Winchester Mystery House!!!

Have you heard of Sarah Winchester? I am sure those of you who live in the Bay Area have definitely heard about her or have visited her home in San Jose. For those who don't know her...be happy you don't. On the Sunday when M&M (my cousins) were here for lunch, we went to the Winchester Mystery House.
I checked out their website the previous night and saw an interesting section - spirit sightings. Intrigued, I entered to explore what people had to say. I saw many postings by people who claimed to have seen and felt spirits while visiting the house. I mentioned this to my cousin and she said..."Why do you want to pay money and get a fright? I might as well stay back and sleep off the heavy lunch I've just had." There was no way we were going to let that happen.

We got there by around 2.45, met up with 3 more folks (cousin's aunt and family friends), bought tickets and waited for our tour to begin. From outside, the building looked like any other regular building...little did we know what awaited us inside. Soon our group was called to the entrance where our tour guide welcomed us.About the tour guide..now that's a whole other story...I don't know if I can blame her though..she was trying her best to make her discourse interesting and funny..but it came forth as monotonous and blah!!!

Anyway, our tour started at the original entrance to the house and we entered, what can only be called, the most crazily built building I have ever seen. Before I get into the details of the building, let me give you an intro to Mrs. Sarah Winchester. She was this lady who was filthy rich and did not know what to do with her money. Widow of William Winchester, who owned the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, Sarah was left with a huge fortune of 20 million dollars. A psychic told her to move West and build a house and to never stop building. The moment she stopped building, she would die. So, the poor little rich lady moved to California and bought a 8 room farm house, which she expanded to a 160 room building, sprawling over hundreds of acres. Currently, the property stands on 4.5 acres while the remaining land has been sold to the government.

Anyway, getting back to the building...there are stairways that lead nowhere, doors that open to walls and kitchen cabinets that have a depth of about an inch. Another feature we noticed was that most of the stairways we took had tiny steps, which were only about a couple inches high. Our guide explained that this was so because our crazy rich lady had arthritis and could not lift her feet up too high.

Finally, after about an hour's torture, we were out again..waiting for our next tour to start..the behind the scenes tour which took us to the old stable, fruit drying room and basement.

It was almost 6.30 by the time we came out and we headed straight to a Starbucks to get some coffee / tea...we needed the caffeine!!!

Overall experience - Very Disappointing - not only because it was such a big waste of money and energy..but forget a sighting, we did not even catch a glimpse of a SPIRIT.
Advice - Please don't make the mistake we made.