Read more articles by Eugene Moreau.
I had an amazing experience several years ago, one I think of often and one I hope to repeat again soon. I went and walked the hallways of an extraordinary house in San Jose, California. This place is amazing. Ir was without a doubt one of those places that when you experience it you will never forget it.
Let me tell you about it.
Prior to the 1906 earthquake, this house was seven stories but today it’s only four. The house is predominantly made of redwood frame construction, with a floating foundation that is believed to have saved it from total collapse.
There are about 160 rooms, including 40 bedrooms and two ballrooms, one completed and one under construction. The house also has 47 fireplaces, 10,000 window panes, 17 chimneys (with evidence of two others), two basements and three elevators. Winchester’s property was some 162 acres (650,000 m²) at one time, but now the estate is just 4.5 acres (24,000 m²) — the minimum necessary to contain the house and nearby outbuildings. It has gold and silver chandeliers and inlaid parquet floors and trim. There are doors and stairways that lead nowhere and a vast array of colors and materials.
Before the availability of elevators, special “easy riser” stairways were installed to allow Sarah access to every part of the mansion, to accommodate her severe arthritis. Roughly 20,500 gallons (76,000 liters) of paint were required to paint the house. Due to the sheer size of the house, by the time every section of the house was painted, the workers had to start repainting again!
The house also has many conveniences that were rarely found at the time of its construction, including steam and forced-air heating, modern indoor toilets and plumbing, push-button gas lights, a hot shower from indoor plumbing and even three elevators, including one with the only horizontal hydraulic elevator piston in the United States.
Anyway, enough about the house…..let’s talk about Sarah, the owner of the house.
Sarah lived a life shaped by regret and guilt and in this blog I’m going to tell her story. I’ll talk about overcoming regret and guilt in my next post.
Sarah’s Story
Sarah was rich…..really rich. At an early age Sarah inherited twenty million dollars….plus she had an additional income of one thousand dollars a day….seven days a week….352 days a year.
Sarah was a wealthy woman.
Not only was Sarah wealthy, she was well known. She was the belle of New Haven, Connecticut. No social event was complete without her presence. No one hosted a party without inviting her.
She had power and money, and that combination would open almost any door in America. Universities wanted her donations. Politicians clamored for her support. Organisations sought her endorsement.
Sarah was rich. Well known. Powerful. And miserable.
Sarah was living her life in the grip of guilt and regret.
She had a great sadness about her. Her only daughter died at the age of five weeks and her husband died soon after. At an early age Sarah was left alone…. with her name….. and her money…….and her memories…..and her guilty regret. It was this combination of guilt and regret that caused her to move west, to California.
Sarah bought an eight-room farmhouse plus one hundred sixty adjoining acres. She hired sixteen carpenters and put them to work. For the next thirty-eight years, craftsmen labored every day, twenty-four hours a day, to build a mansion. Sarah gave very specific instructions. Each window was to have thirteen panes, each wall thirteen panels, each closet thirteen hooks, and each chandelier thirteen globes.
I remember walking through this house. It was incredible.
Corridors snaked randomly, some leading nowhere. One door opened to a blank wall, another to a fifty-foot drop. One set of stairs led to a ceiling that had no door. Trap doors. Secret passageways. Tunnels. The construction continued around-the-clock, without interruption, from 1884 until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time, work immediately stopped.
The cost has been estimated at about US $5.5 million, which would be equivalent to almost $70-$75 million today.
When Sarah died the completed estate sprawled over six acres and had six kitchens, thirteen bathrooms, forty stairways, forty-seven fireplaces, fifty-two skylights, four hundred sixty-seven doors, ten thousand windows, one hundred sixty rooms, and a bell tower.
So, here’s the question!
What drove Sarah to such extremes? Why would she order such a construction?
Legend has it that every evening at midnight, a servant would pass through the secret labyrinth that led to the bell tower. He would ring the bell, as if to summon ‘Sarah’s Visitors’. Sarah would then enter the “blue room,” a room reserved for her and her nocturnal guests. Together they would linger until 2:00 a.m., when the bell would be rung again.
Sarah would return to her quarters and the visitors would return to …..well…. wherever they came from.
Who were these visitors? Well, they were the Indians and soldiers killed on the U.S. frontier. Bullets that came from the most popular rifle in America — the Winchester, had killed them all.
Sarah was Sarah Winchester, the wife of William Winchester, and the heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. What had brought millions of dollars to Sarah Winchester had brought death to hundreds and thousands of people and Sarah lived her life in guilt and regret, even though she didn’t create the the weapon that killed all those people.
Sarah Winchester spent her remaining years living in house built by guilt and regret trying to provide a home the dead.
Sarah Winchester lived her life looking backwards.
Living in the past!
Living in guilt and regret.
Sarah Winchester is an example, if perhaps an extreme one, of what guilt and regret can do to a person.
In my next post I’ll talk about how to escape the grip of guilt and regret and live your life moving forward into the future.
Until next week……
Eugene
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