"thousands of people have died because of the Winchester rifle and their spirits are now seeking deep vengeance"

“Sarah Winchester moved west after she became the widow of the man whose repeating rifle was the definitive weapon in western expansion – “the gun that won the West.” Frightened of the souls of the Native Americans killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, she sought spiritual advice and was told that as long as her house was being built, she was safe – and the result is the 160-room chaos of architecture that has been a local tourist attraction (in San Jose, California) since 1922. The house had no overall plan, so that doors and staircases lead nowhere, windows open onto rooms added later, architectural details clash, and floor levels and design scales are inconsistent. Workers were kept busy twenty-four house a day so that construction was always in process...

...The invisible counterweight to the elaborate uselessness of this monument to wealth and fear is the ruthless efficiency of the rifle that paid for it: between the two of them – military technology and diversionary folly – the valley might begin to be defined. The rifle’s pursuit of death in open, contestable space; the house’s sequestering from death and the dead in sequestered interior space. The implications of Mrs Winchester’s acts are interesting: that guns do kill people; that technology does have a moral dimension; and that perhaps she could buy her way out of the implications, fend off the spirit world with unending consumption, build a literal nowhere in which she could become lost to the spirit world.”

- Rebecca Solnit, “The Garden of Merging Paths”