The Winchester Mystery House.

With so many different aspects to my Castle, with the colourful Onion Domes and the stark Gothic designs I want to use, I had to think of a way to pull all these different ideas together, and such an idea came to mind on how to do this. Another thing I am fond of is haunted houses, and one such house is the Winchester Mystery House in California. Some history below.

 

"The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California which was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester. The property and mansion have been claimed to be haunted including by Winchester herself since construction commenced in 1884. Under Winchester's day-to-day guidance, its "from-the-ground-up" construction proceeded around the clock, without interruption, until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased. The cost for such constant building has been estimated at about US $5.5 million (equivalent to over $75 million in 2012).

A Boston Medium told Winchester, supposedly by way of her late husband, that she had to leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must continuously build a home for herself and the spirits of people who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles. Winchester left her New Haven home and headed for California. In 1884 she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in Santa Clara Valley, and began building her mansion. Carpenters were hired and worked on the house day and night until it became a seven story mansion.

She believed her only chance of a normal life was to build a house, and keep building it. If the house was never finished, no ghost could settle into it. The house contains many features that were utilized to trap or confuse spirits. There are doors that are small or lead nowhere and windows that look into other parts of the house. The mansion may be huge but there are only two mirrors in the whole place. This is because Sarah believed that ghosts were afraid of their own reflection.

Winchester inherited more than $20.5 million upon her husband's death. She also received nearly fifty percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, equivalent to about $30,000 a day in 2012. These inheritances gave her a tremendous amount of wealth to fund the ongoing construction.
Though it is possible Sarah Winchester was simply seeking a change of location and a hobby during her lengthy depression, other sources claim that while consulting The Boston Medium, Winchester came to believe her family and fortune were haunted by the ghosts of people who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles, and that only by moving West and continuously building them a house could she appease these spirits. Located at 525 South Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, California, the Queen Anne Style Victorian mansion is renowned for its size and utter lack of any master building plan."

I love the idea of continually building a property to not only house, but confuse ghosts! I thought that the character who owns my Castle (because she would have been such a wicked Ruler) would have the same situation, if she was cruel to people in life then she would be scared of the ghosts coming back to haunt her for killing them in such brutal ways, so she would keep building in different aspects of Eastern European architecture to confuse the dead and keep them away from her whilst she continued her wicked ways.

I think the Mystery House also has some architectural styles from Eastern European Castles with the cone domes and circular parts to it, the roof colours are also similar! I hope this will help with what I want to create in Maya, with all the different stylings and colourings. DIFFICULT TIMES AHEAD!