Winchester Mystery House
— — a house that kept being built.
Not only on a wall.
“A Queen Anne mansion in San Jose that was built and rebuilt without pause for thirty-six years. Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Wirt Winchester of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, took over a small farmhouse in 1886 and did not stop construction until her death in 1922. By then the carpenters had added roughly a hundred and sixty rooms, two thousand doors, and stairways that climbed into ceilings. Hallways double back. Windows open onto walls. A séance room sits at the centre of the upper floor. The Tower House quarter does not feel like the front parlour, which does not feel like the third-floor ballroom. From above, the roofline reads as a small town brought close on a six-acre lot.
Winchester Mystery House, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Winchester Mystery House sits at 525 South Winchester Boulevard in San Jose, California, in the Santa Clara Valley about fifty miles south of San Francisco. The mansion is a Queen Anne Victorian sprawl covering roughly 24,000 square feet on a six-acre lot, with the original 1886 farmhouse buried somewhere inside it. It is named for Sarah Lockwood Pardee Winchester, widow of William Wirt Winchester of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The property has operated as a tour attraction since 1923, the year after Sarah's death, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. It is owned today by Winchester Investments LLC and run as a private historic site.
Construction at the house ran without long pause from 1886 to Sarah Winchester's death on September 5, 1922. She had inherited roughly twenty million dollars and a controlling share of the rifle company after losing her infant daughter Annie in 1866 and her husband William in 1881. The 1923 newspaper accounts that built the property's reputation tied the continuous building to a Boston medium who told Sarah to never finish the house, in order to confuse the spirits of those killed by Winchester firearms. The carpenters worked in shifts. New wings were framed, torn down, and rebuilt. The April 1906 San Francisco earthquake collapsed the seven-storey front tower and trapped her in a bedroom on the upper floor; the top three storeys were never restored.
The house is open through the year, with timed tours of the Mansion Tour and the Explore More Tour, plus seasonal Friday the 13th flashlight tours and the autumn Unhinged event. Tickets in 2026 run from roughly forty dollars for the standard tour to higher rates for the behind-the-scenes options. The site offers parking, a small firearms-and-history museum, restored Victorian gardens, a café, and a gift shop in the carriage house. The closest landmarks are Santana Row and the Westfield Valley Fair mall, both within a few blocks east on Stevens Creek Boulevard. Norman Y. Mineta San José International Airport is about five miles north and downtown San Jose is roughly four miles east.