TV Program

Current Episode

The House That Was Never Finished

2008-10-26

PRODUCTION #: 1039

SPEAKER: Shawn Boonstra

It is one of the strangest homes in the world. Once located on more than 160 acres, the Winchester Mansion took 38 years to build. Well, actually, that's not quite true. It really still isn't finished. The only reason they are not adding to it is because the owner is dead.

But when the owner was alive, it was under construction 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 38 years. Eventually it spread to 160 rooms, but when the owner suddenly died, the whole project came to a grinding halt.

Why such a large home for just one person? And why does it feature some of the strangest construction in the world, including doorways that seem to go, well, absolutely nowhere? The answer might surprise you.

The Winchester Mansion is an amazing place. Built between 1884 and 1922, this house already had modern sewer and heating systems. Not only that, but it also had three working elevators, 47 fireplaces and gas lighting all the way through.

Today, nobody is really sure what the home is valued at, but it is expensive and it is not hard to see why. It's filled with opulent stained glass windows, ornate parquet floors, and exceptionally rich wall coverings. But in spite of all that, it's not really the extravagance of the home that makes it special.

It started out as a simple eight-room house, but renovations over the years converted it into a sprawling multi-million dollar estate. But even then, it's not the size of the house that makes it stand out.

Why don't we go in and take a closer look?

There are many large, extravagant homes in the world, but the Winchester Mansion stands out from the crowd because of some of the strange features you will find inside. For example, there are a number of staircases that literally go nowhere, stopping at the ceiling. You might think that somebody decided to close off a staircase, but actually, they were designed that way.

Some of the more functional staircases are also strange. One of them is nicknamed the "switchback staircase" because it turns seven times and has 44 steps, even though it only goes up about nine feet. Why would somebody design a staircase like that?

For that matter, why would somebody design any of the oddities in the Winchester house?

One useless chimney rises through four stories and then stops a foot and a half from the ceiling. Some of the doors in this house open onto blank walls. Support posts were deliberately installed upside-down.

Other doors open up to 10-foot drops. Parts of the house feature little toddler-sized doors and balconies, and one room even features a window that is actually built right into the floor.

Then there is the number 13. The thirteenth bathroom has 13 windows. The grand staircase has 13 steps. There are 52 skylights, a multiple of 13. The driveway has 13 palm trees, and one of the sinks even has 13 drain holes.

The question is why? Why all of this strange, expensive architecture that doesn't make any sense? Why 13 of almost everything? The answer is surprising, even a little blood-curdling.

The mansion was built by Sarah Winchester. She was the wife of William Winchester, the son of the man who made the famous Winchester repeating rifle. Sarah and William had one child, a little girl named Annie, who died of a protein deficiency six weeks after birth.

Now, that was understandably hard on Sarah, but that's not all that happened to her. About 15 years later, her husband William died of pulmonary tuberculosis, leaving her utterly alone in the world.

Well, that was one more tragedy than she could take, and she went to a spirit medium in Boston to find answers.

The spiritualist told Sarah that the spirits of the people who had been killed by the Winchester rifle were seeking revenge for their deaths by wreaking havoc on the Winchester family. Annie's and William's deaths may have appeared to have been caused by disease, but in reality, the spiritualist said, they had been killed by vengeful ghosts who couldn't rest until the Winchester family had paid for inventing the rifle.

Furthermore, the spiritualist said, there was a curse on Sarah, and the ghosts were going to haunt her until the day she died.

"What should I do?" Sarah asked.

The spiritualist thought for a moment. "The only thing I can think of," he said, "is to move out west, buy a house, and continually build on it day and night. Build it exactly the way the spirits tell you to. That's the only way you can live in peace."

Apparently, Sarah must have believed the psychic, because shortly thereafter, she left Boston and moved to San Jose. There she bought an eight-room house, and using the $20 million she had inherited from the Winchester empire, she started adding to this house 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The house had a staff of between 18 and 20 servants. There were also as many as 22 carpenters and up to 18 gardeners who kept up production on the home day and night.

