Ghost stories, perhaps more than other folk tales and fables, are told to remind us about the past, often to teach us an explicit lesson about it. When we say we are haunted by something, the feeling we refer to is often unpleasant--to be haunted is to be reminded of something we'd rather forget. Today I'll be talking about one of the most famous haunted houses in Northern California, the Winchester Mystery House, located in San Jose. Specifically, I'll be telling you how the house came to be haunted, and what exactly it was that Sarah Winchester, its owner and master-planner, was hoping to forget when she built a mansion for the sole purpose of living among the undead. The house has been described as a "monument to one woman's fears," but since its renovation and reopening in 1973, the house has come to be a monument to the fears of far more people than Sarah Winchester. Tourists come from all over the country to visit the house, which is open every day for tours, and even boasts "flashlight tours" of the haunted mansion on Halloween at midnight. In fact, the Winchester Mystery House is one of Silicon Valley's only tourist attractions. Standing as it does in the midst of incredibly wealthy corporations devoted to high technology, one has to ask why a haunted house has continued to seem relevant and interesting within a locale associated with the most modern forms of scientific and economic production. Yet the house does continue to be relevant, I would argue, as a result of its explicit connection to the rise and fall of corporate powers in the United States. The ghosts that haunted Sarah Winchester still haunt the Silicon Valley, as it were, and its continued popularity as a tourist spot underscores the degree to which we would rather believe in ghosts than in the reality of what results from the productivity of Silicon Valley's elite professional class.
I'll explain how this works by telling two interconnected stories about the construction and possible meaning of the Winchester Mystery House at the turn of the century. These stories set the stage for an analysis of what the house means in its present context, at the heart of Silicon Valley. The first story, which is the most famous, is recounted in dozens of places, including Ralph Rambo's pamphlet "Lady of Mystery (Sarah Winchester)" and Antoinette May's account in her book Haunted Houses of California (both available at the WMH gift shop). Sarah Winchester was the wife of William Wirt Winchester; William was the son of Oliver Winchester, the first president of the fabulously wealthy Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Early in their marriage, Sarah's only daughter died while still an infant, and fifteen years later her husband died of tuberculosis. Sarah inherited over 700 shares of Winchester stock, and with her cash inheritance, her income after her husband's death amounted to roughly one thousand dollars a day. After visiting a local Boston spiritualist, Sarah came to believe that her family had been killed as an act of revenge by the ghosts of people shot with Winchester rifles. This spiritualist also informed her that she could escape the wrath of these ghosts, and save her own life, by moving out west and building a mansion which would never be finished. As long as she never ceased building, Sarah would remain unharmed.
So Sarah moved from New Haven to the farming community of San Jose in 1884, into an eight room farmhouse. Each night, she is said to have communicated with good spirits in her home, who told her what to built and how. Employing up to 25 carpenters and dozens of other servants around the clock, Sarah died in 1922 in a house that covers 6 acres with 160 rooms. Most intriguing for visitors to the home is its bizarre construction, with stairways that lead nowhere, doors and cabinets that open into walls, skylights placed into floors, a chimney that ends inches below the ceiling, and a secret seance room at the heart of the house. Sarah also designed a number of her home's fixtures and rooms to repeat the number 13--hence we find rooms with thirteen windows, thirteen fireplaces in one suite, thirteen gas lights on her chandelier, thirteen holes in her kitchen drain, and so forth. All of these gizmos and oddities were explicitly designed, according to legend, to allow Sarah to confuse and hide from the bad, vengeful ghosts she had inherited with the Winchester fortune. At the same time, Sarah believed that she continued to communicate with good spirits who guided and protected her. Except for servants and her secretary, Sarah Winchester lived alone in her mansion from 1884 until 1922, talking mostly to people she believed were dead. That's the standard story behind the WMH.
But there is another, perhaps creepier, story to be told about Sarah's continuing financial and familial relationship to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, the entity which was responsible not only for her fortune, but also for her excessive dread and haunting. This relationship never gets discussed on the tour of the house (which I just took last Sunday), or in any of the literature about it. Not only did Sarah continue to own a large minority of stock in the Company, but when her husband died, the man who became president, William Converse, was married to her sister. In other words, Sarah's sister and William Converse essentially replaced Sarah and William Wirt Winchester at the Company, and Sarah's family continued to run it. And, as her family's Company grew, so did Sarah's mansion. Although the Company had amassed a great fortune since Oliver Winchester took over in 1866, its profits grew with the release of Winchester rifles manufactured during the 1880s and 90s, all of which were highly popular and led to the Winchester rifle being nicknamed "the gun that won the west." It was also during this time that Sarah bought her mansion (in 1884), and began paying for its epic proportions. The building of her house, then, took place while her brother-in-law was building his company.
