MANSION
FOR THE DEAD

Topics: Conscience; Guilt; Regret

Reference: Hebrews 10:1–4, 22

Sarah was very rich. Her income was $1,000 a day, but she had also inherited $20 million. That was in the late 1800s. By today’s standards Sarah would have been a billionaire. But Sarah was also miserable. Her only child died at five weeks. Then her husband passed away. To get away from painful memories, Sarah moved from Connecticut to San Jose, California. She bought an eight-room farmhouse there, plus 160 adjoining acres.

Then she began a massive remodeling project. She hired sixteen carpenters to work on her house, twenty-four hours a day, every day, for the next thirty-eight years. The floor plan was bizarre. Corridors were put in at random. Some led nowhere. A set of stairs led to a ceiling that had no door, and one door opened to a blank wall. There were tunnels, trap doors, and secret passageways. The work on this mysterious mansion finally came to a halt after it covered six acres. It had six kitchens, thirteen bathrooms, forty stairways, forty-seven fireplaces, fifty-two skylights, 467 doors, ten thousand windows, 160 rooms, and one bell tower.

According to legend, Sarah Winchester had “visitors” every night. A servant would go to the bell tower at night via a secret passage and ring the bell. Sarah would then go into the “blue room,” which was reserved for her and her guests, and stay there until 2:00 a.m. The bell would ring again, the visitors would depart, and Sarah Winchester would go to her room.

The visitors supposedly were U.S. soldiers and Indians killed on the frontier by that new invention, the repeating Winchester rifle. It brought millions of dollars to the Winchester family but death to thousands of people. That haunted Sarah Winchester the rest of her life. In an effort to appease the guilt, she built a mansion for the dead.

—H. Norman Wright, Why Did This Happen to Me? (Servant, 1999)

PART 16: JUST FOR FUN