For a supposedly haunted house, the Winchester Mystery House is normally alive with decidedly corporeal activity.
Katie Dowd, May 22, 2020, SFGate.com
Every few minutes, another tour departs. Floorboards creak under the weight of eager feet. The gardens are filled with cheerful guests, drinking wine from the outdoor bar.
But these days, the house is as quiet as it’s been since the days of Sarah Winchester.
“Bizarre is putting it mildly,” said general manager Walter Magnuson. “It’s been like nothing we’ve ever seen in our 97-year history.”
The labyrinthine mansion in San Jose, which began its famed expansion in the mid-1880s, opened for visitors in 1923 shortly after the death of its brilliant, eccentric owner. Since then, it’s been a favorite of ghost hunters, history buffs and architecture lovers, renowned the world over for its dead-end staircases, doors to nowhere and other oddities.But since the coronavirus pandemic shut down California tourism in mid-March, the historic home has been emptied of visitors. With its small indoor spaces, tight corners and the occasional low ceiling, it was clear there was no way to safely funnel guests through in the age of a highly contagious viral outbreak.“We look to, of course, the state and county. We can’t get ahead of them,” Magnuson said. “We’re trying to prepare a number of different models based on what the criteria is. The guidelines come first and then we figure out how to tell our story.”
There are, a few months on, some signs of life again. Although indoor museum experiences are still off-limits, outdoor museums are able to reopen in the current stage of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s reopening plan. Last week, the Winchester Mystery House opened just its grounds to visitors again, allowing small groups to do touchless, self-guided tours of the historic garden. As to when the interior will reopen to visitors, Magnuson isn’t sure. The operations staff is closely following updates to county and state guidelines and keeping an eye on what other historic sites that have reopened are doing. Most appear to be operating at maximum half their previous capacity. And it’s possible there will be restrictions on if tours can mix groups of people who aren’t quarantined together.
“Many of our rooms were designed and are small in space,” he said. “The benefit for us is that we have a lot of control because we’re not a place of mass gatherings. We can control and pulse people in and re-route accordingly. If we have some places liable to get congested and become pinch points, we can change that.”
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