The House That Sarah Built: The Winchester Mystery House (San Jose, CA)

The front of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California

Way before San Jose, California, transformed into the anchor of what eventually became known as Silicon Valley, I had two personal mental associations with the city. One was the Dionne Warwick song "Do You Know The Way to San Jose", one of the first songs I remember listening to and liking immensely.

The other association was The Winchester Mystery House, which I always perceived as something of a cheesy attraction, based on both the promo ads I heard and read as well as the story (essentially, superstitious rich widow, in this case, Sarah Winchester, takes fortune teller’s crazy story to heart and builds a likewise crazy house to match in the quest for immortality.)

However, as we were happy to find out on our first visit ever, the tale behind The Winchester House is far more nuanced than that, with aspects about Winchester herself as well as the house she ended up building wouldn’t realize upon first glance.

Quoth The Brewer: Columbus Brew Adventures' Haunted History Tour

Our starting point for the Columbus Brew Adventures'
Haunted Brewery and Winery Tour was the Downtown
Columbus-located Wolf's Ridge Brewing Tap Room

We have had the great pleasure in the past few months of being invited to and attending a couple of craft beer oriented tours by Columbus Brew Adventures, founded by local culinary entrepeneurs and ambassadors Bethia Woolf and Jim Ellison. Our previous experiences with their Brewery District Walking Tour and Grandview Heights Tour have provided their own uniquely fun and quite informative experiences; the latter part of which was a nice surprise for us as relative veterans of the local craft beer scene.

This Wednesday, we had the pleasure grabbing two tickets to what promises to be a very unique event in Columbus Brew Adventures' catalog of tours. The inaugural "Beer, Wine, “Boos” & “Spirits”: A Haunted Brewery & Winery Tour" promised a nice chunk of this area's haunted history mixed in with a tasty sampling of the area's locally-produced craft beer and wine.

As it turned out, the feel of this particular tour, which was hosted by Jim himself, is fairly similar to their Brewery District excursion in that a tour-goer will get an equal if not more of a focus on local history as you do the craft beer side of the equation.

However, the unique subject, combined with the time of the year (just a couple days before Halloween), made this perhaps our favorite Columbus Brew Adventures tour so far for both my spouse and I. Once again the knowledge we picked up proved to be truly fascinating and lent a little more color to both places we had visited many times (i.e. Studio 35 and Barley's Brewing) and had not known about at all previously, such as The Central Ohio Fire Museum.

In addition, the unique combination of topic and season also made me decide that a uniquely-styled write up was appropriate in this case. In many ways, a typical blow-by-blow write up as is typical in my blog posts seemed like it would spoil the experience a bit for future tour-goers. However, I did want to give a taste of what we encountered this night, and it seemed a poetic touch from a master of the macabre (the obvious inspiration from the one and only Edgar Allen Poe) seemed a perfect way do this (helpful links to the places we visited and the historical info are embedded within the poem.)

May your haunting this Halloween weekend be good for you all...

Quoth The Brewer

(inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven)

Once upon a Hallows Eve dreary

My spouse and I wandered alert and leery

To Wolf's Ridge Brewing lauded culinary score—

When we entered, beer a tapping

Suddenly, a man came a rapping

'Twas Jim of Columbus Brew Adventures lore

He met us that night clapping, clapping at the fore. 

“’The haunted tour?,” he muttered

We nodded at the brewery door— 

Only this, but a whole lot more.

Ah, distinctly it was in a bleak October; 

We with eleven other rovers

A haunted brew tour we had gathered for

We prepared for our ghostly tales

In our hands Wolf's Ridge Imperial Pumpkin Ales

Amidst the costumed CYP Club troupe

Benefiting the Columbus Literacy Council group

We'd embark for beer and wine

And to find the Columbus' ghostly lore

Frightened here for evermore. 

Now to the firehouse stately and proud

Came the members of our crowd

A Museum now lay within its core

Anticipate, our hearts a beating 

Alongside Jim, who stood repeating 

It was a visitor entreating 

Entrance at the museum door

Captain D, was he revealing

His spirit on the museum floor?

Yes, he was, and much, much more.” 

From there our souls grew stronger

Hesitating then no longer, 

We moved on despite impending horror

No one was even close to napping

Walhalla Ravine we were a mapping

A foreboding hand we had in store

Rolling into Armbruster land

Tension felt and uploading

Trapping us at the fore?   

Darkness there and nothing more. 

Deep into that darkness peering 

Under the bridge of death we're fearing

A dream like no mortal dared dream before; 

Don't go or they'll think you're loony

The cursed grounds of the Mansion Mooney

Where blood from the lion's head doth pour?

A young girl's scream

From Glen Echo whispers

A stark murmur restored!

Merely this and nothing more. 

Farther to where crowds are churning 

The theatre where ghouls are yearning

Studio 35, a projector clapping louder than before. 

Sipping on a Land Grant Kolsch

Our host Andy did not squelch

Ghostly tales from lady Kelly for

There sitting across the bar

The dapper 30's twosome

A threat traveled from afar!

Or was it the wind and nothing more?”

Down to Barley's, our nerves a fluttered 

To the Underground, dark and shuttered

When a street named High lay in the days of yore; 

Our guide serving delicious Blood Thirst Wheat

When lo! the echo of pounding feet?

Was doom the fate for us in store?

Not a hint of menace made she

Lady Erin perched next to Jim

We drank deep as they declared

The cemetery which this space had shared

Whence only gravestones moved, but nothing more

Through an ebony night compiling

To a winery quite beguiling 

Via Vecchia and the Raw countenance it wore, 

Owner Paolo, shorn and shaven

Declared "Art thou so craven,

To hear the ghastly sights in store?"

