Mystery house movie#

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.Ĭopyright © 2018 NPR. Who knows?ĭEL BARCO: The Winchester House remains a mystery. SPIERIG: Well, I mean, if you classify doors slamming and - maybe that's a ghost. Nothing, like, strange has happened while you were shooting here?ĭEL BARCO: What about that? What was that? It's now a California landmark that still has peculiar goings on. She invented an irrigation system in the house that was ahead of its time.ĭEL BARCO: Much of the mansion was destroyed by the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. She was one of the first people to have a shower. She was apparently one of the first people to have a telephone. MICHAEL SPIERIG: I never saw Sarah Winchester as a crazy person.

Mystery house movie#

You know, you can only sort of be in awe of it, really.ĭEL BARCO: Michael Spierig, who wrote and directed the movie with his brother Peter, says the notoriously reclusive Winchester spared no expense to innovate her architectural wonder. There's something so eccentric and out of the ordinary about it. It's the work of an artist, a huge imagination. It must be like being the inheritor of a fortune that was made on the back of the atomic bomb.ĭEL BARCO: On the final day of filming on location last May, Mirren sat in one of the many rooms of the Winchester mansion and marveled.

MIRREN: She felt the weight of the effect of the Winchester rifle, what it had done, what it had achieved. Helen Mirren says in the movie, Winchester did so to placate the spirits of those who died at the hands of the weapon whose fortune she inherited. She had workers build and rebuild her home nonstop day and night for nearly 40 years. MIRREN: (As Sarah Winchester) I can feel it in the air, in the walls.ĭEL BARCO: Winchester remained in mourning for her baby daughter and late husband. Legend has it Winchester conducted seances to communicate with the dead. HELEN MIRREN: (As Sarah Winchester) Do you believe in ghosts, Doctor?ĭEL BARCO: In the movie, Sarah Winchester's sanity is questioned by a psychologist hired by the company to push her out. TIM O'DAY: He appears as an apparition in his white overalls and his mustache, and he'll just kind of blankly look at you. And you're looking around like, who's messing with me? And there's nobody there.ĭEL BARCO: House marketing director Tim O'Day says some people report seeing a handyman named Clyde stoking the fireplace or carrying coal. JANAN BOEHME: Because you will actually hear footsteps coming down the hallway, and you think someone whispered your name. The house historian, Janan Boehme, says tour guides refuse to go up to the third floor after dark. You check the area, and no one's there.ĭEL BARCO: The Queen Anne revival-style mansion has staircases that lead to nowhere, doors that open to a two-story drop, a witch's cap with strange acoustics. NICOLE CALANDE: The house just creaks on its own. MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: At the famous Winchester Mystery House, tour guide Nicole Calande (ph) leads us up the wooden stairs. NPR's Mandalit del Barco visited the house that's now a popular tourist attraction in San Jose, Calif. Helen Mirren stars as the eccentric woman who built and rebuilt her vast and ever-changing mansion from 1884 until her death in 1922. The story is based on the life of Sarah Winchester, heiress to the company that created the Winchester rifle series. The new movie 'Winchester' is a paranormal horror film about one of the largest haunted houses in America.