Devyn visits the Winchester Mystery House on a rainy day in San Jose. The house is a mess of architectural features, all spindlework and stickwork, red scalloped shingles, rooms jutting out everywhere—an asymmetrical madness. Despite this chaos, the house is beautiful, with yellow walls and so many windows. An enormous layer cake of a house, done up in Queen Anne Revival style.
Seeing the house fills her with a strange hunger. This architectural decadence reminds her of all the things she wants but can’t have. She is so full of wanting that she sometimes feels like there isn’t room for anything else. She wants an affordable apartment. (Bay Area rents are impossibly high.) She wants to be a children’s librarian, because it is her passion, because libraries are a bastion of good in a world that never seems to care about what’s right or what’s fair, and also because she has student loans to pay off. She wants a dog (although pets are not allowed in her overpriced apartment). She wants cute mittens and fancy tea and a mountain of books. She wants to be taken seriously, which can be difficult when you are under five feet tall. She wants to live in a world where the news doesn’t make her cry. She wants so many things, and she works hard for them, because she still believes that hard work is the way through.
Right now, she wants to get out of the rain.
Fredrik waves at her, motioning her under an awning.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
Fredrik is a tour guide at the house. He’s another recent graduate of library school, working the only job he could find tangentially related to his degree.
Fredrik leads her over to the house. She shuffles behind the rest of the tour group.
As soon as she steps inside, the back of her neck prickles. It feels like the house has a presence, a focused aliveness. It’s claustrophobic, the way the house tangles around her.
To steady herself, she touches her bracelet, taking the small waves between her fingers. Delicate amethysts in a twist of gold. It belonged to her grandmother.
Fredrik leads them into the first room, which smells musty, like air from another century. Stained glass windows are jammed everywhere, unmoored from window frames, overlapping, leaning against the walls.
A short history of the house is projected onto three of the windows. Of course, it mentions the rumor about spirits. Devyn knows the house isn’t haunted. It’s impossible for her to believe in ghosts. She doesn’t yet realize that some places can be haunted by their own history.
To get into the house proper, Fredrik leads them up a winding staircase, all switchbacks, with thin easy rider stairs. Once they get to the top, he tells them that Sarah Winchester, the owner, wanted small steps because she was under five feet tall. Devyn’s size.
He guides them through a labyrinth of rooms, pointing out stairs that disappear into the ceiling and the Door Into Nothing (which opens to the outside, on the second floor, without any warning about the drop).
The house is too warm. Devyn takes off her sweater and stuffs it into her bag, then runs her hand over her grandmother’s bracelet, feeling comfort in the delicate ridges.
While the others are examining the sparkling wallpaper in the Crystal Bedroom, Fredrik hangs back.
“What do you think?” he asks.
“This is not a house. It’s a mess,” she says, surprised at the anger in her voice.
Here is this huge house, with its ridiculous number of rooms, taking up so much land. She thinks of her tiny, one-bedroom apartment, which she shares with a roommate. How everyone she knows is struggling to pay rent.
The house shifts, floorboards creaking. For a moment, she imagines the house can hear her.
“What a waste of space,” she says, louder than she intended. Her voice echoes down the twists of hallway.
Fredrik guides her forward, putting a hand on her shoulder so that the gap between them closes. She barely comes up to his collarbone. He leans down to whisper in her ear, brushing his arm against hers, grabbing her elbow for support. “If you want to see something really interesting, go up that stairway.”
“Is it allowed?”
He raises his eyebrows in that way of his, daring her.
She doesn’t want to go somewhere off limits, but she also doesn’t want him to see that she’s afraid.
The stairs are tiny. She trips going up. Her heart beats hummingbird fast. At the top of the staircase, she finds a bedroom with seven beautiful windows.
She’s not supposed to be here. This place isn’t meant for her.
The house shifts slightly underneath her. She stumbles and drops her bag, spilling her things everything. Her wrist knocks against the bed frame, and she jerks her arm forward, gasping.
The muffled sounds of the tour group fade. Devyn scrambles to shove all her stuff back into her bag, then hurries down the stairs.
It’s not until she’s back outside that she realizes her bracelet is missing.
Sarah Winchester was a woman who knew loss. The story of her grief is too sad to tell, although the tour guides tell it with a depraved, ghoulish zest.
In 1885, she moved to California. Soon after, she began construction on her famous house, the mansion she would be building for much of her life. She was monied by violence, by a fortune made from selling rifles.
