I was in the old gun museum alone looking through the collection. It was an old wooden building which may have been for servants or something similar. The place was arranged with glass counters on either side and as you entered the walk would turn to the right where there was a room with an old wooden stairway leading to a 2nd floor. Then you would walk past that, and the walk would go straight and turn left through more glass counters with guns to the exit.
As I walked past the staircase it was roped off and apparently the 2nd floor was not in use. The stairs went up about 8-feet and then turn back going up in the opposite direction so I could not see upstairs, just the first half of the entire stairs. Being midway through the collection at that point I thought it was nice to have the entire building to myself.
I walked past the roped off staircase and started admiring the gun collection again when I heard a loud, pronounced step or creaking stomp coming down the staircase.
Of course I could not see up the staircase and I was already past it, but the worst thing was a sudden rush of chill that went right through my body. My entire body was goosebumps when I heard the 2nd and 3rd slow creaking stomp audibly coming down the staircase.
Now normally this should not have spooked me but being where I was, having determined that I was alone in the building and then the sudden change in atmosphere and the uncontrolled reaction of my body to the sudden chill, I lost nerve and walked right out the exit.
I do not know what came down the stairs and waited outside where it was very quiet with few people in sight until my skin returned to normal.
I didn't go back into the building.
I went back decade later. The gun museum had been totally re-arranged. The room now ended in the first section and the small room with the staircase had been closed off as if it was never part of the museum. You had to walk out the same door you entered where before you would have walked past the staircase and through to the exit.
Very different experience that day. I wasn't disappointed by the lack of another "experience".
I did the tour in `86 on my honeymoon with the missus.
Felt a definite cold spot walking though a hallway, but other than that thought it was just an old woman with too much money—so she was eccentric, not crazy.
Sarah was into popular-at-the-time seances and mysticism, and thought that the spirits of people killed by her husband’s firearms would haunt her unless she scared them away with the sound of hammers and construction.
The stairways to nowhere were to confuse the spirits. The number 13 is repeated throughout the house. Lots of cool stuff but crazy too: doors that opened to long drops, cupboards an inch deep and another was endless. Stairs that rose only a few inches: she was a little woman. It was obvious the workmen did what they were told, as long as they got paid.
Lefty writer Stephen King pretty much lifted his novel/movie `Rose Red’/The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer’ from the Winchester house story, I think, like so much of his stuff (clearing throat) borrowed from the Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock and other stuff he saw as a kid.
The guns were the best part. I had some Winchesters, a recoil action model 50 and 1897 `trench sweeper’ 12 gauges, `62 model 70 feather light ... until ghosts tossed them off my boat, dam spooooks.