Since the release of the film Winchester earlier this year, the Winchester Mystery House has become one of the world’s best-known haunted mansions.

It all started when Sarah Winchester moved to San Jose, California, in 1886 to start a new life after the deaths of her husband and daughter. Her inheritance from his estate (his family founded the Winchester rifle empire) made her one of the wealthiest women in the world. She purchased a small farmhouse and soon launched the world’s biggest home improvement project that would take 36 years and $5.5 million (in the money of the time), only stopping when she herself died in 1922.

By the time she was done, the Winchester Mansion was a modern marvel with indoor plumbing, multiple elevators, a hot shower, and central heating. It had over 160 rooms and 40 bedrooms, 10,000 windows, and even 2 basements. Of course, that’s not all that’s unique about the house. Not all 2,000 doors can be walked through—one leads to an eight-foot drop to a kitchen sink, another to a 15-foot drop into bushes in the garden below. Staircases lead straight to ceilings, expensive Tiffany stained-glass windows were installed in places where they would get no light, and there are more secret passages than Narnia. A particularly odd delight is a cabinet that, when opened, extends through 30 rooms of the house.

No one is quite sure why Mrs. Winchester obsessively remodeled her sprawling house. The most prevalent story is that she was haunted by the ghosts of people who were killed by the Winchester rifle. After her husband passed away, a psychic told her that to evade the spirits, she would have to move out west, buy a home, and build nonstop. Another story is that she was warned that as soon as construction was complete, she would die. Another suggests that she built the house like a maze in order to keep her paranormal tormentors at bay and lost in the many intricacies of the building.

In 2016, preservationists uncovered a hidden attic room that had been sealed off for 110 years. It seems that even in the 21^st century, Winchester House still has more secrets to be discovered!

Read about the Secrets of the Winchester Mystery House at Atlas Obscura…