Even as Sarah was sleeping in her bedroom, they kept working. And it went on non-stop until Sarah died in 1922, when the work came to a grinding halt.

Some say there are still spots in this house where nails are pounded in only half way, because the carpenters quit the very moment they heard that Sarah was dead.

At long last she was at rest, but when she was alive, she never had a moment's peace.

In the very heart of the house is a room known today as the séance room, so named because Sarah went there every night at midnight to talk to the spirits. At midnight, a bell was rung outside the house to summon the ghosts, and Sarah would go to meet them for about two hours. At two o'clock in the morning, the bell was rung again to tell the spirits to leave. Then Sarah would go to bed, and the workmen would keep on building.

During the time that Sarah lived in this house, people would often walk past the estate and wonder at the strange house that sprawled further and further over the property with each passing year. Little did they realize what was going on inside, that Sarah Winchester was receiving bizarre building instructions from supernatural beings who threatened to harm her unless she obeyed.

And little did Sarah Winchester herself realize what a Pandora's box she opened the day she went to visit a spiritualist. She became a slave to paranormal forces she didn't fully understand.

I personally believe that Sarah Winchester was not entirely crazy. She was not some insane eccentric who was hearing voices that didn't really exist. Somebody really was giving Sarah messages. When she went up to her séance room every night, she was actually meeting with somebody.

But who was it? Were they really spirits who had been tragically killed by the Winchester rifle? We could guess or speculate about it, but we don't have to, because an ancient book gives the answer. The Bible holds an important clue to the mystery of the Winchester Mansion.

In fact, the Bible has a lot of information to help us understand paranormal phenomena. The Winchester house is not the only haunted house in the world, not by a long stretch.

A lot of famous places claim to have a ghost or two haunting their hallways. The Royal Ontario Museum back in my home country, for example, claims to have a ghost. And, some people say, so does Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto.

Here in the United States, there are literally thousands of so-called haunted sites, from the Queen Mary in Long Beach, to the famous Amityville house in Long Island.

But when somebody experiences something abnormal, something that they just can't rationally explain, is it really caused by the spirits of the departed?

Listen to what the Bible says, speaking of those who have already died: (Ecclesiastes 9:6)

"Also their love, their hatred, and their envy have now perished; nevermore will they have a share in anything done under the sun."

The Bible is crystal clear. When somebody dies, they never have anything to do with anything that takes place under the sun. In other words, they just don't come back here, and that includes Sarah Winchester's séance room. The dead simply can't come back to haunt us. The Bible says that that is a complete impossibility.

But it doesn't mean that Sarah Winchester didn't experience something. In all likelihood, it wasn't just her imagination. So who or what was it? It might not have been the spirits of people killed by the Winchester rifle, but it was definitely somebody, or something.

Now, sometimes, the things we think are ghosts can be explained scientifically. For example, Robert Matthews of the Telegraph recently published a story about a haunting in a university laboratory.

Apparently, a man named Victor was working alone one night when he suddenly began to sweat, even though it was quite cold in the room. Then he thought he noticed a mysterious figure. He was so terrified that the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

The next morning, however, he found the truth about his ghost. You see, not only was he an academic, but he was also a fencing enthusiast. And he had left his fencing sword clamped in a bench vise in the lab. When he arrived at the lab in the morning, one end of the foil was rapidly and mysteriously vibrating up and down.

As a trained engineer, Victor quickly realized that the blade might be receiving energy from very low frequency sound waves, so low that human ears couldn't hear them. He conducted some tests, and discovered that a new extraction fan recently installed in the lab was causing low-level vibrations.

When he altered the mountings on that fan, the vibrations stopped, the foil stopped shuddering, and all of the ghosts suddenly disappeared.

But that wasn't the end of the story. He decided to pursue the matter, publishing his results in the Journal of the Society for Physical Research. He discovered that low frequency sound waves, or "infra-sounds" as he called them, also caused many physiological effects, including breathlessness, shivering and even unexplainable feelings of fear. And these are some of the things that a lot of people claim to experience in haunted houses.