There are the stories about her, some taken from rumors and myths, some from historical documentation. But not memories. It’s been too long for that.
At the heart of it all, there’s the one question everyone wants answered. Why did she keep building?
It’s no longer raining, but the ground outside the gift shop is still wet, puddles nestled in pavement hollows.
Fredrik waves to the guests before turning to Devyn. He gets close to her again and smiles. He looks at her like this sometimes, like he is also full of wanting.
“So how was the tour?” asks Fredrik. The way he leans forward, looking so eager, Devyn can tell he wants to be praised. She should thank him for getting her a free ticket. Tell him he did a great job. But she can’t think about anything but her bracelet. What would her grandmother say?
“Thanks for the ticket. Can you get me another?” She winces, feeling like the biggest jerk. “Sorry, your tour was really good. It’s just that I think I dropped my bracelet in there. It’s really special to me. It belonged to my grandmother.”
“I have another tour tomorrow. We can find it then.”
She can’t stand the thought of her bracelet alone in that house. “I need to find it now.” She looks up at him. “Please?”
Fredrik sighs. They’ve spent so many late nights studying together, eating donuts and cursing incomprehensible MARC record fields. She knows all his moods. When he gets petulant, it’s impossible to talk him out of it, so she doesn’t try.
“Fine,” he says.
As Devyn enters the house for a second time, she steps carefully. The house seems darker than before, the air weighed down.
She promises herself she’ll make it up to Fredrik. Buy him a dozen donuts for a picnic by Almaden Lake. Take him roller skating. Knit him a scarf. He’s a good friend. Mostly.
The tour progresses, the new guide reciting from the same script.
She stays towards the back, scanning the ground.
Her bracelet isn’t anywhere.
She must have dropped it in the secret room, the room not meant for her. Her throat closes up, as if she’d swallowed dust. Her stomach twists.
If she wants to go back to that room, she’ll need to find the staircase again.
The only problem is that there are so many stairs. The house is a labyrinth.
It feels like someone is always watching her, even when the tour group is far ahead, even when there’s no one around.
She finds a staircase that looks like the one she climbed before. She darts up it, only to find that the stairs lead straight to the ceiling. When she comes back down, the tour guide is waiting for her, glaring.
“You need to stay with the group.”
“Sorry, I thought that’s where everyone went.”
“For your safety, I’m going to have you come up front with me,” the tour guide says sternly. “This is an old house. Not all of the rooms are safe.”
Now that Devyn is paying attention, she realizes that she doesn’t recognize any of the rooms. Is this tour different? Did the rooms shift? An uncanny chill rolls up her shoulders. She wishes she had never come back inside.
When the tour ends, Devyn frantically calls Fredrik, but he doesn’t answer.
Twenty-four thousand square feet
One hundred and sixty rooms
Forty staircases
Thirteen bathrooms
Six kitchens
Ten thousand windowpanes
Fifty-two skylights
Forty-seven fireplaces
An unknown number of secret passageways
Three basements
Seventeen chimneys
Hundreds of doors (one that leads to nothing)
Five million dollars (seventy-one million, adjusted for inflation)
Several full-time builders
Over twelve million visitors
One question: why did she keep building?
The next day, Devyn and Fredrik meet at Santana Row, a couple of blocks away from the Winchester Mystery House. They walk past shops with clothes Devyn will never be able to afford, not on a librarian’s salary. If she ever manages to find a job as a librarian.
“Still job hunting?” he asks.
She nods, grimacing. Right now, she’s working part-time ranking search results for a company with an unpopular search engine. Since she’s signed an NDA, she refers to it as “Not Google.”
“You?” It’s the question they start with, always. The same with all her friends who are recent graduates with a master’s in library science.
She’s made him lunch: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, carrots hastily peeled, chocolate chip cookies that crunch hard when you bite them. If she could afford it, she’d buy him lunch, but the restaurants here are so pricy.
They sit on a bench, and she presents him with the homemade lunch.
He tries to hide his sigh, then pulls out a carrot and takes a bite. “I swung by the house before work and asked about your bracelet. No one turned it in yet,” he says.
“I think I lost it in the off-limits room.” Just thinking about going back makes her chest tighten.
“I’d go up there for you, but I have to lead the tour.”
“Thanks anyway,” she says, distracted. She can’t stop picturing her bracelet caught between floorboards, devoured. She rubs her wrist. The clasp was old fashioned. It undid so easily–the bracelet would slip silkily from her wrist, falling into her hand.
