California: The fourth day of ISOC INET 99 & The Winchester Mansion

Written by Stephen Baines

Thursday, 24 June 1999

After yesterdays remarkably short entry, I'm afraid I'm going to make up for it today... I had breakfast, and made my way to the Convention Centre for the start of the morning. I went to see Elliot on the 3Com stand are see what details she had for me. 3Com had had a bit of a drama that morning, but it was quickly ironed out, it was to do with the advertising campaign that they are running for the PalmPilots. Elliot introduced me to some of her collegues, and they told me about the internet projects that they are running with a local school as a pilot, and the lab that they have at their Santa Cruz headquarters. Tomorrow afternoon I'm not going to the INET sessions, as I've been invited to Santa Cruz to have a tour of the 3Com facility and the lab to see what they are doing for schools. This is too good an opportunity to see "the future" to turn down. I attended a session on XML, and also purchased a book on XML to try and get a head start on it all. The final session that I attended today involved looking at publishing information and the internet as a publisher and the problems inherant in that; a Japanese project to get primary school pupils to write and design computer games; a project between a US university and a Japanese University to use the web for teaching epidemiology; and finally a project to teach academics how to use the internet. They were all very interesting. Now that sounds like today is covered, and it's even shorter than yesterday, but late afternoon, a few of us went to a seriously strange place in San Jose... The Winchester Mansion I'd heard a little bit about the mansion - what I'd heard was it was owned by the heiress to the Winchester fire-arms fortune, and she was convinced that if she stopped building the house she would die, so the house grew, and grew, and grew... However, as with all stories, the full truth (as known) is even more strange! The first thing that strikes you, is just how large the place is - not in height, but in bredth. The site is now in the middle of shops and car lots, but sitting amongst all that is a 160 room mansion... It is a very imposing place - if ever there was a place that looks like it had escaped from Scooby Doo, this is it. We bought our tickets and went in for the tour. Lauren, our fantastic guide, took us on a mystery trail around the house. The first challenge was the first stair case... It went up to the ceiling, and that was that. It went to the ceiling. Hmm, this is one seriously strange place. OK, so now we were taken along to the second stair case... All 7 flights of stairs, just to go 9 foot up in the air! This is one seriously freaky house! Each step was about 1" high! We then had to go through the 13th bathroom in the place... This had a shower for Mrs Winchester, and she was only 4'10" tall! So the set-up was like a car wash with jets at the sides to spray her in "just the right places"... The other highly notable thing about this place was the glass... The windows are absolutely beautiful, and some are highly creepy. Sarah apparantly had a thing about spirals/spiders webs and the number 13. Many, many windows featured one or both of these features. One of the first windows we came across was a spiders web. Then we noticed that 6 of the windows in the bathroom were spiders webs... 6 of 13 windows... We also had to go down 13 steps to get to it. We then got to the main bedroom, and here Lauren started to fill us in on the story. Apparantly Sarah's child and husband died, leaving her alone. She consulted a medium in Boston who told her that the spirits of those who had been killed by the Winchester rifle had killed them, and that if she looked after the spirits by building a house and never stopping, she'd live for ever. She bought the 8 roomed house, and started to build, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for nearly 40 years! She could afford it, even back then in the late 1800's, she had a personal income of $1000 a day! We then got to the seance room, where she consulted the spirits. We went in, but we couldn't leave by the same door, as it didn't have a handle on the other side. It did have three exits, though, which could not be entered from the other ways. Amongst the strange things, such as flights going up so you could go down, were a sink - the sink had 13 overflow holes in it. The Oriental Bedroom was beautiful, though at the same time very strange, with a bamboo fireplace. The wall paper was handpainted, and was used as the secretaries room - Sarah's niece. Amongst all the windows and rooms, were lots of other doors, these had umpteen cupboards. Some massive - as big as rooms themselves - some less than half an inch deep. Behind some of the windows were walls from when she added more rooms. Nothing in the house made sense. The windows were exquisite, and they were in many places incredibly expensive, made of cut glass, jewelled glass, coloured glass... And positioned in such a way in the main part so if they had any plain glass parts they framed something else, such as a statue or part of the garden. As we continued to wind around the rooms, we were shown the rooms damaged in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. We were also shown the damage from the quake a couple of years ago... The house was remarkably unscathed! The whole house was a complete contradiction. It made no sense whatsoever, and yet at the same time it made perfect sense. I could have spent hours wandering around on my own - though the guide assured us that would be a bad idea, because of the freaky layout, there is a fair chance you'd get very, very lost! For the rest of the evening, I took a drive out into a different part of San Jose, and stopped off at Fry's - an home electronics store I'd heard about, and really was quite amazed at the amount of different things they stocked. It has to be seen to be believed... And so, now I'm back at the hotel, and getting ready for the next day, and whatever it will throw at me.