It just might be that many of the things people think are ghosts, could be the result of low frequency sound vibrations. But still, it is not possible to explain everything this way.

Empirical science doesn't explain every supernatural event. What happened to Sarah Winchester was not the work of low frequency sound vibrations. Sound waves can make you feel strange, but they can't tell you what to build. They can't tell you to put a window in the floor, or to build staircases that stop at the ceiling. I believe that a lot of people who claim to see ghosts really do see something.

How do I know? Well, the Bible makes it clear. God wouldn't waste time warning us about low-level sound waves, but He does warn us about dabbling in the world of the supernatural, and there is a reason for it.

Have a look at what God originally told the Israelites back in the book of Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 18:10-12):

"There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God drives them out from before you."

You know, some people have wondered why the Canaanites had to be driven off the land before the Israelites could settle. After all, populations were relatively small in those days, so why couldn't they just share the land? Well, one of the reasons the Bible gives is that the Canaanites used spirit mediums, which the Bible refers to as people with "familiar spirits."

You see, séances and channeling are nothing new. The Canaanites were doing it thousands of years ago, as were the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and many other ancient cultures. It turns out that there is nothing new about the New Age at all. Channeling, séances, crystals and astrology are almost as old as the human race itself.

And God knew that something was terribly wrong with these things, because the dead never actually come back to speak to us, as we read just a few moments ago in the book of Ecclesiastes. So if it's not the dead who are speaking to us at a séance, it is something or somebody else. And that is really bad news.

You see, spiritualism isn't just a party game or a figment of the imagination. If that is all it was, then God would not have to warn us.

But He knows that it's dangerous. People who dabble in the occult often wish they could get out of it, but find themselves hopelessly trapped. That's why some of God's sternest warnings come with regard to spiritualism.

Here is another example in the book of Leviticus: (Leviticus 20:27)

"A man or a woman who is a medium, or who has familiar spirits, shall surely be put to death; they shall stone them with stones. Their blood shall be upon them."

In ancient Israel, the law was tough on spiritualists. To be a spirit medium meant the death penalty, not because God was being harsh or vindictive, but because He knows the truth about how dangerous it is.

At the time, He was trying to establish a special people who would share His love with the whole world, and He took every possible measure to keep them from falsehood.

But God never delighted in the death of a spirit medium, or for that matter in the death of anybody else whose lifestyle puts them in an early grave. The Bible says in the book of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 33:11):

"Say to them: 'As I live,' says the Lord God, 'I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live."'

The Bible teaches that God never delights in death. Mediums were removed from ancient Israel only because God fully understood the danger they represented. He was taking the rotten apple out of the barrel to spare all the rest.

You see, the Israelites were supposed to be preparing the world for the Messiah to come, and God couldn't afford to have them spoiled by the dark forces at work to distract them. The salvation of the human race was at stake. And spiritualism has always played a key role in the devil's strategy to derail God's people.

Take, for example, the story of the Garden of Eden. One day, the Bible says, as Eve walked through the garden, she saw an unusual sight, a beautiful serpent who spoke to her. In effect, that serpent was the world's first channeler.

"Did God tell you that there are some things you shouldn't do?" he asked. "He is just trying to keep you in the dark, Eve, because He's worried that you might become as smart as Him."

It was a dangerous message, because it was a lie. The serpent told Eve that if she ate of the fruit of the tree, she wouldn't really die, and she believed it. She chose to believe a mysterious message over the Word of God, and now the human race has to live with the unspeakable misery that comes from separating ourselves from God.

God knows what He's talking about, and that's why He created some boundaries for Adam and Eve. It was for their own good, and that is the same reason He still gives us some boundaries, because it's for our own good. And one of those boundaries is spiritualism.

God knows full well that it's not spirits of the dead speaking to us. He knows that it's actually that same dangerous voice that spoke to Eve thousands of years ago.

