Speaker 1: Brought to you by the all new Toyota Corolla. Welcome
Speaker 1: to you stuff you should know from house stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey and happy Halloween, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark. Go do what you're about to do,
Speaker 1: Chuckers and Jerry. Jerry's saying, uh, you put the three
Speaker 1: of us together, me Josh Clark, there Chuck Bryant, and
Speaker 1: there Jarry. And you've got stuff you know, the Halloween edition.
Speaker 1: We got a big old tub of candy corn here
Speaker 1: we got have you have you tried Starburst candy corn?
Speaker 1: My goodness, I don't like candy corn and I like
Speaker 1: Star Wars candy corn? Is it Starburster? Is it candy corn?
Speaker 1: It's candy corn with star Warst flavors, but not Starburst texture.
Speaker 1: No candy corn texture. Okay, some mad scientists threw it
Speaker 1: all together. Interesting. Yeah, I'll try it. You got one?
Speaker 1: I have a warm one in my pockets, been in
Speaker 1: there for a few days. Perfect. Here you go, soften
Speaker 1: it up there, that's delicious. Make a chewing Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: straw strawberry and lin. Yeah, it's exactly right. Chuck. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we've got candy corn. It's a Halloween edition, and
Speaker 1: we hope you enjoyed our Halloween episode, our story. That's
Speaker 1: probably that's probably my favorite thing of the year that
Speaker 1: in Christmas episode, we're gonna get cracking on the Christmas extravaganza. Yeah, work,
Speaker 1: running out of stories, I'd probably and I got one
Speaker 1: up my sleeve. I got an idea. Yeah, yeah, otherwise
Speaker 1: we can just make stuff up. Yeah, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then everything worked out okay because it was Christmas
Speaker 1: the end, Chuck. Yes, have you ever heard of the
Speaker 1: Winchester Mystery House? I have, Indeed, I have to, thank God,
Speaker 1: because that'd be a surprise. If I was completely unprepared,
Speaker 1: it would be I would be surprised. I can tell
Speaker 1: you that. Uh yeah, I've heard of it. I've never
Speaker 1: been there, but I would like to go for sure
Speaker 1: and check it out. I might. I might do that
Speaker 1: next time I'm in the Bay area, I might venture
Speaker 1: towards San Jose to check this thing out. Yes, well,
Speaker 1: I've already cleared it with you me that we're going
Speaker 1: next time we're in the San Francisco area. Great, how
Speaker 1: far always San Jose from San Francisco, I don't close, right,
Speaker 1: Do you know the way to San Jose. I do
Speaker 1: not know the way to San Jose apparently, um, but
Speaker 1: if I could find my way there, we would find
Speaker 1: the Winchester Mystery House, because apparently it sticks out like
Speaker 1: a sore thumb. Um. It was originally in some pretty
Speaker 1: rural area, and over time, the the acreage a hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty two acres is what the Winchester House grounds
Speaker 1: eventually covered, has been whittled away and now it's just
Speaker 1: like the suburbs with this enormous Victorian mansion situated in
Speaker 1: the middle of it. Yeah. And when we say enormous,
Speaker 1: we mean enormous um supposedly about a hundred in sixty rooms.
Speaker 1: Even though and I think this is part of building
Speaker 1: up the lore, some say they cannot be counted because
Speaker 1: you will get lost in the house and never get
Speaker 1: an accurate count and never escaped. I say that's hoke
Speaker 1: hokem because hey, if you can put a man on
Speaker 1: the moon, you can count the rooms in a house. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And what do you suggest using a post it note?
Speaker 1: Just put a post it note up and yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't even need to write that. And that's the very
Speaker 1: presence of a post it note indicates you're you've been
Speaker 1: there before, and counter all the post it notes right.
Speaker 1: You could just you could write the numbers on them.