Moreover, it seems fairly certain that Sarah's work on the house went beyond a loopy interest in the occult, for her ghosts were associated with a specific source: the rifles that her family was mass producing, and a company that continued to pump out rifle after rifle, presumably mass producing ghosts in the process. Interestingly, these ghosts are explicitly related to mass production, rather than the creation of Winchester rifles themselves. Contrary to popular legend, Oliver Winchester did not invent the Winchester rifle, he merely found a means of marketing the newly invented repeating rifles of the post-Civil War era. As Harold Williamson notes in his exhaustive study of the Winchester rifle, Oliver Winchester was in the garment industry selling clothes before he became involved in the arms business; in fact, one of the ongoing problems of the Company, and what eventually led to its downfall, was how little its board of directors knew about the actual production and construction of rifles. So the Winchester family's guilt, as Sarah experienced it, was associated with marketing and making money on rifles, not with creating them.
Along these lines, one might view Sarah's house as a symbolic critique of her family's anti-social devotion to the production of guns. Certainly this might help to explain the chief "mystery" of the Winchester Mystery House, which is why anyone would want to spend their fortune on something so strange. Sarah's extensive domestic space could be read as a type of destructive behavior aimed at undermining the Winchester Repeating Arms Company: it was Sarah's deliberate effort to create a kind of anti-Company, to reduce and squander profit rather than making it grow. Her expensive house, with its imported woods and fixtures, Tiffany glass windows, and round-the-clock servant care, could be understood as her effort to destroy the Winchester fortune by extravagantly wasting it. If money was the problem, the solution might be to burn that money away on frivolous, useless, anti-social projects like her house. A legend of the house about President Teddy Roosevelt confirms this possibility (explain and show picture). Apparently Teddy Roosevelt, fan of the Winchester rifle, came to visit Sarah around the turn of the century and was turned away quite rudely. Rumor has it that the butler didn't recognize him, but given Sarah's continued connection with the Company, and her strict supervision of all the goings-on in her house, it seems more likely that she recognized the President all too well and wanted to have nothing to do with anyone who so avidly consumed her family's products. Another little reported fact about Sarah's connection to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company has to do with the year she died, 1922. This also happens to be the year that the Company began negotiations with Simmons for a merger; in other words, Sarah died the year the Company began to die too. This detail in itself makes for an interesting ghost story--it's almost as if Sarah's life were magically bound to the life of a company. We can see this reflected in commercial postcards with images of house and guns rising over it, as if to imply some sort of parallel development. [As an aside: The Winchester Repeating Arms Company was finally sold in 1931, after it unsuccessfully attempted to diversify into sporting goods and hardware products. What was once the Winchester Repeating Arms Company is now known as the Western Cartridge Company.]
Even the structure of the Winchester Mystery House mimics the structure of a successful capitalist venture. Sarah was obeying the ghostly injunction to build and expand or die, and this is also the goal, figuratively stated, of all for-profit corporations: profits must continue to grow, and productivity must be maintained, or the company will die. Her house stands in imitation of a Company which never seemed to stop growing in size and power. And this brings me to one of the more obvious lessons taught by the ghost stories surrounding the Winchester Mystery House. Put simply, this is a moral about capitalist guilt, and Sarah's guilt by association with money made off what amounts to the mass production of death. What Sarah's belief in ghosts kept her from forgetting was the source of her money. Far from dispelling myth and spiritualism with its rationality, here we see capitalism can create its own ghosts, which, rather than haunting houses, more properly could be said to haunt money. After all, Sarah believed it was by spending exorbitant amounts of money--doing something that goes against all capitalist good sense--that she would be relieved of her haunting.
Ironically, then, the Winchester Mystery House stands today in one of capitalism's epicenters, Silicon Valley, a region which is host to dozens of highly profitable electronics corporations and startup ventures. AnnaLee Saxenian, an expert on Silicon Valley culture, reports that in 1990, "Silicon Valley-based producers exported electronics products worth more than $11 billion, almost one-third the nation's total." Named for a substance contained in superconductors, Silicon Valley's growth since the late 1940s takes up the story of corporate America where the Winchester Repeating Arms Company leaves off. Money was routed into the region largely through military contracts, especially those associated with Stanford University. Rather than remaining solely connected to the military, as The Winchester Company did for most of its life, engineers and scientists in what was then Santa Clara Valley began to incorporate commercial or entrepreneurial ventures early on, eventually forming successful companies like Fairchild, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and various venture capital firms. Since the late 1960s, Silicon Valley has boasted a booming industry, sprouting new suburbs and companies for the professional classes from Mountain View down to San Jose. In fact, the Winchester Mystery House was bought by a private company and completely renovated in 1973, during this first boom. Sarah's house, begun with money from nineteenth century industrial capitalism, has been carefully maintained over the years with money made from the post-industrial, flexible capitalism of the computer industry.