You see, there is almost nothing Satan wouldn't do to destroy us, including a clever impersonation of somebody who has died. He knows that if he can convince us that we are really talking to the dead, then he can use that as a catalyst to draw us further and further away from the truth about God's love.

I find it interesting that almost every psychic and fortune-teller tends to downplay the importance of coming to Jesus for forgiveness and salvation. Oh, they are quick to pay Jesus lip service as a special man or maybe even a supernatural being, but that's all they'll ever say.

If you listen carefully to what they're saying, they always seem to neglect what Jesus did at the cross. And that is a very dangerous deception.

We don't need psychics or mediums or fortunetellers, because we have something much better. The prophet Isaiah says (Isaiah 8:19):

"And when they say to you, 'Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,' should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living?"

Here is what Isaiah is saying. People will tell you that you can find good advice by speaking to the dead. But then he goes on to give us an important warning in verse 20 (Isaiah 8:20):

"To the law and to the testimony! If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them."

In other words, if anything contradicts what the Bible says, we need to ignore it. And that includes people who claim to speak to the dead, or apparitions who claim to be the spirits of the dead. The Bible says clearly, that the dead never speak to us.

On the other hand, there is a voice that speaks only the truth, and that is the voice of Jesus. You can count on what He says, because He's the only voice you'll ever hear that really comes from the other side of the grave. The Bible says He holds the keys of death, because He came back from the dead. You can trust what He says.

What a shame that Sarah Winchester didn't realize the dangerous trap she was stepping into. And today, a massive monument of confusion stands as her testimony to what listening to the spirits can accomplish.

But for those who choose to listen only to God's voice, the Bible promises a mansion in heaven where we will dwell in the presence of Jesus forever. The choice is entirely yours. The question is: What are you building with your life?

Maybe you haven't built a senseless mansion with secret rooms or staircases that don't go anywhere, but your life is a terrible mess, and you live in constant fear. The Bible says that Jesus can give you something much better. So let me ask you, what have you been building with your life?

Maybe you've been dabbling in the occult, and now you feel addicted and trapped. You can be free, because you've been lied to, and any contract based on a lie is not binding. Jesus only tells the truth, and He says that nobody who ever comes to Him will ever be cast out.

There's no question that the occult is a dead end. And I suspect that a lot of people reading this today know exactly what I'm talking about.

But it's not quite the dead end the devil's been telling you it is. At this very point, as you feel a stirring in your heart, it's because the Spirit of God has already begun working. The Bible says that one of the first things God does for you is give you the gift of repentance, the ability to feel sorrow for the life you've been leading.

There's no question that if you stick with the world of the occult, you're going to end up in very serious trouble. But don't ever believe that God can't set you free, no matter what you've done.

The Bible actually records several cases of people who were so immersed in the occult that they were actually possessed by demons, and Jesus set them free. That very same freedom can be yours, but it's a decision you're going to have to make.

I can't think of a single good reason not to take that first step with Christ, can you?

Why don't we bow our heads and pray together?

PRAYER:
Heavenly Father, we understand that the only reason you give us boundaries is because you know that what lies beyond that boundary. Your heart aches for that person who has been dabbling in the spirit world. They feel hopelessly trapped, but you have a way out. Hear their prayer for help, and cover their sins with the blood of Christ. Thank you for loving us, in the wonderful name of Jesus, amen.

Scriptures Used in “The House That Was Never Finished”

"Also their love, their hatred, and their envy have now perished; nevermore will they have a share in anything done under the sun."
—Ecclesiastes 9:6 NKJV

"There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God drives them out from before you."
—Deuteronomy 18:10-12 NKJV

"A man or a woman who is a medium, or who has familiar spirits, shall surely be put to death; they shall stone them with stones. Their blood shall be upon them."
—Leviticus 20:27 NKJV

"Say to them: 'As I live,' says the Lord God, 'I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live'"
—Ezekiel 33:11 NKJV

"And when they say to you, 'Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,' should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living'"
—Isaiah 8:19 NKJV

"To the law and to the testimony! If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them."
—Isaiah 8:20