Winchester Mystery House

Sarah Winchester's house, the subject of lasting stories that she believed in Spiritualism and consulted mediums. Her biographer found no record of a seance, and a later researcher found no evidence she had consulted a medium.

The Winchester Mystery House's own page asks whether Sarah Winchester believed in Spiritualism and practised it herself, and leaves the question open.

Tour guides and many articles have said she kept builders working day and night for 38 years, right up to 1922, when she died. Wikipedia disputes this. It says she tired easily and often halted the work to recover, at times for months, which slowed the building a great deal.

The Los Altos Town Crier reported in 2022 that her biographer, Ignoffo, looked into talk of seances at the house and could not confirm even one. Writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2024, Adrienne Hill said there is no evidence that a Boston medium called Adam Coons existed or that Winchester ever consulted any medium. Hill traces the Coons name to Susy Smith's 1967 book Prominent American Ghosts. She adds that Winchester's family and staff never described her as superstitious, and that her quiet life, which Hill puts down to arthritis, neuritis and lost teeth, gave local papers and gossips plenty to speculate about.

The University of Wyoming's Firearms Research Center took the same line in a 2025 interview with the podcast Our American Stories. It argued that the picture of a heiress haunted by guilt and ghosts hides a well-educated, independent woman who spent her money on new ideas in design and technology and on giving people work in lean years.