Story from a tour guide:
Blind woman on the tour once asked if the tour guide ever saw any ghosts.
The guide said that he hadn’t.
The woman asked the tour guide if he wanted to know where we “picked up” a ghost.
The presence arrived in seance room & left at 3rd floor stairs.
I just overheard one of the Behind The Scenes tour guides talk about a maintenance worker who heard someone walking above them in the 2nd water tower. They went in to catch the intruder, but no one was found… & there is only 1 staircase.
The day after birthing my first child, my husband was hungry and left to get food. (Hospital only feeds the mother after the first night)
My newborn pre-term son was in the nursery between feedings so I figured I’d try to get a short nap.
The lights were off in the room but there was dim evening light filtering in, so the room was not dark.
I closed my eyes and felt 3 pats on my belly followed by 3 pats on my shoulder.
I opened my eyes but no one was in the room with me.
I didn’t feel anything sinister… I felt like something said “You just had a baby. Congratulations.”
I spoke with a few night nurses who said that they never have seen anything personally, but they have heard from others that people in old style clothing have been spotted in the hallways.
Someone once told me that the hospital was once used by the military, but I can’t find any record of this.
Sarah Winchester was the wife of William Wirt Winchester (3rd president of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. They married in 1862 and a few years later had a baby daughter that they named Anne Pardee. Unfortunately their daughter died only a few days later. They never had another child. Sarah’s tragedy did not end there. Her husband died young in 1881 and inherited a vast fortune and shares of the Winchester company. She sought the advice of a medium who told her that the ghost of her late husband wanted her to know that there was a curse on their family that was responsible for his death and the death of their daughter. The medium told her that in order to appease the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle, she sell her home in New Haven, Connecticut, move west, and buy a house that Sarah would have to continually build. Sarah moved to Santa Clara Valley in California (in present day San Jose) and bought an unfinished six room farmhouse and the 162 acre property on which it rested. For the next 38 years she had workers constructing and reconstructing 24 hours a day 365 days a year. When she died and the construction ceased, the house had a grand total of 160 rooms. The house is constructed oddly, with rooms that have no entrances or exits, stairs that lead to the ceiling, windows in the floor, and doors that lead to a one floor drop. The house was state of the art for the time, with many water saving innovations.
Ghost Stories
it is said that Mrs. Winchester held seances in the special “seance room” in her home to consult with the spirits over the design of the home. She either built the odd home as a way to appease the spirits or to confuse them. She was obviously worried about the spirits, she never slept in the same room for two nights in a row. The home was built as a way for Mrs. Winchester to appease the ghosts of people who were killed by Winchester Rifles.
A few groups on tours have been said to have seen ghosts roaming the halls. Footsteps and other noises have also been heard.
There is a story of a tour guide that saw Mrs. Winchester reach out towards her.
The tour only shows you a very small portion of the third floor. It is said that is because the third floor is the most haunted. There is supposedly (and we got this from a tour guide as well as other sources) a room on the third floor with a rocking chair in it that will rock without any one touching it.
There is an odd story from the days when Mrs. Winchester was alive about how she would go down into the wine cellar every night to pick out a bottle of wine, until the night she saw a black hand print on the wall of the wine cellar and had it sealed up. It is said that when it was sealed up there was a vagrant or an employee sleeping in there, and he died. He now wanders the basement searching for the sealed up wine cellar.
Our Review
If you are ever in San Jose and can only do one thing:
Go to the Winchester! It is my Dream Home. If it were possible, I would live here. Spiderweb themes, the number 13 is incorporated throughout the home. However, I am biased towards most anything spooky.
On a more objective note: The story of the house is wonderfully entertaining. Finding out the -reasons- behind why certain things are made the way they were and what her motivations were. At one point in the tour, you see a picture of the home as it stood before 1906 earthquake. It is a reminder of the true age and mutability of the place. It is truly spectacular.
Formerly the La Baron Hotel, the Wyndham San Jose Airport is a hotel in north San Jose. The decor, seemingly stuck in the 70s, eerily reminded me of the “Overlook Hotel” from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 version of The Shining starring Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall.
Ghost Stories
The Wyndham is haunted by a businessman who is said to have committed suicide in room 538. He is said to appear in hallways on the 4th, 5th, and 6th floors, in room 538, and in the dining room. Cold spots and orbs have also been reported..
Our Review
We have never actually stayed in the hotel, or in room 538. On our only visit we walked through the hallways near the haunted room in hopes of seeing a manifestation. The hotel looked nice enough even if its decor was a little dated.
Day 15
August 15th, 2004
Seattle, WA to San Jose, CA
She Says
Woke up early to pack our things & say goodbye to a life supplied with maid service.
It took a while, but we did eventually find our way down the Seattle streets to find Pike Place Public Market. It looked like a farmer’s market/street faire.
We would have liked to have stopped, but we couldn’t find parking anywhere. When we did find parking, it was so far away that we wouldn’t have had time to park, walk the market, & walk back without missing our flight.
So, now we’ll have something to do when we come back.
I’d really like to come back to Seattle 
sometime & finish the city, take a ferry to Victoria, see more there, & then ferry back again to Seattle. Next time we’ll just leave the car in the US & spare ourselves the wait & vehicle ferry fees!
Driving south to SeaTac Airport, Bryan kept asking me to try to get pictures of the Qwest 
Ballpark…
The wait at the airport wasn’t too bad. At least we found the rental car return in a timely fashion & were able to get to our flight without having to run for it!!!
Bryan’s folks were nice enough to pick us up and we got home where my mother was there to meet us with open arms & a condo that she cleaned for us & the chance to open all our presents!!!
He Says
Got up early in the hopes that we would be able to check out Pikes Place Market for at least a little while before we had to speed off to the airport. But, unfortunately, by the time we navigated our way down too Pikes Place 
(we stupidly left the map in the trunk), we did not have enough time to park and check it out. Not that there was anywhere to park anyway. So we headed off to the airport.
Airport and flight were uneventful.
My parents picked us up from the airport and took us 
home. Kryis’s mother had cleaned up some of the mess we had left in the mad scramble the few days before our wedding. There were a slough of feral cats and kitties waiting for us when we got home. All eager for some food, no doubt. And a plethora of unopened presents just begging to be relieved of their confining wrapping.