Speaker 1: Even better, you wouldn't even have to count them. You
Speaker 1: just write one and then keep in mind the last
Speaker 1: number you wrote down the right, the next number that
Speaker 1: comes after that on the next post it note, right,
Speaker 1: and you know what we should do. It would be
Speaker 1: funny if we did a little video series where you
Speaker 1: and I a big smart guys, tried to do this
Speaker 1: and we kept getting confused. I would watch that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would watch that over and over, and then we
Speaker 1: find the lost wine cellar and everything's kind of peters
Speaker 1: out from there. Alright, So what we're talking about, well,
Speaker 1: let's clue those of you who don't know what we're
Speaker 1: talking about in we're talking about the Winchester Mystery House,
Speaker 1: which was, as Chuck said, an enormous mansion of an
Speaker 1: indeterminate number of rooms. I think they estimate a hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty. But even um, the state of California, on
Speaker 1: their tourism website says, um it is an odd dwelling
Speaker 1: with an unknown number of rooms. A tourism website said
Speaker 1: that yes, because there's a tourist attraction exactly. They're trying to,
Speaker 1: you know, draw people in with the mystery of the
Speaker 1: mystery house. Yeah. And the whole thing was the brainchild
Speaker 1: and the result of a four ft tennant little uh
Speaker 1: firecracker nicknamed the Belle of New Haven in her day,
Speaker 1: named Sarah Party who became Sarah Party Winchester. Yeah, new Haven, Connecticut.
Speaker 1: She's born in eighteen thirty nine, not new Haven, New Jersey. Um,
Speaker 1: and she was. It's very smart, spoke four languages, can
Speaker 1: play the piano like a champ with her elbows. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she's beloved. Um. She married in eighteen sixty two William
Speaker 1: Winchester of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Because it's a
Speaker 1: big part of the story, it is they developed what
Speaker 1: was known as the Repeater, the repeating rifle, which is
Speaker 1: the coolest rifle ever. The Lone Ranger head one did
Speaker 1: he according to the Lone Ranger placet that I had,
Speaker 1: he did. I believe that he mainly used the old
Speaker 1: revolver though. Yeah, and um the cudgel. Yeah, the rifle
Speaker 1: famous for the rifleman used the repeater for sure. The
Speaker 1: Lone Ranger did too, Okay, Um, But basically it was
Speaker 1: a revolutionary gun that you could fire really quickly. Um.
Speaker 1: And yeah, you could fire once every three seconds, which
Speaker 1: is pretty amazingly fast for a rifle. Especially. It was
Speaker 1: the gun that won the West, and it was the
Speaker 1: gun that helped the Northern troops defeat the Southern troops
Speaker 1: in the Civil War. And when the west depends on
Speaker 1: your vantage point, yes, it was the The westward expansion
Speaker 1: took place at the barrel of the Winchester repeating rifle. M.
Speaker 1: So she marries William Winchester, heir to that fortune. Uh.
Speaker 1: They started family in eighteen sixty six and very very
Speaker 1: tragically lost their lone daughter, Annie in infancy, and it
Speaker 1: was something that Sarah never recovered from. Basically, No, it
Speaker 1: was a pretty sad thing to see if apparently the
Speaker 1: child um was alive for either twenty eight days or
Speaker 1: forty two days, I guess, depending on who you ask. Um.
Speaker 1: So she made it the term she was born, and
Speaker 1: then she died of a wasting disease called mora asthmus,
Speaker 1: which is a disease of malnutrition. So no matter what
Speaker 1: they fed her, she just wasn't taking in the nutrients
Speaker 1: and she died of malnutrition. And at the time mora
Speaker 1: asthmus was still mysterious, so it seemed like, what the
Speaker 1: heck just happened to my kid? I'm feeding the kid. Also,
Speaker 1: here I go right along the edge of completely losing
Speaker 1: my sanity forever, and I'll never be quite the same again.
