Backbone”—but then as now the company was best known for its firearms. Back in 1866, the year baby Anne was born and died, the Gun that Won was underwriting Sarah’s life in New Haven, Connecticut. That gun paid for roast duck, hothouse greens, down-stuffed bedticks; it kept her servants in board and uniforms; it paid for doctors, ministers, and, at the end, the sexton. That gun hired a stonecutter and paid for a small casket, lined with silk.
And a few years later, after her husband died, Sarah must have known she couldn’t build the $25,000 Storeroom without the warehouses of guns, ready to be loaded into crates, into railcars, into waiting hands ready to shoot Apache and Pueblo by the thousands. Lead soldered water pipes and joined panes of glass; lead made ammunition. In the Winchester shot tower, seven stories of carefully engineered furnaces and molds terminated in the water tanks where hot shot was dropped to cool, hissing and steaming. Soothsayers used to employ lead rings to divine your future, holding the circles aloft with threads, burning through the threads, and marking where the rings fell. But Sarah asked her questions of the Boston medium, who scratched out answers with a planchette one letter at a time.
By all accounts Sarah’s days in California were busy ones. The weight of her body anchored her here, on thick rugs that showed no wear and polished floors that glowed like gunstocks. Sarah became an entrepreneur, buying real estate, running her farm, selling walnuts by the barrel. She stored up spade and mattock and blade, oil and whetstone, homing pigeons and ivory leg cuffs, screws cast from solid gold. She invented a sink with a built-in washboard, and a window clasp modeled after a rifle’s lock, paying homage to both cleanliness and defense. And although she set up the house to be self-sufficient, with its workshop, water tank, and gas reserves, still she answered the call of the outside world—rosewood and teak for the floors, German silver inlay for doors, pipestone for a fireplace.
In the end, she knew none of it mattered. She signed her thirteen-page will thirteen times, leaving provision for the house to be sold at auction and the furnishings to be left to Francis, her favorite niece, who took what she wanted and sold the rest. A practical way to dispose of things: leave the gaslight chandelier with thirteen jets; leave it all, with minimal instructions, so that mountain of stuff won’t hold you back. Set aside a sum to hire a man to deal it all out once you’re gone.
How I love a good auction, the auctioneer’s chant braiding buyers, goods, price. His chant is a ballad that lasts all day, and each lot is a verse. What will you give me, he cries, what’ll you give? More, always more: rugs scrolled like scripture, bareheaded lamps shorn of shades, books on orchardcraft, cobbler’s tools. Sales used to be regulated by candles; bidding lasted, like a séance, until the flame guttered dry.
But for the kitchen, the Grand Ballroom, and the séance room, it’s hard to tell what most of the rooms were used for, and that’s not the only thing that gives the Winchester House a rickety, kaleidoscopic feeling. There are shallow cabinets an inch deep, and others large as generous rooms. One door opens onto a one-story drop, another onto slats instead of flooring. A staircase ends blind in a ceiling, and another forks into a Y, eleven steps up and seven steps down. Despite the fortune Sarah spent, the house feels temporary as a badly pitched tent.
Here we stand in the Hall of Fires. It’s lined with hearth after hearth, strange for central California, but the guide tells us that Sarah craved the heat to ease her arthritis. I think of her sitting on this bench, listening to her house: a medium taps out a message from the dead, coins snick like knitting needles, and a gun-shaped latch snaps home. Two swings tap a trim nail true. A burning log hisses, freeing drops of old rainwater. A signal card drops into a slot: Mrs. Winchester needs assistance in the Hall of Fires, and a nurse heads toward her to help. Radiators knock, carrying waves of warmth. The rim of a plate kisses its kin, and the maid clicks the cupboard door closed.
By April 1906, Sarah had lived in her house twenty-two years. During that time, her workers had built, among many other rooms, the Grand Ballroom. Whereas the rest of the house follows no rules—chimneys stop shy of ceilings; an extravagant rock-crystal window receives only slantwise light—the parquet floor in the Ballroom is precise down to the hair.
“The floor builder used no nails,” our guide tells us, “only glue.” He would have worked a section at a time, fitting one piece of smooth wood against another in a neat herringbone. This must have been the hushed corner in a house constantly worried by sound, and even now I’d like to stand here awhile, quiet, in this sunny corner.
I wonder if he heard the remembered racket of other workers when he slept at night, as I have in my own dreams, the carnival jingles of the theater-lobby arcade, the burr and shriek of machine parts turning and dropping off the lathe.
Above the glowing floor hang two stained-glass windows with quotations from Shakespeare. From Troilus and Cressida: “Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts”; from Richard II: “These same thoughts people this little world.” According to legend, only three people ever entered the house through the richly carved front door: Sarah, the man who delivered it, and the door-hanger. When Theodore Roosevelt dropped by one afternoon to express his admiration for Winchester rifles, servants sent him around back.
But on April 18, 1906, just after sunrise, the earth shook. In San Francisco, the ground liquefied and houses crumbled, their fronts peeling off and their walls buckling and kneeling. There must have been screams and silence—people shaken from sleep and too surprised to speak. When the gas lines ruptured, walls of flame pushed up the city’s hillsides; pictures taken just after the disaster show buildings planed open, whole city blocks of blackened rubble where houses had stood, rifts carved in the countryside, oaks riven, fences fallen, barns sucked flat.
Later, some witnesses told of hearing “an approaching roar” at dawn, or feeling a cold touch upon the cheek. Others said dogs pawed at doors and birds flew strangely; earthworms wriggled to the surface and tied themselves in knots. In the Daisy Bedroom, a fireplace shook loose and collapsed, and Sarah was trapped alone.
“Sarah believed she caused the quake,” our guide says. “She thought the spirits were rebuking her for spending too much time on the front part of the house.” So, the guide goes on, she ordered those rooms to be boarded shut and never went there again. No one danced across the Grand Ballroom’s smooth parquetry, no chamber orchestra warmed the walls with music, and no friend paused in front of the Shakespeare windows and asked Sarah what she meant in choosing them.
But the guide hustles us away too quickly from the earthquake-wrecked rooms, with their crumbling plaster and naked studding, lengths of ship-lathe and dusty little cobwebs. Light bends from a curved window. Torn wallpaper and scrawls of glue stain the walls, and I think of that old line from Pliny the Elder: “Hence also walls are covered with prayers to ward off fires.” The floor creaks companionably, and there’s no armchair to distract, just the bones of the tired old house. I’d stay here all day if I could.
A telling detail hides in the house’s thirteenth bathroom: a spiderweb window Sarah designed. The artisan rendered the web’s arcs in balanced curving sections of glass, but this is shorthand; in any real web, something more pleasing than symmetry develops. After all, symmetry leaves gaps, and if prey escapes, the spider starves.
Jean-Henri Fabre, a French naturalist writing during Sarah’s lifetime, noted that the orb-weaver spider works in a method that might seem, to the untrained observer, “like mad disorder.” After the initial triangle, spokes, and spiral, she rips out the preliminary threads, whose remnants appear as specks on the finished web. (In one added room of the Winchester House, you can make out the slope of a previous
