The Cipher Puzzles of the Winchester Mystery House

The writing seems more focused on conveying the author's belief in numerology and the occult, rather than Sarah's. He uses "ciphers" with values that aren't idempotent, which makes them meaningless. If we say that "8" sometimes means K but sometimes means BANANA, we are off down a pointless, flat-earth style rabbit hole. One can read any kind of symbolism into the design, but that doesn't mean that Sarah was an occult expert with a methodical (or maniacal) plan. It may just mean that she and her suppliers chose pieces in a certain style that was popular and contemporary.

Read as architecture, the Winchester Mystery House is gorgeous and at the same time awful. It's a weird mélange of parts that was built piecemeal, at her instruction, often only to be torn down and modified soon after. Sarah was notorious for commanding large scale and expensive installations in both the house and garden, then later removing them or building over them at whim (hence the appearance of doors over walls and skylights in ceilings). Her employees recalled her as an insane boss who took no input from anyone and fired people for merely asking questions. The only reason Sarah was able to get any construction done at all is that she paid far above the prevailing wages and always had work to do.

I do think from what I've seen and read over years of visits that Sarah was afraid of ghosts, particularly the ghosts of the people killed by her husband's Winchester rifles, the source of her vast fortune. There are many Disneyesque "haunted house" elements which seem like puerile attempts to "fool the spirits," rather than the methodical practice of an expert occultist on a mission.

The spectacular Tiffany window is a good case in point. When first designed, this original window was produced for her in France and installed in a lovely south-facing location in a large study upstairs. Upon later expansion, that side of the house was covered with other rooms, the entrance to the study modified, and its dimensions significantly narrowed. The result was a room that wasn't useful as a study and had a window facing another indoor room. This is vernacular architecture done with high end Victorian materials, not masterful, devilish design.

If Sarah Winchester were a believer with a message, she did a terrible job of communicating it. A famous recluse, Sarah almost never left the house. There is only one photograph of her in public in existence, on a carriage trip to the market. In that instance, the market owner was obliged to build a covered porte cochère to accomodate the carriage -- where she remained parked while store attendants collected her goods. Sarah had no visitors to the house, ever. She was not a well-read person or a lady of literature, and therefore it seems unlikely that she would have amassed the interest or knowledge to mastermind an enormous estate of intentional occult design.