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March 31, 2008
Winchester Mansion
I wrote before about the endless mansion, built by Mrs. WInchester (of Winchester Rifles) to escape her own guilty ghosts. Leave it to Paul Auster to add more details to what has become an absolute must-see for me:
"Or Mrs. Winchester, the widow of the rifle manufacturer, who feared that the ghosts of the people killed by her husband's rifles were coming to take her soul - and therefore continually added rooms onto her house, creating a monstrous labyrinth of corridors and hideouts, so that she could sleep in a different room every night and thereby elude the ghosts, the irony being that during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 she was trapped in one of those rooms and nearly staved to death because she couldn't be found by the servants."
More facts:
- Construction continued around-the-clock from 1884 until 1922
- Costs of this work translate to $70 million in today's currency
- The construction most certainly was the primary cause of the dust bowl
OK, that last one was made up, but my GOD can you imagine? If she wasn't nutso before (doubtful), that certainly would've sealed the deal.
Posted by Bree at March 31, 2008 12:21 PM