Same feeling I had. The areas you can visit and the things you can see are severely curtailed. I’ve been there twice and each time that disappointment hung on as I left.
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“This noble edifice, which to some seemed a sphere, to others an ovoid, and to the reactionary a shapeless mass, and whose materials ran the gamut from marble to cow dung, consisted essentially of truncated bridges, of spiral staircases that gave access to impenetrable walls, of balconies to which entrance was impossible, and of doors than opened either into pits or into high, narrow rooms from whose ceilings soft armchairs and comfortable double beds hung upside down. Nor was there any lack of concave mirrors.”
If you’re in the area, make sure to eat at as many family run Vietnamese restaurants as possible, because San Jose.
I heartily recommend “Dominic Cafe”.
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This story actually makes me more likely to visit if I’m ever in the area.
I don’t know why people are so into the haunted thing. Every place in the US and Europe has “ghost tours” these days when a normal historical tour would be so much more interesting. Or an architectural tour. Or a brewery tour. Or pretty much anything else.
You know. Tours where you learn facts that aren’t made up.
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because it’s fun and the real world is shitty?
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I’d argue that ghost tours make light of how shitty the world was before. Many of them are basically recountings of how the poorest of the poor lived and died; fetishising their suffering for modern thrills. As I understand it, ghost tours basically try to find the most gruesome things that happened in the area and then built narratives around them that allow them to present them as “hauntings”.
But then I also don’t understand why true crime is such a big genre right now. It’s just not for me.
The world is shitty now. right now.
Indeed it is
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I remember reading about this as a kid, but the story I read was that she’d gotten the idea that she’d die if construction on the house ever stopped.
Grew up in Willow Glen (a few miles away, for non-San Jose natives). Despite others poo-poo-ing about Mrs. Winchester’s paranormal leanings, one has to wonder why there was spiritualist symbolism scattered throughout the architecture (windows with 13 panes, etc, etc). And even the least talented architects or builders might hesitate to make purposefully tilted floors, doors that opened onto multi-story drops, or stairs that led into the ceiling.
But more apropos to your post, @sdmikev… I can still hear the theme to the Century Cinemas opening roll, and the clap-along that the crowd always engaged in (albeit for me in the mid-to-late 80s / early 90s): BUM-bum-BUM, Bum-bumbum, bumbumbum…
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I remember the clapping. I was a teenager in the 80’s and I think the Merc ran a story one time about the rift between clappers and non-clappers.
Sort of like people who are into or not into the wave at stadiums during sporting events.
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I loved visiting the Winchester Mystery House when I lived in San Jose. Also spent plenty of time at the Century Cinemas, and a slice of cake from the Flames coffee shop (next to the Winchester House) took three days to finish.
I also found the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum creepier than the Winchester House, probably due to the actual mummies and recreation of a tomb. It’s also worth a visit.
I found the Rosicrucian Egyptian museum much creepier because they have a collection of South American shrunken heads. They’re not always on display and I don’t know if they’re out now, but it’s how I learned as a kid that shrunken heads are just the skin that has been shrunken, and not the skull or anything else.
I have no idea why the Egyptian museum has South American shrunken heads. I guess because they are thematically related, being preservation of body parts after death?
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I recall watching a number of their presentations on how the Egyptians preserved their mummies, so shrunken heads would be in their wheelhouse–err, museum.
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