We marveled at discourse that plainly 

Discussed ghosts that quite so ungainly 

Flung bottles and brooms 

Flung so hard, across the floor

Past spooky mirror to the back

Eyes alert for sudden attack

To see their winemaking at its core

Zulu Nation stood on the wall

Ready to heed the call

Should specters rise and come to the fore 

Grape skin splatter seeing

We found ourselves agreeing

Being scared is better

Much better when the wine does pour 

Driving down a street named Mound

With its numerous burial grounds

To return to the place we had been before

Unflustered by the stillness broken

Disembarked, the night had spoken

Haunted lands we did indeed explore

And yet still, a voice did utter

"Do not leave, come have another"

One more ale with a ghostly brother"

Quoth the Brewer, evermore

Columbus Brew Adventures
Tour and ticket information can be found on their website at
www.columbusbrewadventures.com
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Appalachian Adventures (Pt. 2): Searching for the Mothman

Were we foolish to seek out the terror that emerged nearly fifty years ago?

Our next stage of our trip had us wary with anticipation, as we crossed over the Ohio River from Gallipolis to the West Virginia side to stay the night in the sleepy river town of Point Pleasant. What happened almost fifty years ago just north of this hamlet has led to a unique folklore (or folk-fact, depending on your point of view) that intertwines a famed bridge collapse, numerous media headlines, a book and a subsequent Hollywood movie, and, in an odd twist, provided a dose of lifeblood that keeps Point Pleasant from fading into the proverbial dustbin of history.

This piece of American folklore is none other than The Mothman, a winged humanoid creature first encountered by two young couples on a dusty road in the old West Virginia Ordnance Works (referred to locals as the "TNT Area") in November of 1966.  For the next year, reports in the local and mainstream media of various sightings, encounters, and other paranormal activity, along with claimed threats by mysterious "men in black" to prevent people from revealing their experiences, were commonplace.

The culmination of these events was the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge, roughly one year after the initial sighting of the creature. Those who give credence in the existence of the Mothman believe the Mothman was either responsible for or was sent to try to warn the residents of the area of the bridge disaster, since no sightings of the creature were reported in the aftermath.

In many ways, the anticipation for us was not so much a belief or non-belief in the Mothman legend, but rather learning about the legend itself, as much an unexplored entity as the lands we were traveling through this weekend. We had heard about the book by John Keel titled The Mothman Prophecies and the subsequent movie starring Richard Gere based on the book, but otherwise we had little knowledge of the backstory.

Silver Bridge Memorials lie on both West Virginia and Ohio sides of the river

We did want to pay homage of sorts to the disaster which had much a far more wide-ranging effect than its role in the Mothman mythos. The original Silver Bridge, built in 1928 roughly one mile north of where its existing replacement lies, was a unique construct in its silver aluminum-based paint and its highly efficient but low-redundancy single high-strength eye-bar suspension construction. The state-built memorials, also located where the original bridge set down in each state, give simple summaries of the disaster, reference the 46 lives lost in the incident, and are both in need of a little upkeep, especially on the West Virginia side. The effect of the December 1967 bridge collapse had a profound effect; as noted on the West Virginia historical marker, the disaster led to the passage of Federal Government bridge inspection standards the following year.

Our stay that night would be at a hotel that has its own encounters with the supernatural. The 114-year-old Historic Lowe Hotel, seated in downtown Point Pleasant, started off as the Spencer Hotel and was a popular stopover port in the days when Ohio riverboat traffic was far more prevalent. According to the blog site Theresa's Haunted History of the Tri-State, the Lowe may be the home to at least five different ghosts.

On one of the few nods to modern convenience, the hotel's website states that the current owners Ruth and Rush Finley, owners of the hotel since 1990, are "upgrading the building and adding
their personal touch to the business." We suspect upgrading will be mostly about maintenance, and there were places in our room that could've used it, from a vent panel propped against the wall, a toilet that didn't quite flush right, and a stray screw in a window sill that either needed tightening or removal. Even the walls were thin, a perfect environment for ghostly moans and laughter to seep throughout the building.

But similar to the Queen Anne Hotel, an old Victorian (supposedly haunted as well) smack dab in the middle of San Francisco that my spouse and I had the pleasure of staying in a few years back, the little quirks and flaws we found were far outweighed by the bygone era touches, such as the period furniture and equipment (the hotel's old telephone switchboard was a neat find in the lobby,) the skeleton keys used to open and lock your room door, or what appeared to be vintage wall sconces.

The personal touch of the owners was in full effect that night.  After checking us in, the owners invited us to their dimly lit hotel bar next door to join the few guests staying for the night for a little impromptu at-the-bar shindig by a local country and bluegrass guitarist, who sported a well-honed, soft Appalachia twang and strummed a mean guitar while knocking out tunes from artists like Garth Brooks and Jimmy Martin. Between songs, Ruth let us know what was in and around Point Pleasant: the Mothman was first and foremost, but there were more things to see and do that actually sounded quite interesting that we tucked into our memory banks

Amazingly, another couple who had checked in after we had that night came by the bar and had never heard of the Mothman or any of the lore behind it, or the fact that hotel itself is said to be haunted by ghosts. After we headed back up to our room, I remarked to my spouse, "I think we're safe now; if there's going to be any haunting, it's going to happen to that poor couple who came in late."

Yes indeed, we slept well that night. We would be well rested for our confrontation with the Mothman.

Silver Bridge Disaster/Memorials
West Virginia Division of Culture & History article
Open University youtube.com video on the Silver Bridge Disaster
Roadside America - Ohio Silver Bridge Eye-bar Memorial

The Historic Lowe Hotel
401 Main St
Point Pleasant, WV 25550
(304) 675-2260
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