Speaker 1: But I'm gonna come back a little bit. And then
Speaker 1: when I do a few years later, my husband's gonna
Speaker 1: die an early death at age forty three, fifteen years
Speaker 1: later to be exact. And um, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: can I take a second here? Somebody wrote in, and
Speaker 1: I don't. I can't find the email, but they wrote in.
Speaker 1: For our Dying podcast, we mentioned life expectancy and we
Speaker 1: said that, um, you know, we made the assumption that
Speaker 1: people used to um only lived at like age thirty
Speaker 1: or something like that, because the average life expectancy was
Speaker 1: so low. And this this person pointed out that that's
Speaker 1: not the case. That people typically live to old age
Speaker 1: like they live now. But the infanmortality rate was so
Speaker 1: high that if you took all of the infant deaths
Speaker 1: and all the people who survived it and put it together,
Speaker 1: you had an average life expectancy of thirty. So it's
Speaker 1: not like everyone's dying in their forties. They were dying
Speaker 1: in their ones and twos exactly. So if you made
Speaker 1: it out of your ones and twos, you would probably
Speaker 1: live a pretty long life. So that was the discrepancy
Speaker 1: that I never understood until the person wrote in. So,
Speaker 1: whoever wrote in, thanks for writing that in. You didn't
Speaker 1: catch your name or anything. I don't know. Uh so
Speaker 1: where are we? She she's lost her daughter, she's lost
Speaker 1: her husband, she's very distraught. Um goes and sees a medium,
Speaker 1: which was a big deal at the time. Yeah, in Boston,
Speaker 1: a man named Adam Coots, and which was strange that
Speaker 1: it was a male medium. It is because you know ladies, um,
Speaker 1: which is why they're all called lady so and so right,
Speaker 1: you know, uh yeah, like you know, oh Madam, yeah,
Speaker 1: or madam or like Lady Charlotte or whatever. Um, Lady Charlotte,
Speaker 1: who I go too. That's why I buzz marketed her. No,
Speaker 1: you don't, do you really know? Because see Lady Adam. Um.
Speaker 1: So anyway, she goes and sees Lady Adam, and he said,
Speaker 1: as you're gonna be haunted by ghosts for the rest
Speaker 1: of your life because you married into a fortune of
Speaker 1: killing and murdering with that Winchester rifle. Yea, So remember haunting.
Speaker 1: You remember I said it was important that she married
Speaker 1: um Mr Winchester. Right here, William. The Winchester family supposedly
Speaker 1: had a curse, according to Lady Adam, that all of
Speaker 1: the people who had died at the at the other
Speaker 1: end of the Winchester rifle now haunted the family, and
Speaker 1: they had a listed demands that Sarah was going to
Speaker 1: have to put up with or else she would be
Speaker 1: gotten by the spirits too. And that's where the house
Speaker 1: was born. Basically, Yeah, the guy said, these spirits need
Speaker 1: a house, so you're gonna have to build a house
Speaker 1: for him. More and more people are dying from the
Speaker 1: the rifle that your husband's family created every day, so
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to make it a big house. And
Speaker 1: you can never cease construction. If you cease construction, you'll die.
Speaker 1: And there's two different interpretations here, and they're not quite
Speaker 1: sure how Sarah Winchester interpreted it. But whether if she
Speaker 1: stopped construction she would die, or if she kept construction
Speaker 1: going she would live forever, eternal life. Because the people
Speaker 1: who are into spiritualism, we're into that whole thing a
Speaker 1: lot too. But either way, she had her her walking papers,
Speaker 1: her instructions, um, and she decided to take them out
Speaker 1: west and follow her husband, who who she believed was
Speaker 1: leading her, who supposedly told her all this through the medium,
Speaker 1: and headed towards California. Yeah, she visited head a Nissan
Speaker 1: Menlo Park and eventually found a property three miles west
Speaker 1: of San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley there, and
Speaker 1: she said, you know what, I'm gonna buy this land.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take this house and I'm going to build
Speaker 1: on it until forever. And Um, Lady Adam had a
Speaker 1: his cousin was a contractor. That's not true. That would
Speaker 1: have been great though. Yeah, It's like, so you have
Speaker 1: to build and NonStop. Here's my cousin, John Hanson. John
Speaker 1: Hanson was in fact or foreman. Uh even though Ms
Speaker 1: Mrs Winchester was her own architect, So hold on. So
Speaker 1: Mrs Winchester, um, who's just really slightly off a rocker
Speaker 1: now at the loss of her child and her husband
Speaker 1: has instructions that she is to move west start building
Speaker 1: forever a huge house to how's the ghosts of all
Speaker 1: the people who have died at the hands of her
Speaker 1: um husband's company's rifles. That's where we're at right now.