A New York Times article, describing the WMH over a decade after its renovation, claimed that "the mystical meets the bizarre [with] Victoriana in Silicon Valley." These terms leave us with an image of something spiritual in the Silicon Valley reminding us-- in a "bizarre" way--of the Victorian era. Given such a formulation, the Winchester Mystery House itself takes on the aspect of a ghost, haunting the ultra-modern community in Silicon Valley and recalling a time when farms covered the land now occupied by Apple and Sun Microsystems. This ghost story, however, is not about the death of people at the hands of Winchesters --it's about the death of Victorian-era industrial capitalism, which gave life to Sarah's house in the first place. Part of what makes the Winchester Mystery House so spooky, I think, is the way it reminds visitors and Silicon Valley neighbors of how fleeting industrial power really is--eventually, the fortunes made in Silicon Valley will pass away and remain only in the form of preserved houses built during the 1980s and 1990s. The death of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, symbolized in Sarah's house, is a reminder to Silicon Valley professionals and residents that their industry, too, will die, taking fortunes and lives with it.
Finally, there is another lesson to be learned from the ghost story which is Sarah Winchester's house, one which applies equally well to its original context at the turn of the century and its context today. Up to now, I have been talking about communities of the dead that Sarah imagined, and communities of people currently living in Silicon Valley who get spooked when they contemplate the possibility that the source of their livelihood might die. The question is, what do both of these communities have in common?
Let me conclude by telling you a story about Sarah's seance room-- sometimes called the Blue Room--in which Sarah conducted all her dealings with spirits, and created new plans for her house with them. You can see this room on the house tour--the tour guides make much of the secret doors to get in, and the mysterious thirteen coat hooks on one wall. What they also point out is that this room, where no one but Sarah was allowed to go, is located directly above the kitchen and servant's quarters. Through a series of light shafts and hidden windows in the seance room, Sarah was effectively able to spy on her servants whenever she wanted. So her seance room was not simply for the observation of spirits, but also for the observation of the workers she employed. Ghosts and servants obviously occupied a common place in Sarah's imagination.
An article about Sarah's house written in 1928, and reproduced without comment or discussion in a pamphlet about the WMH available at the gift shop, comments further on what kinds of ghosts Sarah hoped to attract and repel with her house: only good spirits would be permitted into her seance room, while the bad ones were supposed to be confused, distracted, and contained by the odd layout of the mansion. But this article, which I'm going to read from now, puts an interesting spin on what the difference really was between good and bad spirits:
It appeared that there were both good and evil spirits and that only the bad ones were to be dreaded. If she could make her surroundings congenial to the better class ghosts, they would keep the others away. This seemed reasonable to the widow, because in this world she knew that nice people kept hoodlums out of restricted neighborhoods where they live. But how to attract the nicer sort of spooks? . . . One of the oldest beliefs is that ghosts hate mirrors . . . All Sarah Winchester need have done, therefore, was to have built a cheval glass in all four sides of each room . . . But that would not do at all. It would have freed the place of the spooks of Indians, low grade white men, fire and water "elementals" and other undesirables, but it would also offend the respectable citizens of the spiritual world with whom she hoped to associate.Thus, good spirits were of the upper classes, and bad ones were Indians and lower-class whites. Commenting further on how the house was bound up in racial and class meanings, the article goes on to state, "The Winchester house has five fully equipped kitchens . . . Sometimes [Sarah] had American laborers fed from one kitchen, Japanese from another, Spaniards from a third and Mexicans from a fourth, so that the kitchens may not have had any direct spiritual significance." One answer to the mysteries of Sarah's house, then, has to do with class and race rather than spirituality.
I claimed earlier that the expansion of Sarah's house imitated the growth of a company, in that Sarah believed she had to continue building it or die. The layout of her seance room, however, suggests not just the growth of a company, but the structure of social and economic relationships an entire community like Silicon Valley, where certain people--most notably the lower classes and some racial minorities--are deliberately excluded from participating in how the structure is created. In fact, such people are often intended to be baffled and kept at bay by the maze of social relations shared among the Silicon Valley elite, those professional classes who have replaced capitalist magnates like Oliver Winchester. Yet the working classes of Silicon Valley--the children of displaced farmers, the service workers, manual laborers, gardeners, janitors, and low-ranking bureaucrats--follow the fortunes of entrepreneurs, hoping to get jobs in places where people still have some money to spend. Like ghosts, the servant class of Silicon Valley haunts the campuses and malls of major corporations, living under the watchful eyes of the wealthy, but rarely invited to come into or understand the corridors leading into professional middle-class life. That would make Silicon Valley a monument to anti-social economic power and middle-class fears of the lower-class, just like the Winchester Mystery House.
Back to Writing.