Sarah Winchester inherited a rifle fortune and built a San Jose mansion; the medium who supposedly ordered it was invented in 1967

Kind 2, with the record. Sarah Pardee married William Wirt Winchester, son of the rifle maker, in 1862. Their daughter Annie was born on 15 June 1866 and died within weeks. William died of tuberculosis in March 1881. Sarah held 777 shares of Winchester Repeating Arms stock and received 2,000 more when her mother-in-law died in 1898. In 1886 she bought a 45-acre farm in the Santa Clara Valley for $12,570 and built a large house there; the 1906 earthquake brought down its seven-storey tower. The legend says a Boston medium told her the spirits of people killed by Winchester rifles would haunt her unless building never stopped. Brian Dunning traced the medium, "Adam Coons", to Susy Smith's 1967 book Prominent American Ghosts and found no earlier printed mention. Historian Mary Jo Ignoffo, her first full biographer, argues that the house's odd stairways and chimneys had ordinary causes. Her estate was about $3 to $4 million, not the rumoured $20 million. She gave over $1 million to a tuberculosis hospital in New Haven named for her husband, which opened in 1918. Her will left her niece Daisy a Palo Alto house and the contents of her homes, and sent the remaining trust money to the hospital after family members died. The San Jose house was not in the will. It opened to tourists within months of her death; John Brown leased it and bought it in 1931.