Speaker 1: Before we're going further, let's um, let's do a message break, Okay,
Speaker 1: before we left, UM, I sort of hinted that she
Speaker 1: was her own architect, and she was. Not only did
Speaker 1: you hint it, you said it. Not only was she
Speaker 1: her own arc deck. But see, she supposedly got instructions
Speaker 1: on building through seances, right, And she had an architect
Speaker 1: at first, but she fired him later on, apparently, I think,
Speaker 1: because he wouldn't listen to her, and she's like, look,
Speaker 1: I'm getting instructions from the other side, paler, are you
Speaker 1: getting instructions from the side? No, Well, then we go
Speaker 1: my way. So she had a seance room, and here's
Speaker 1: how she would conduct her seance. Would try and trick
Speaker 1: the ghosts into not following her and disrupting the seance um.
Speaker 1: So she would set up for the seance room. Um.
Speaker 1: She would traverse basically a labyrinth of rooms and hallways
Speaker 1: like she would push a button and a panel would
Speaker 1: fly up. She would step quickly into their shut the door.
Speaker 1: She would open a window to that place, climb out
Speaker 1: onto like a flight of outdoor steps that took her
Speaker 1: down a story come back inside like through a window.
Speaker 1: And she was basically trying to to lose these spirits
Speaker 1: that she felt like we're tailing her until she could
Speaker 1: finally get into her comforting science room where she would
Speaker 1: receive instruction on what to build next. And then when
Speaker 1: she got into a sance room, which was the Blue room.
Speaker 1: It was at the center of the house and I
Speaker 1: think the second floor. Um, she would get instructions I
Speaker 1: think from her husband supposedly and then also a spirit
Speaker 1: caretaker named Clyde, and she would get the instructions. At twelve,
Speaker 1: there would be a bell rung. That's when the spirits
Speaker 1: arrived at to another bell would ring, signaling their exit.
Speaker 1: And she would do this every night and then in
Speaker 1: the morning she would go meet the foreman Hanson, John Hanson,
Speaker 1: and say here's what you guys do today, and he
Speaker 1: would go, all right, but we should say that all
Speaker 1: through the night, including at midnight at two and the
Speaker 1: time when she was sleeping after the science and before
Speaker 1: she met Hanson, there was construction going on. Yeah, and um,
Speaker 1: like it was twenty four hours a day, sixty five
Speaker 1: days a year, including Sundays, including holidays, there was all
Speaker 1: somebody doing construction on that house. Yeah. She she apparently
Speaker 1: like as long as she could hear those hammers nailing nails,
Speaker 1: then she felt at ease. Um. She would uh design
Speaker 1: rooms that would be built on top of other rooms.
Speaker 1: She would build rooms apparently to get to those hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty rooms. They estimate they may have built five
Speaker 1: or six hundred over the span of those years. Right,
Speaker 1: Because if there was something that got in the way,
Speaker 1: she would either build around it have it torn down.
