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Comment by The_Goonies1985 | Hacker News Reader

The_Goonies1985

>"Sarah didn’t build her mansion to house ghosts, she built her mansion because she liked architecture."

That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. Specifically: Sarah Winchester built the house because she was told that the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester guns would haunt her unless her house was sufficiently labyrinthine, and endlessly expanding; to confuse them.

Visit the house (the tour is rad) and see for yourself the architecture. There is no reasonable explanation for internal doors leading to sheer-drops, throughout the house, and other bizarre 'traps', apart from Sarah legitimately believing she had to confuse the ghosts.

This is more akin to a programmer consciously obfuscating and expanding a codebase to make it impossible for their angry-users to ever finish auditing it, or to determine its author.

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> That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades.

The house is run by an organization that has a very vested interest in playing up the supernatural element of the house. Some tour guides have gone on record discussing their frustrations with having to repeat known falsehoods to guests.

> Visit the house (the tour is rad) and see for yourself the architecture. There is no reasonable explanation for internal doors leading to sheer-drops, throughout the house, and other bizarre 'traps', apart from Sarah legitimately believing she had to confuse the ghosts.

Parts of the house were damaged by the 1906 earthquake and were not rebuilt. A lot of the weird path-to-nowhere stuff is "the destination collapsed during the earthquake", nothing particularly mysterious there.

Wikipedia agrees with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House#Labyr...

>The house is run by an organization that has a very vested interest in playing up the supernatural element of the house.

Sure, but we're dealing in oral-folklore that's over a century old here. I don't see any reason to value the earthquake-theory over the ghost-trap theory.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Except, of course, that modern academia is opposed to accepting, or investigating, anything paranormal (see Wikipedia etc).

I first visited the Winchester house in 1985, as a child, and it sure felt ghost infested to me back then. You can't get more scientific than that. My sister (also a child at the time) peer-reviewed my findings.

Refactoring w/o removing all dead code.

> the tour is rad

As others have noted, the guides are full of tall tales. I grew up in San Jose and remember when the property next to the Winchester Mystery House was a drive-in theater, and before the House was fire-damaged. The B.S. was well-known even then. My father, who moved to San Jose in the 1950s, even explained it to me as a child after some friends who were into ghost stories told me about it.

I don't know if it's still there, but my favorite part of the site was the detached museum showing some of the earliest pieces developed by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. Easy to miss as it is not part of the house or the guided tour.

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