copperbadge: things-with-teeth: copperbadge:scifigrl47:whitmerule:seperis:ladyvyola: Now thr
copperbadge: things-with-teeth: copperbadge: scifigrl47: whitmerule: seperis: ladyvyola: Now thru April 7th - free virtual tour of the Winchester Mystery House! Oh. Hell. Yes. @ruvyru @copperbadge This makes my HEART HAPPY. The Winchester Mystery House is my favorite tourist trap in the entire world and on top of being just the kitschiest is also a beautiful, wonderful work of architecture, surrounded by lovely gardens. Whenever anyone visited us in California from out of state we’d drag them there, so I must have been on the tour at least a dozen times before the age of eighteen. This is all the better because I haven’t been back since new scholarship has revealed that Sarah Winchester definitely wasn’t deranged or suckered by some random tale of Native American vengeance, and probably wasn’t even all that into the occult. As wonderful as the spookiness of it all is, there’s an even better story behind the Mystery House. We’re now seeing evidence that Sarah Winchester was, in fact, a very frustrated architect who was learning by doing after having her passions stifled for half her life by being A Woman In History, compounded with damage done by the 1906 earthquake. If Sarah Winchester nee Pardee had been born a man, the name Pardee might well fall amongst Burnham and Wright as one of America’s early starchitects. I strongly recommend the podcast and article at History Chicks for a fascinating new take on her life and work. I wonder if the tour has been changed to reflect that? The last tour I was on was, uh, the last tour I gave, so over a decade ago, and I’d heard from someone who had been more recently that it’s under new management and that there are jump scares now?? Which never used to be the case (other than maybe during flashlight tours, and even that was more a byproduct of one of the managers dressing up specifically to spook the guides, not the guests). Like, when I was there they didn’t even want us going too hard on the ghost stories during the main house tour. Anyway, I’m gonna listen to that podcast and then I’m going to do the virtual tour and get super nostalgic. Yeah, I remember watching the tours evolve over the years and back then they were always moving further from the hardcore creep factor while still keeping it “mysterious” – later tours I went on usually talked about how the earliest tour guides would straight-up invent shit, and they were now trying to fix that damage. But I haven’t been back in probably 20 years. I wonder if the jump scares are because of the Winchester movie, it had quite a few of those. -- source link