Speaker 1: Sometimes there was even um it was even less explicable
Speaker 1: why a room would get torn down, but she would
Speaker 1: just order it torn down, even though say they've been
Speaker 1: working on at a month up to that point. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the whole trick to all this is to pay well. Um,
Speaker 1: if you weren't paying well, then you probably would have
Speaker 1: had dudes walking off the job being like, you're crazy lady,
Speaker 1: I'm out of here. Right. She paid double the day rate, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is three bucks three Yeah, And so the construction
Speaker 1: dudes were happy to keep working on this. What they
Speaker 1: thought was this crazy old lady's plans um and they frustrating,
Speaker 1: but that you know, they were getting rich or not rich,
Speaker 1: but they were doubling their money, right, And I think
Speaker 1: over time to Chuck, like, I get the impression that
Speaker 1: the people who worked for her, both the construction workers
Speaker 1: who you know, I mean like there would be once
Speaker 1: they came, they didn't leave unless they were fired because
Speaker 1: the money was so good. Um, so when you work
Speaker 1: for some crazy old lady for twelve, fifteen, twenty years
Speaker 1: or whatever, like, you're gonna start to develop a sense
Speaker 1: of loyalty. And they they she was very much protected
Speaker 1: from the outside world by these people because her neighbors
Speaker 1: thought she was a total whacko, maybe a little evil
Speaker 1: who knows what's going on? And she was very she
Speaker 1: lived in seclusion. She always wore black, she always wore
Speaker 1: a veil. Yeah, she uh. One of the first things
Speaker 1: she did was had built a private had a private
Speaker 1: planet around the entire house. But she was also very
Speaker 1: kind of children, especially or friends would have them over
Speaker 1: for ice cream. So it's not like she was some awful,
Speaker 1: mean old person. She was just mysterious and liked her
Speaker 1: privacy mainly. Yeah, And apparently once she moved into town,
Speaker 1: um a lot of the local charities started getting anonymous
Speaker 1: donations that they never got before. She and she of
Speaker 1: course she didn't need all the glory, but she was
Speaker 1: still very charitable woman. Yeah, she had a bunch of money. Um.
Speaker 1: The reason she was able to pay double was a
Speaker 1: big inheritance obviously about twenty million bucks and a lot
Speaker 1: of stock in the Winchester Company, and um, it afforded her.
Speaker 1: They guessed about a thousand dollars a day to spend
Speaker 1: on construction, which it's like twenty grand now and change
Speaker 1: a day day. And this is good money, mostly prior
Speaker 1: to the era of the income tax. So like that
Speaker 1: was all hers. Um. I mean, she ended up spending
Speaker 1: I think five point five million on the house in
Speaker 1: nineteen dollars. That's a lot of dough, it really is.
Speaker 1: But she didn't have anything else to do with it
Speaker 1: except give it away to orphans. That's true. So, um,
Speaker 1: all of this construction led to some very strange design decisions.
Speaker 1: And we should say this is probably a pretty good
Speaker 1: point to say, Mrs Winchester didn't leave any diaries, any journals,
Speaker 1: She was never interviewed. Uh. All we can say for
Speaker 1: sure is that she went to a medium in Boston,
Speaker 1: received these instructions that she had to build the house
Speaker 1: to appease the spirits, and that's what she did. Everything
Speaker 1: else is kind of conjecture, like her motivations. Beyond that,
Speaker 1: the details of her motivations and what she thought and believed,
Speaker 1: um is conjectures. We should probably say that, um, And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of room for misunderstanding. Like the staircases
Speaker 1: that she built had lots of steps and they were
Speaker 1: like two inches high. Well, the reason that she did
Speaker 1: that was because she had very bad arthritis, and those
Speaker 1: are the only types of stairs that she could um climb.
Speaker 1: But they would also double back all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: or go around in crazy circles of A lot of
Speaker 1: people say that she thought that you could kind of
Speaker 1: screw with the spirits and throw them off your trail.
