Sarah Winchester: Silicon Valley Developer

Abstract

Sarah Winchester:Silicon Valley Developer Homay King (bio) In San Jose, California, sits a sprawling mansion known as the Winchester Mystery House. The property is about fifty miles south of San Francisco, near the Junípero Serra Freeway, on the street now called Winchester Boulevard and was owned and expanded by Sarah Lockwood Winchester. By reframing both the Winchester Mystery House and the woman who developed it, this essay demonstrates that present-day computational personhood is informed by histories far more varied and nuanced than previously appreciated. Sarah Winchester was heiress to the fortune of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which was once one of the world's largest manufacturers of guns. Winchester rifles were known in particular for their pioneering designs in automatic and semi-automatic weapons, the predecessors of today's magazine guns.1 After enduring the deaths of her infant daughter Annie to a congenital defect and her husband William to tuberculosis, Sarah Winchester left the rifle company and her life in New Haven, Connecticut, and decamped to California, settling in the region that would later become Silicon Valley. In 1884, she bought a Victorian farmhouse and named it Llanada Villa, a misspelling of the Spanish for "home on the plains." She continued to renovate and expand this house for almost forty years, until her death in 1922. Her home was under near constant construction, with carpenters sometimes working twenty-four hours a day. As was not unusual at the time, Winchester reportedly consulted a psychic [End Page 188] following the losses of her husband and daughter.2 According to legend, the medium warned Winchester that the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles had cursed her family. While sold all over the world, including to foreign armies, the rifles enjoyed their greatest success as domestic weapons marketed to civilian settlers: the Winchester '73, immortalized in the 1950 film of that name starring James Stewart, was famously dubbed "the gun that won the West" and was responsible for the slaughter of untold numbers of both Native Americans and settlers during the Manifest Destiny era of westward expansion. The Blackfoot warriors of Montana called the Winchester Repeating Rifle "the spirit gun" for its capacity to reload itself automatically.3 The psychic predicted that the spirits of those slain would continue to haunt Winchester unless she moved to California and built a gigantic dwelling for them. This structure, Winchester was advised, should be colossal in size but also rigged with trapdoors, winding staircases, doors to nowhere, and other maze-like features so that the spirits would be tricked and unable to harm her: it was to be a ghost trap. The result was, in one critic's words, "a four-story jumble of mansards, turrets, gables, gingerbread tracery, and board and batten siding."4 At the time of her death, Winchester's house boasted 161 rooms, forty-seven fireplaces, over 10,000 panes of glass, and three elevators. The Winchester House—California State Historical Landmark no. 868—is currently privately owned and operated as a tourist attraction. Its promotional materials play to the property's Gothic, haunted house associations. They paint Winchester as a lonely eccentric who held séances in a private octagonal room constructed for this purpose, where she supposedly received messages from the dead with architectural blueprints for the home. According to this literature, Winchester's superstitious nature prompted her to configure ornaments, coat hooks, and other decorative details in groups of thirteen as a kind of numeric talisman. Accounts from tourist materials also note that she rarely if ever appeared in public.5 But some, including Winchester's biographer, Mary Jo Ignoffo, claim that the story of her obsessional attempts to exorcise her ghosts is at least partly a myth. While most accounts agree that Winchester did indeed visit a Boston spiritualist after the deaths of her child and husband, that [End Page 189] she did an inordinate amount of construction on her San Jose home, and that she was indeed a recluse, there are more mundane explanations for these aspects of her biography. Winchester was only four feet ten, intensely arthritic, and had difficulty walking. Her decision to settle in the more clement environment...