“I was thinking, let’s go out to Almaden Lake tonight. Picnic under the stars. I’ll bring the donuts. And the warm blankets.” He leans toward her, touches her arm lightly. They’ve had plenty of picnics, but the way he’s asking feels different.
Her stomach lurches unpleasantly. She likes Fredrik, she does. But they won’t ever be more than friends.
Are they really going to have this conversation? Now?
“You are such a good friend,” she says. “And I need good friends right now.”
She hopes he’ll leave it at that, but then he gets that look in his eyes, too full of wanting.
She tries again, as gently as she can. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
He doesn’t respond. His hand is snakes up her arm, up to her hair. He’s cradling her neck. She doesn’t want to hurt him, but he’s leaning toward her.
She pushes back. “I can’t,” she says, softly.
They don’t speak on the walk to the mystery house.
Harry Houdini visited the house in 1924, two years after Sarah’s death. Was he drawn to the house because he was a magician? Magicians, with their secret pockets and hidden items, the ability to make things appear and disappear. Palm, ditch, steal, load, simulation, misdirection, switch.
Here he was, in this house full of secret passageways and false cabinets and so many doors.
Here he was, in this house drowning in its own history.
There’s a rumor that Houdini gave the mystery house its name, although newspaper articles show the name was in use before his visit.
When myth clashes with historical documentation, which story are people more likely to believe?
Before the tour, Devyn slips a note to Fredrik. She wrote it in the gift shop, temporarily pilfering a pen with the Winchester skull logo splashed along its side.
The note is a picture of a donut being pelted by sheets of paper, with a word bubble that says, “Help, I am drowning in MARC records.” There are whimsical lines and swirls around a postscript which reads: BTW, you are an amazing tour guide.
She sees him read it, in those moments before the tour starts. It is an apology and a question. What the note is really saying is: “Are we okay?”
He smiles, and then he doesn’t, as inscrutable as a mysterious house with too many rooms.
When they enter the house, Devyn shivers. In her mind, the house stretches out farther and farther, an eternity of hallways.
During the tour, Fredrik speaks with animation, pitches his voice for maximum spooky effect. Devyn can barely concentrate. She feels as if the house is pressing in on her, suffocating her.
They pass so many staircases. Again, she feels as if the house has shifted without her knowing, as if the house has infinite rooms, as if it has been building itself this whole time.
Finally, as the rest of the tour group heads forward, Fredrik darts back to her. He nods towards a staircase.
Hesitating, Devyn creeps up the stairs. There is the room again, but it looks different. The wallpaper is cracked. The bed is unmade. Is it possible she just hadn’t noticed before?
She scours the room for her bracelet. Under the bed and the dresser. Desperately, she opens a dresser drawer. The smell of dead lavender drifts out. She peeks behind the cracked wallpaper. Runs her hand along window ledges caked in dust. She levers the mattress off the bed, the bedsprings squeaking into the quiet.
Her bracelet is nowhere.
She wonders if the house has swallowed it, hidden it. She wonders if, like a magician, the house has made it disappear.
“What do you want?” she asks, but the house is silent.
When she comes down the stairway, she has no idea where to go. The hallways stretch out, curving. There are too many levels. Too many rooms.
She is completely lost.
The thing about ghosts is they can’t tell their own stories, at least not in a straightforward way. The same is true for history. The past is filtered through archival documents–the letters and photographs and diaries, the business records, the tickets stubs and itineraries, the charcoal sketches, the telegrams, the correspondence so carefully typed on onionskin paper—and the historical record is never complete.
Our collective memory is only the stories we tell.
When does history become a ghost story?
Devyn forces her breathing to quiet. The house stands silent around her. Without the tour guide’s patter, she can truly study the house. She wonders about its history–the real history, not the rumors, not the script the tour guides are forced to speak. There is so much she does not know. Things no one can ever know.
Why did she keep building? Devyn wonders.
The house creaks. A breeze wafts down the hallway, wrapping around her. Sunlight shines through a stained glass window, so bright it’s almost tangible.
For a moment, Devyn imagines all the people who have walked these hallways and all those to come, superimposed upon each other, like ghostly imprints on an underexposed photograph, like hundreds of archival documents stacked one atop another, the air weighed down with their collective breath. In the past and the present and the future, the house holds all those footsteps, all those memories, all that wondering and speculating and searching.
“I’m sorry,” Devyn says softly. Maybe the house only wants to be understood for what it truly is.
Fredrik finds her staring at a beautiful stained glass window. He hurries her down the hall, but he doesn’t touch her.
