Even though it’s located about six hours north of where I currently reside, I admittedly knew very little about the Winchester Mystery House prior to last week, which is when Daily Dead attended a special tour of one of the most haunted houses in America, alongside Michael and Peter Spierig. The duo recently celebrated the debut of the new trailer for their upcoming supernatural horror project, Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built, which stars Oscar-winner Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, and Sarah Snook (who the directors recently collaborated with on Predestination), and the filmmakers were eager to head inside and talk more about the lengths they went to in order to stay true to who they believed Sarah Winchester was, and her passion for turning Winchester into one of the most perplexing properties in history.
Before we headed inside the Winchester Mystery House, we were greeted by producer Tim McGahan, who sang the praises of the Spierigs and gave us an initial rundown of what was in store for us that afternoon. He discussed the painstaking process that went into the making of Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built, saying, “What we did with our film is that we've actually recreated a lot of the façade of this house down in Australia, partly because of logistical reasons. This area doesn't look like 1906 San Jose anymore, so we reconstructed the house in a field in northern Australia, and the film is partly shot on location there. It was also partly shot in a studio, then partly shot on location in Melbourne. We used a lot of Victorian correct architecture to matching materials, and we had the production design team crawl all over this house, and they measured every angle of it to meticulously recreate a whole bunch of different sets.”
“What we did for the movie is that we actually flew a drone over this house, and we took a 360-degree survey of the entire house. Then we built our digital model on top of where the four stories are now, and we added up to the seven stories the house used to be. We photographed thousands of pictures to recreate an accurate CG model of it, and what we've created is very accurate to the real thing,” Peter Spierig added.
Upon entering Winchester, our amazing tour guide Laura gave us some insights into just why Sarah would dare build a home like this one, with nearly 160 rooms and numerous instances of bewildering architectural choices, including the infamous “Door to Nowhere” (which I can confirm leads absolutely to nowhere—so odd!) or the staircase that leads directly into a ceiling (which the Spierigs confirmed will play a role in The House That Ghosts Built).
But according to Laura, Sarah had a method to her architectural madness. “Sarah Winchester seems to have built this house to confuse both the living and the dead. It seems to be a place that Sarah intended to just actually be haunted. The story goes that she built it to be a crypt for spirits with unresolved business, and she wanted to make it a prison for those spirits, with Sarah acting as the warden. This would make sure that all of the spirits would stay in the house, instead of going after her or her family.”
The reason behind Sarah’s obsession with the supernatural stems from her own real-life tragedies. As a young woman, she married William Wirt Winchester, whose family had founded the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and they were an idyllic company until their daughter Annie died at six weeks old, and they were never able to have any more children. Sarah lost William about 15 years later to tuberculosis, and after visiting a psychic, the widow was told that her misfortunes were tied into the death and destruction that the Winchester guns had done throughout the years. And so, Sarah’s way of channeling her grief was to build this monstrous abode to try and keep those evil forces at bay.
And as we made our way through several notable parts of the Winchester House, including the crystal and daisy bedrooms (both being key locations in the Winchester film), two things were made abundantly clear: Sarah Winchester was a woman of particular tastes, and throughout the seemingly endless construction on her home (it was reportedly kept constantly under construction for 38 long years), she spared no expense. One of the stained glass windows we passed early on in the tour was valued at nearly $30,000 by today’s value of currency. The aforementioned crystal bedrooms earned their name from the crystal-laced wallpaper that used to adorn the walls.
In an area that used to be utilized as storage, we had a chance to take in some of the stunning crystal and glass doors that Sarah had crafted throughout the years. We also saw some of the original fixtures and handmade tiles from the Winchester House, and all of the stunning pieces that were on display can only be described as an interior designer’s dream come true. Just beautiful.
Something that I thought was really interesting as we were in the Daisy Bedroom, is that prior to 1906, the Winchester House had stood tall at a massive seven stories, with five floors for actual living space as well as a two-story observation tower. What stands today is absolutely massive and awe-inducing, so I cannot even begin to fathom what Winchester must have originally felt like. But apparently, it was the great San Francisco earthquake on April 18th, 1906, which sent jolts straight into San Jose that dismantled parts of Sarah’s home and left her trapped in the aforementioned daisy bedroom for hours on end. And according to the Spierigs, the substantial shaker is also something that heavily plays into the plot of Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built.
