The Winchester-Merriman House is the oldest house in Los Altos, California, and was once owned by Sarah Winchester of Winchester Mystery House fame.
Mrs. Sarah Winchester was a native of New Haven, but left New England after the death of her husband, who was the heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune. She moved to the Santa Clara Valley in California, hoping the mild, sunny climate would be good for her arthritis and gained fame for her fantastic house, now a big tourist attraction in San Jose. It has, however inaccurately, become associated with gossip about Mrs. Winchester's involvement with the occult, something that has never been confirmed by even one bit of verifiable research.
Sarah Winchester is one of six profiles in my upcoming book, Historic Bay Area Visionaries, coming this October from the History Press.
Sarah Winchester at left and her sister, Isabelle Merriman were very close and when Winchester moved to California, so did her sister. Winchester bought her a ranch and its ranch house is now the oldest house in Los Altos, California.
People seem to think Winchester was obsessed with her San Jose home, now called the Winchester Mystery House, but the truth is she owned houses all over the San Francisco Peninsula, one of them in Los Altos, my own hometown. Now a City Historic Landmark, it was up for sale recently for the first time in many years, and it created quite a stir.
Here's the story I wrote about in this week's Los Altos Town Crier. Click the link to read it. And once you have, come back and look at the photo below more closely.
How do you suppose this happened?
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