In his 31 years at the Winchester Mystery House, general manager Shozo Kagoshima has never seen a ghost. But countless co-workers and visitors have, and they’ve related tales and passed along photographs of strange apparitions to prove it—quivering orbs of light captured on film and numerous accounts of shiver-inducing visions, such as a woman in victorian-era clothing traversing the six kitchens. “There’s really no way to explain that,” Kagoshima says.

Then again, there’s no way to explain most of the things in this house. a creepy, winding mansion with 160 rooms, staircases and doors that lead nowhere, a window built into the floor, and the number 13 cropping up everywhere (13 bathrooms, a chandelier with 13 lights, and 13 palm trees lining the driveway, for starters), the house in San Jose, california, now a museum offering guided tours, seems straight out of a horror flick. But the story behind it is even more goose-bump inducing.

Sarah l. Winchester, the widow of William Wirt Winchester, the son of oliver Winchester, who owned the Winchester rifle company, had builders start the house in 1884, then added onto it for 38 years until she died, in 1922, according to Kagoshima. construction took place seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and Winchester never had any formal plans or blueprints for the add-ons; she simply sketched her bizarre designs on paper and tablecloths. Before a 1906 earthquake destroyed part of the structure, the house towered at seven stories; now it has four. Winchester also had a taste for modern luxuries: she had installed forced-air steam heat and modern plumbing with a shower (which was designed to wet Winchester’s four-foot-ten-inch frame only from the neck down, to spare her hairdo), which were considered opulent trappings in that era.

Also on the property are two other museums—the Historic Firearms Museum, containing an example of almost every Winchester rifle ever produced, and the Antique Products Museum, showing items the Winchester company made after World War I, when the demand for rifles decreased. “They wanted to keep the plant busy, so they figured out what kinds of other products they could make using the existing equipment,” Kagoshima says, listing lawn mowers, carpentry tools, razor blades, and an icebox as examples.

By far, though, the mansion itself garners the most attention. Kagoshima says he can’t reveal the annual number of visitors, but hordes of psychics, ghost hunters, and the merely curious have been drawn to the mansion since before it even became a museum. Artists have even paid homage to the house, including the late Jeremy Blake, who created a trilogy of digital animations titled “Winchester” in 2002 and 2003.

Some of the mansion’s stranger details include a séance room, a Tiffany stained-glass window with a spiderweb pattern and 13 stones, a closet with no floor, and a cabinet that runs 30 rooms deep.

No one knows for sure why Winchester, who inherited the more than $20 million family fortune, felt compelled to create this architectural oddity, but legend has it that after the deaths of her husband and infant daughter, she thought the family was plagued by the ghosts of all the people killed by Winchester rifles and hoped to ward off those spirits with the labyrinthine design. Some say Winchester believed she would die the day construction stopped.

“That’s one theory,” Kagoshima says, “but we don’t know the full story. Only Mrs. Winchester knew that. That’s really why it’s the Winchester Mystery House. The mystery is why she built it.”

"Winchester Mystery House" comes to ARTINFO from the winter 2008 issue of Museums magazine.