Speaker 1: I guess on your way to the sance room. Um,
Speaker 1: by having stairs constructed like that. At any rate, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of weird design elements in this huge mansion. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The switchback stairs, um were seven flights that rose only
Speaker 1: nine ft forty four steps total. She had stairs that
Speaker 1: would go down leading two stairs that went up stairs
Speaker 1: that would go into a ceiling, chimneys that would stop
Speaker 1: short of the ceiling. Ah, you know, hidden doorways covered
Speaker 1: up stairwells. It was just sort of a big beautiful
Speaker 1: mess of design. There was a there were doors that
Speaker 1: led from the inside out to the outside, but it
Speaker 1: would just be a sheer drop if you stepped out
Speaker 1: the door, like that last step as a doozy right. Um.
Speaker 1: There was an inside door in the sance room, a
Speaker 1: closet door that opened up onto the kitchen sink another
Speaker 1: story below. Um, there was a corridor behind a cabinet
Speaker 1: that went along the backside of thirty rooms. It's just
Speaker 1: all sorts of neat stuff. There's the very famous stairs
Speaker 1: that lead to nowhere. Yeah, there were cabinets or only
Speaker 1: like two inches deep. Um. There was a grand ballroom,
Speaker 1: and you know, it wasn't all just wacky stuff. It
Speaker 1: was like really gorgeous design in places. Um. The grand
Speaker 1: ballroom was built without nails, which was a feat of
Speaker 1: engineering in itself and was gorgeous, but never used because
Speaker 1: of an earthquake that was pretty significant in her life
Speaker 1: in nineteen o six, there was an earthquake that Um.
Speaker 1: She was known for sleeping in different rooms every night
Speaker 1: so she wouldn't be found out by the ghosts, and
Speaker 1: she was actually trapped in the Daisy room and not
Speaker 1: found for a little while by her employees because they
Speaker 1: didn't know where she was after this earthquake. Cabin right.
Speaker 1: Not only did the ghosts not know where she was sleeping,
Speaker 1: her servants didn't either, So she was in there for
Speaker 1: a few hours and it f freaked her out. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sure, because despite the fact that it had like
Speaker 1: totally killed a lot of people in ravaged San Francisco
Speaker 1: and burned it down, she took it as a sign
Speaker 1: that the ghosts were mad at her um, that they
Speaker 1: were afraid that construction was nearing an end, and so
Speaker 1: to appease them, she boarded up a lot of the
Speaker 1: damaged um interior so that it could never be repaired
Speaker 1: and then therefore the house could never be finished. We
Speaker 1: should also say that by this time the house had
Speaker 1: reached seven stories, and the earthquake was so bad it
Speaker 1: knocked off the top three I believe. Yeah, she ended
Speaker 1: up sealing the front thirty rooms of the home, uh,
Speaker 1: including the front entrance to the home. These like grand
Speaker 1: front doors that they had just put in. Apparently only
Speaker 1: three people the two guys that put in the door
Speaker 1: and her were the only people to walk through them.
Speaker 1: Before she sealed them off forever Um. What she had
Speaker 1: a beautiful tiffany stained glass window installed and then built
Speaker 1: a wall behind it so no light could shine through it.
Speaker 1: You can only see it from the outside, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure it looks kind of dull. And then after the
Speaker 1: earthquake earthquake, which I say freaked her out, supposedly she
Speaker 1: went and lived on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay
Speaker 1: for six years. And then when she came back there
Speaker 1: was it was different Like before, there wasn't necessarily much
Speaker 1: of a plan and so like if she ran into
Speaker 1: trouble architecturally, she just teared the thing down or build
Speaker 1: around the problem. This was like a different kind of
Speaker 1: frenetic pace and it was just like build whatever wherever Um.
Speaker 1: After the earthquake really got to her, just like crazy
Speaker 1: person building. Yeah, alright, Chuckers, before we go any further,
Speaker 1: how about another message break? Okay, So back to it, Um,
Speaker 1: here's some numbers for you. Forty seven fireplaces, seventeen chimneys, uh,
Speaker 1: two basements, six kitchens, ten thousand window panes, and four
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty seven doorways and only two mirrors in
Speaker 1: the whole house because of course, ghosts are afraid of
Speaker 1: their own reflection, and apparently that staff would sneak hand
Speaker 1: mirrors so they can occasionally see what they look like
Speaker 1: after getting out of the shower. But she didn't want
Speaker 1: have anything to do with the mirrors though. Yeah. She
Speaker 1: Um also supposedly would fire staff who saw her without
Speaker 1: her veil on. Apparently her butler, UM and her niece
Speaker 1: were the only people who could see her without a vail.
