House of Penance

This eerie, blood-soaked tale is set during the construction of a very real place: the vast and curious Winchester mansion in San Jose, CA, known today as the Winchester Mystery House. Owned by Sarah Winchester, widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester, construction of the Winchester house began in 1884 and continued for 38 years, until Sarah’s death in 1922. According to tabloids of the time, during a séance in Boston a medium informed Sarah Winchester that the vast fortune she’d just inherited from her husband was cursed by the countless deaths caused by the Winchester Rifle. The medium instructed Sarah to move to California and build a house to appease the angry spirits of the rifle victims. Once in California, Sarah conducted nightly séances herself in order to receive building instructions for the mansion. Construction was funded by the tremendous wealth from her inheritance, including 50% ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which provided an income of “roughly $1,000 per day, equivalent to about $23,000 a day in 2013.” Because Sarah feared that she would die at the hands of the angry spirits should construction ever stop, work on the Winchester house went on nonstop 24 hours a day, all year round. House of Penance is a lurid and macabre tale of a haunted house, a haunted, grief-stricken woman, and her desperate efforts to atone for the bloodshed caused by the source of her wealth.