California!

I don't think I've mentioned this here yet, but Ben and I are living in California for the summer while he does a summer internship. While I am generally opposed to living in California because I don't want to die in an earthquake, I have made peace with spending three months here. For our first week we're staying at a temporary place in Mountain View; next week we'll move to a place in San Francisco that we are subletting for the rest of the summer. As far as we can tell, Mountain View is colossally boring, so yesterday we took the train down to San Jose and visited the Winchester Mystery House.

It is weird seeing palm trees in front of a Victorian mansion.

The house was under continuous construction for 38 years, since apparently  that's what Mrs. Winchester thought was necessary to appease the spirits of everyone who had been killed with a Winchester rifle. She had nightly seances with those spirits to determine what to build the next day, and the house ended up pretty much how you would expect for a Victorian mansion designed in daily increments by an old woman consulting with ghosts and no architectural training - all kinds of crazy. There are staircases that lead to ceilings, doors to nowhere, windows that open to walls on places where the house turns in on itself, all kinds of odd-sized doors and windows, staircases that abruptly change direction multiple times, and the kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, and sitting parlors are scattered about the house seemingly at random. There's a room with four fireplaces, a storage room with hundreds of Tiffany stained glass windows that had yet to be installed anywhere, and a room on an upper floor with windows that allowed Ms. Winchester to spy on her servants below. Also, since Mrs. Winchester was 4'10" tall, everything is built to suit a person of that height. There was a lot of stooping as we went on the tour.

Unfortunately, you can't take pictures inside the house - although there is a pretty decent gallery here. We spent some time wandering around the outside and taking pictures, although it's hard to convey how massive it is in one shot.

One side of the house.

Another side - the opening you see in the rightmost part is one of the doors that open to nowhere.

Ben is impressed at yet another side of the house.

All in all, if you're going to go crazy I guess it's good to have an unlimited amount of money to invest in the endeavor.