Speaker 1: And if you saw her without a vail, no hard feelings,
Speaker 1: but you're cute. So we've talked a lot about the
Speaker 1: fact that she worked as her own designer and made
Speaker 1: all these weird, terrible choices that made no sense. But
Speaker 1: we also mentioned earlier she was a very smart lady.
Speaker 1: So she actually learned over the years more about design
Speaker 1: and architecture and got better at it um and developed
Speaker 1: a skill. And she actually had some innovations in her
Speaker 1: home that were brand new at the time. Um. For instance,
Speaker 1: they say she was the first person to use wool
Speaker 1: for insulation. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Uh. They had carbide
Speaker 1: gas lights in the house that had their own gas
Speaker 1: manufacturing plant for the estate, which is brand new, and
Speaker 1: she had electric push buttons installed to turn the lights
Speaker 1: on and off. She had an inside crank to open
Speaker 1: and close outside window shutters. First person to do that.
Speaker 1: That eventually became the norm. Uh what else she had?
Speaker 1: She I guess it was sort of green at the time.
Speaker 1: She had drip pans under the windows and a zinc
Speaker 1: sub floor in the north conservatory, so when you watered plants,
Speaker 1: the runoff from those plants would be captured by drain
Speaker 1: pipes for the garden below it. It's pretty cool. And
Speaker 1: she had something called the annunciator, which is a servant
Speaker 1: call system allowed her to summon servants from anywhere in
Speaker 1: the house and it would drop a little card to
Speaker 1: show the servant which room she was in at the time.
Speaker 1: That's awesome, So it wasn't just crazy weird steps that
Speaker 1: lead to nowhere. There were actually some innovations at the time.
Speaker 1: And it's it's a gorgeous Victorian like when you look
Speaker 1: at it, really really beautiful house. Yeah, and apparently the
Speaker 1: construction by the time she died took up six acres
Speaker 1: six acres of the house, not just the the grounds,
Speaker 1: because the grounds are like a hundred and sixty acres
Speaker 1: um And when she she dies, finally it's ao And
Speaker 1: apparently the legend has it that she died at a
Speaker 1: time when construction stopped. The workman took a break or
Speaker 1: something to play cards and never started back up again
Speaker 1: because they discovered that she died in her bed sleeping
Speaker 1: ino and um. Right afterwards, she left up everything to
Speaker 1: basically her nieces and nephews, and one of her nieces
Speaker 1: I think, the only one who was allowed to see
Speaker 1: without a veil, came in and was like, let's just
Speaker 1: auction this stuff off, and um, it took six weeks
Speaker 1: supposed to to get everything out of the house because
Speaker 1: there was that much stuff and it was that difficult
Speaker 1: to find your way out and you really got into
Speaker 1: the interior. Yeah, and some really valuable things too that
Speaker 1: were locked away in storage that were never even uh used,
Speaker 1: like you know, furniture and furnishings, just sitting and wait. Basically,
Speaker 1: didn't you say that there's a wine seller that's lost. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think they can't find the wine seller to this day,
Speaker 1: which also sounds a little like lower to me. It does.
Speaker 1: Why can't you find the wine seller? I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's lost. Uh. It is a popular tourist attraction today
Speaker 1: and um still being renovated and maintained. Apparently it's continually
Speaker 1: being painted. The exterior is all year long. They finished
Speaker 1: painting it and they start once again because it takes
Speaker 1: sixty five days to complete the job. I would imagine. So,
Speaker 1: and it's been a tourist attracting almost since she died.
