Here's a recipe for a classic ghost story.

Take one big scary Victorian house.

Fill the house with an endless maze of hallways, mysterious rooms, and stairways that go

nowhere.

Add in a wealthy widow with a dark tragic past that she's trying to outrun and voila,

a ghost story for the ages.

I'm Annie Ubank, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

Today, we're taking you to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California.

To see if this sprawling mansion lives up to its reputation as one of the most haunted

places in the world.

It's 75 degrees, sunny, there are trees everywhere, a few weeks ago.

I visited the Winchester Mystery House.

This is a beautiful, shady courtyard, everything's nicely painted in earth tones.

It's a huge, wildly decorated Victorian house, it kind of looks like a courtyard at Disneyland.

It's kind of hard to believe that since one of the most notorious haunted houses in

America, growing up in San Jose, I heard this story.

Sarah Winchester was a haunted woman.

Her husband was the heir of the Winchester Rifle Company, and after he died, Sarah believed

that the thousands of damned souls killed by those rifles would never let her rest.

Sarah consulted a spiritual medium, and Sarah was told that wherever she settled down,

she had to build a house, but not just any house.

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