The Myth and the Dig

The Winchester Mystery House's popular legend — that a grieving heiress was told by a Boston medium to keep building forever to appease the ghosts of everyone killed by Winchester rifles — didn't come from Sarah Winchester's own lifetime at all. Historians have traced the séance story to a book published decades after her death and found no record that the medium it names ever existed. The room tour guides now call the "séance room" was more likely just the gardener's quarters. Much of what visitors hear inside the house was shaped by the 1920s carnival operators who leased the property after Sarah died and needed a better story than "a wealthy widow renovated her house for decades" to sell tickets.

The museum next door exists because its founder believed he had personally been initiated into an ancient mystery tradition during a trip to France. Harvey Spencer Lewis went on to found the fraternal order that still owns the site, and began collecting Egyptian antiquities to support that belief — starting with a single small statue of the goddess Sekhmet. He didn't stop at buying pieces: in 1921 he helped fund real archaeological excavations at the ancient capital of Akhenaten, and after his own trip to Egypt later in the decade, the collection grew large enough to become the biggest gathering of Egyptian antiquities anywhere in the western United States.