Speaker 1: Like the house was sold to a group of investors
Speaker 1: who wanted to it as a tourist attraction UM for
Speaker 1: a hundred and thirty five thousand dollars, even though she
Speaker 1: dropped five point five million into it. UM and again like,
Speaker 1: if you're interested in this, you can go check out
Speaker 1: the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. UM. They have
Speaker 1: a website. I just imagine you type in Winchester Mystery House,
Speaker 1: but also look up UM something called Mrs Winchester's House.
Speaker 1: It's a documentary from nine kpi X I think is
Speaker 1: a San Francisco television station. It's narrated by Lilian Gish.
Speaker 1: It's just a half hour long, but it's really spooky
Speaker 1: and black and white and just interesting. It's a neat one,
Speaker 1: very cool. Yeah, check that out, all right, So we're going, okay,
Speaker 1: let's go before that though, Chuck Um, if everybody wants
Speaker 1: to read this article, you can type in Winchester mystery
Speaker 1: House in the search bar at how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com and we'll bring this up. And I said search bar,
Speaker 1: So that means it's time for a listener mail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this a sexuality call back. I just
Speaker 1: listen to your A sexual podcast. Guys, found it very interesting.
Speaker 1: One thing really caught my attention. You said a sexuals
Speaker 1: were classified there's a separate group outside the range of
Speaker 1: homosexual to heterosexual. I think it could be different. So
Speaker 1: Paul is proposing an idea here, instead of the range
Speaker 1: being in number line with a subgroup that doesn't fit,
Speaker 1: it should be more like a coordinate plane. Not all
Speaker 1: people are equally sexual. I'm sure you know people who
Speaker 1: don't really think about sex often, and then people who
Speaker 1: it dominates a large portion of their lives. That made
Speaker 1: me think that it could be a coordinate plane with
Speaker 1: homo and hetero on the left and right, and a
Speaker 1: sexual too extremely sexual. I want to say nymphomaniacal even
Speaker 1: but I feel like nymphomania is more complicated than a
Speaker 1: born sexuality, or at least we don't know enough about it.
Speaker 1: To say whether it is. Yeah, so what is describing
Speaker 1: as like a plus sign? Yes, the sexual orientation on
Speaker 1: left and right, and then the intensity of your sexuality
Speaker 1: going up and down exactly, so you can have uh,
Speaker 1: high homosexuality, low heterosexuality, and so on exactly. It's a
Speaker 1: good idea. I've actually seen that elsewhere to coordinate plane.
Speaker 1: It just makes sense. He says, that way all the
Speaker 1: people could be accurately plotted. It's to some degree at least,
Speaker 1: not saying it would count for everything perfectly, but I
Speaker 1: think it would clarified a bit more. Anyways, I'd love
Speaker 1: to know your thoughts on that idea. You just got them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: has it been done before or have you read about that?
Speaker 1: I have not. I do not know. I saw in
Speaker 1: a paper somewhere somebody proposing that similar thing that it's
Speaker 1: um who was it the the sex study yer Kinsey
Speaker 1: Kin Yeah that he Yeah, Um, they really kind of
Speaker 1: missed a really obvious aspect of intensity rather than just orientation.
Speaker 1: It just stuck the orientation dummy. It's a good idea.
Speaker 1: I agree. So Paul of Uniontown p a ah, we
Speaker 1: we think it's a swell Get to work on it.
Speaker 1: Go Paul if you can call it the Paul Paul's
Speaker 1: sexual plane. Paul's a one sexual plane and a girl. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: that's good. Thank you, Paul, Thank you for that. And
Speaker 1: if you like, Paul has some great thoughts ideas on
Speaker 1: things that we've talked about, more expansive ideas. UM, we
Speaker 1: want to hear them because we like that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast.
Speaker 1: You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff
Speaker 1: you Should Know. You can send us an email to
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Speaker 1: hang out with us at our website Stuff you Should
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