After his tour, Fredrik avoids her, but she catches up to him. They walk in silence across the road to the abandoned Century movie theater, the blue dome rising above them. Nervously, she pulls out her hair clip and shoves it into her hair again.
“It looks like it’s going to rain again,” he says.
She nods. “I love the winter in San Jose.”
“Even here, it’s too cold for me.” He smiles sadly, as if in that moment, he is letting go. “So, still job hunting?”
She nods, and then they are chatting like they always do, but even so, she realizes it will be the last time. She can feel their history unspooling out between them. It should make her sad, but it doesn’t, not really. Some things are meant to change. Fredrik has been a good friend. Mostly.
“I wanted to ask,” she says, “how do you feel about reading that script during your tours?”
He shrugs. “I didn’t write it.”
“But the way it’s all like ‘you can believe the spooky rumors”–on the word spooky, she draws out the ohs and modulates her voice–”or not believe them, but definitely they could be true.’“
What she doesn’t ask is her real question, the question she started asking herself ever since she first set foot in the mystery house: What is our responsibility to the past?
Fredrik shrugs again. “Like I said. It’s not up to me.”
He stumbles, brushing against her, grabbing her arm to steady himself.
“Sorry,” he says, but he’s grinning. He holds up her hair clip. She blinks, totally shocked. She hadn’t even felt him remove it.
He hands it back to her with a flourish. “We all have our secrets,” he says.
On the way back to her apartment, she walks past the mystery house. From the outside, it’s not so imposing, with that cheery yellow paint. The red shingles are muted in the late afternoon light.
She can imagine how it was once a home, how it was once full of people who loved it.
“You have your own history,” she says softly. “Don’t let anyone tell you differently.”
As the sun lowers, throwing light into her eyes, she holds up a hand to shield her face, then gasps softly.
Her bracelet dangles delicately from her wrist, as if it had never left.
When Devyn thinks of the miraculous reappearance of her bracelet, there’s a story she tells herself. It involves a mysterious house and her experience there–twisting staircases that lead to nothing; the gentle breath of windows ajar; doors opening like ears, softly listening. It involves things beyond her understanding. At its heart, it’s a ghost story. It’s easier for her to believe in something supernatural, because all the other possibilities are worse.
The story she doesn’t want to believe goes like this. Like Houdini, Fredrik is also a magician. The first day in the mystery house, he palmed her bracelet. Perhaps he planned to heroically recover it and present it to her, hoping she’d see him with new eyes. Or perhaps he did it to have power over her, knowing she never would.
Is this a love story? (Can it be a love story without love?) Is it a ghost story? (Can a ghost story occur only in one’s own mind?) A story about a haunted house? About history? A story about the lies we tell ourselves, even when we know what’s true?
There are the things we know and the things we don’t. There are the facts and the lore, and the space between.
And there is that last question.
Why did Sarah Winchester keep building?
If you go to the Winchester Mystery House, the guides will share this rumor: Before coming to California, Sarah Winchester visited a medium, who told her that she needed to build a house and keep building to appease the spirits undone by the rifles which had built her fortune. The odd architecture would confuse the spirits. The constant drone of hammers would keep the ghosts away.
But the historical documentation tells a different story.
Sarah Winchester was an amateur architect. She subscribed to various architectural trade journals and made a serious study of the profession. Building her magnificent house was a passion project, an outpouring of artistic expression. She built out of love, not fear.
In 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake destroyed many parts of the house. Although Sarah cleaned up the wreckage, she didn’t continue construction. Many of the staircases leading up to the ceiling once led to higher floors that were knocked down during the earthquake. The door into nothing used to have a balcony. And, of course, the new owners who turned the house into a tourist attraction built many of the unusual features, claiming they were original to the house.
There’s profit in rumor, profit in ghost stories, profit in twisting the truth so that it no longer resembles itself.
Devyn manages to get a job at a local historical society. In the archives, she learns another version of the story about Sarah Winchester and her strange house, but it is difficult for her to reconcile these facts with her experience.
That’s the problem with the stories we tell ourselves. It is so hard to stop believing them, even when we know they aren’t true.
In the archives, Devyn’s hands touch so many historical records, the ghosts of other hands who once handled these same documents stacked upon hers. She begins to understand the past as archivists do–how the past reaches into the present, how history is made up of the stories we tell and so much more, how the past caresses us, ghostlike, with us always, a labyrinth that we can never find our way out of.