At one point during the tour, we arrived at the most non-sensical staircase I’ve ever had the pleasure of traveling along unbelievably narrow halls, featuring seven complete turns, 44 steps, and traveling just over 100 feet, all to reach only about nine feet above our heads, with us winding up on the second floor. The Spierigs discussed that this notorious locale in the Winchester House was a crucial component of their cinematic story, and McGahan chatted about how they managed to pull off shooting in such a tight amount of space.
"When we recreated this staircase, it ended up being a huge miracle that the production designer [Matthew Putland] was able to perform for us,” McGahan said. “Obviously, the guys need to get the cameras into that space, and the set was an almost one for one replication of that staircase, so we had to be able to pull walls out to get the cameras in, and then put the wall back, and then swap out other walls. It was quite an interesting process, and as the guys will attest, it was a pretty difficult set to shoot in. You need to maintain the claustrophobic feel, but you need to be able to have it be practical for the actors, too.”
“It was actually quite a complex sequence for us to pull off with Helen," added Michael Spierig. "We had to be able to do it on the set that we built, because it's something that if we didn't build it, it would just be impossible to shoot here in the actual house."
One of my favorite areas inside Winchester was called the “Witch’s Cap,” and it’s where Sarah Winchester would go at midnight every night to commune with the spirits around her, and being someone who is a sucker for old-timey houses, cylindrical rooms are always something I really dig in classic homes. The other area I really got a kick out of was the grand ballroom, a gothic-style area that paid homage to two of Sarah’s loves: the number 13 and Shakespearean quotes—both are heavily featured (Laura talked about how Sarah even added an extra fixture to the room’s chandelier just so the lights on it would total up to 13). It was gorgeous and filled with a lot of fascinating machinery that I could have spent hours looking at.
We rounded out the expansive tour in the basement of the Winchester, which is apparently haunted by one of the home’s workers. A posted picture in the area gave us an idea of what he used to look like back when he was still under the employ of Ms. Winchester (he’s the mustachioed man on the far right for those who are curious), and Laura told us that it wasn’t uncommon for him to be roaming around in the basement of the Winchester. Neat!
Touring the actual location and hearing from the passionate filmmakers behind Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built was an amazing experience (the filmmakers were nothing but heartfelt when discussing the long road that this project has taken, or the fact that they were able to land a trio of amazing talents to help bring Sarah Winchester’s story to the big screen). The film arrives in theaters on February 2nd, 2018, and I’m excited that we have such an intriguing looking film to get us through the winter doldrums early next year.
And for those of you who may be curious about visiting the Winchester Mystery House for yourself, I’d highly recommend it. I’m not super into the supernatural aspects of this experience myself, but I absolutely loved getting lost within the house’s seemingly impossible construction, and it’s something I’m definitely going to do again sometime soon (they do a nighttime candlelight tour during October every year, and I think it sounds like a great way to get into the Halloween spirit).
A huge thanks to both Michael and Peter Spierig as well as Tim McGahan for being a part of this thoroughly entertaining experience, and I must tip my hat to our guide Laura, too, for giving us a tour that was both informative and truly engrossing from start to finish.
Photos by Daily Dead:
Heather A. Wixson was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, until she followed her dreams and moved to Los Angeles in 2009. A 14-year veteran in the world of horror entertainment journalism, Wixson fell in love with genre films at a very early age, and has spent more than a decade as a writer and supporter of preserving the history of horror and science fiction cinema. Throughout her career, Wixson has contributed to several notable websites, including Fangoria, Dread Central, Terror Tube, and FEARnet, and she currently serves as the Managing Editor for Daily Dead, which has been her home since 2013. She's also written for both Fangoria Magazine & ReMind Magazine, and her latest book project, Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume One will be released on October 20, 2021.
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