“As long as hammers ring out day and night, nothing bad will ever happen to you. Only then will the good spirits keep the bad spirits away.” And so the hammers continued to ring out.
Sarah Winchester was holding séances alone now in the séance room, sitting for hours with her pen poised to write down the spirits’ instructions for her life. The message she believed she was receiving through Mrs. Raven was that she must accomplish two tasks. The first was to keep out low and depraved spirits who would try their utmost to harm her. The second was to please the good spirits whom she would one day join when she moved on to the next world. Both tasks were very expensive. The good spirits could be pleased only by the most lavish furnishings, and therefore every room had to be furnished like a royal palace.
It was vital that none of the evil spirits should ever get into the small, bare-walled séance room, which no living person but she could enter until after her death. If anyone did, they might contain a depraved spirit that could contaminate the room and prevent her from reaching “heaven.” Therefore her way of getting to the séance room was a secret one through a labyrinth of passages and rooms. To elude and frustrate the evil spirits whom she believed sought to follow her, she spent hours planning unusual and unexpected construction tricks for the carpenters to execute.
Once these tricks were completed, she could, for example, push a button, that would make a wall panel recede, and she could step swiftly from one apartment to another. Then she could open a window and climb out, not onto a roof, but to the top of a flight of steps that would take her down one story to meet another flight that would bring her back up to the original level. The theory was that this maze of stairs would trick and confuse the spirits of the Indian ghosts.
In addition to stairs that led nowhere, she had the carpenters build a huge room full of nothing but balconies. These balconies were of all sorts and sizes. Here the bewildered spirit might dash around a corner only to find that a balcony had suddenly shrunk from being three feet wide and was now only three inches! One balcony led to a door that, once closed, would not open from inside. Mrs. Winchester believed this would force the spirit to find another escape route. Of course everything was only temporary, a way to delay for a few minutes the evil spirits that hurried after her.
After at least half an hour of maneuvering to be certain that she had eluded her last ghostly pursuer, Mrs. Winchester would arrive at last in front of a piece of furniture resembling a large wardrobe with drawers in the bottom of it. But like almost everything else in Sarah Winchester’s house, it was just another deception, for one door was not a wardrobe door at all. It really led into the séance room. Once through this door, she would emerge safely into the secret room on the other side of the wall, finally attaining her objective. The walls were painted blue, for it is widely believed among superstitious people that this color frightens away evil spirits. In the room was a cabinet, a comfortable armchair, and, in front of the latter, a table with paper and pencil for automatic writing and a planchette board to receive the spirit messages. There are spots on the floor of this room where the varnish has been worn away by the constant tread of her slippers.
Today, there are few people left alive who remember Sarah Winchester. One of the last was Maria. An old woman herself when speaking to the author, she still shivered about an experience she had as a girl when she worked in the Winchester house.
It all started quite accidentally. Maria had been employed there for only a month and was hurrying to leave to prepare for a date that night with her young man. She took a wrong turn as she left the wing of the house in which she worked, and within minutes she was hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of connecting passages between the (by then) almost 150 rooms.
At one point she was sure she was near one of the passages to the outside world; instead, Maria found herself on a stairway with seven separate flights. Breathless, she reached a door and managed to open it, only to find that the wall behind it was solid. Panic stricken, she attempted to retrace her steps but discovered she was on a sun porch that she had never seen—and it had a skylight in the floor! The next room she entered was also unfamiliar. She turned to go back out, only to realize in a panic that the door to this room did not open from the inside. Finally she found another way out.
Her experience was assuming all the qualities of a nightmare, except that it was real. She walked along a balcony and, seeing an open window, stepped through it; but in a moment she found that she was back on another part of the same balcony. By now she was hysterical. On she hurried up one flight of steps and down another.
Finally she opened a door and stumbled into a small, windowless cell of a room. There, seated at a table, was a little old lady glaring at her with an expression of unspeakable rage. It was Mrs. Winchester. “You have disturbed the spirits!” she shouted.
Maria had never really seen her employer, for she was always heavily veiled, and all the servants knew that no one was ever permitted to see her face. The combination of the forbidden sight and the anger she saw there caused the poor girl to faint. The ending of this story is told in Maria’s own words.
“When I woke up, I was
