The Winchester Mystery House sketched loose-handed with an iron gall ink filled Lamy Vista fountain pen, and a Herbin fountain pen with Noodler's Gruene Cactus for the greens too shitty weather atm for urban sketching so we surf the web when in the mood.

Since its construction in 1884, the property and mansion were claimed by many to be haunted by the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles. Under Winchester's day-to-day guidance, its "from-the-ground-up" construction proceeded around the clock, by some accounts, without interruption, until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased.
After her husband's death from tuberculosis in 1881, Sarah Winchester inherited more than $20.5 million (equivalent to $532 million in 2018). 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 $26,000 a day in 2018. These inheritances gave her a tremendous amount of wealth which she used to fund the ongoing construction.

Tabloids from the time said that, at some point after her infant daughter died of an illness known as marasmus, a children's disease in which the body wastes away, and her husband died of pulmonary tuberculosis, a Boston medium told her (while supposedly channeling her late husband) that she should 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 New Haven and headed for California. Though it is possible she was simply seeking a change of location and a hobby during her lengthy depression, other sources say that Winchester came to believe her family and fortune were haunted by ghosts, and that only by moving West and continuously building them a house could she appease these spirits.

In 1884 she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the 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 did not use an architect and added on to the building in a haphazard fashion, so the home contains numerous oddities such as doors and stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms and stairs with odd-sized risers. Many accounts attribute these oddities to her belief in ghosts. Environmental psychologists have theorized that the odd layout itself contributes to the feeling of the house being haunted today.