Start listening at minute 9:15.   

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And let’s go ahead and move on to the topic of the day, we’ll be talking about the Winchester Mystery House. But this story wouldn’t make sense at all if we didn’t begin by talking about a woman named Sarah Winchester. 

Sarah Winchester was a woman from the East Coast, from New Haven, Connecticut, who tragically lost her infant daughter to a child’s illness and then her husband a few years later to tuberculosis. She was very distraught by the loss of her beloved family members and sought help. 

She went to a medium in Boston. A medium is a seer, someone who claims they can communicate messages between the living and the spirits of the dead. So what the medium told Sarah would change her life. 

He told her that many spirits were furious with her. Why so many, though? So Sarah’s husband was the creator of the Winchester Repeating Rifle, which was the main gun that was said to have won the West. The guns had killed many, many people, including many Native Americans. These were the spirits that the medium was referring to in these spirits that would haunt her until she appeased them. 

There was only one remedy, the man told her, in order to keep these evil spirits away you need to always be surrounded by beauty. You need to build a house for the rest of your life and if you do so, you will be able to live in peace forever. 

Sarah believed this medium, and moreover, rifle sales had made her so insanely wealthy that she could do what the medium recommended. She would build a house incessantly, so without stopping for the rest of her life. All she needed to do was to find a good location. So she did.

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