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Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune

by Mary Jo Ignoffo; University of Missouri

Sarah Winchester built a 160-room crazy quilt of a house in San Jose, Calif., that has steadily drawn crowds since it opened as a tourist attraction in 1923.

But who was she? Pop history—the sort dispensed at the “Winchester Mystery House” even today— says she was an eccentric, miserly recluse who wasted the fortune she inherited from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company on a bizarre building project.

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Consumed by guilt from the deaths due to the rifles that made her rich, she turned architect, directed by aggrieved ghosts. As long as she kept building, she could stay a step ahead of the Grim Reaper.

On the other hand, we have witnesses like Frank Lieb, her longtime legal counsel.

“Mrs. Winchester was all that a woman should be, and nothing that a good woman should not be,” Lieb noted after her death in 1922. “If there is a heaven, there she must surely be.”