Our family recently enjoyed an epic trip to California — a trip that lasted two weeks and spanned 6,500 miles as we traveled from Vermont to Montreal, flew to San Francisco, drove to Los Angeles, and returned to Vermont again by way of Montreal. We slept in five different locations and reconnected with numerous dear friends and family members.

The three days that we spent in the San Francisco Bay Area marked our first return to the region since 2016. The Bay Area is where my husband, Erick, grew up and lived until his college graduation; we’d lived there for half of our first decade of marriage and it’s where our first three children were born. We barely scratched the surface of our family history during this visit, but we did take our children to the Winchester Mystery House.

Erick and I had visited the Winchester Mystery House once, before we had children. It was shortly after we’d moved to Berkeley, something to do on a free Saturday when we were still exploring the new landscape we now inhabited. Come to think of it, we probably even slept late and then read the newspaper over brunch; we may even have watched an entire movie the night before!

The details of that first visit were fuzzy in my mind, but I still remembered the bizarre story behind the Winchester Mystery House. Here is the story as I relayed it to my children:

Winchester Mystery House

Sarah Winchester, who had married into the family that owned the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, moved to San Jose, Calif., in the 1880s after the deaths of her husband and infant daughter. She was consumed with guilt over the people who’d been killed by Winchester rifles, and was told by a medium that she had to continually build a house for their ghosts; if construction ever stopped, she would have bad luck — or die (or perhaps both). So, she bought an old farmhouse and began a 38-year construction project that ballooned the house to 500 rooms, complete with bizarre features like doors to nowhere, curving staircases with tiny steps, trapdoors, and walled-off windows. The building was, of course, never finished.

Our children are mostly at ages and stages in which they are fascinated with the bizarre and vaguely spooky, so we thought they’d enjoy the Winchester Mystery House. We were correct. It was a hot day in San Jose, with temperatures pushing 90 degrees, but our children trooped gamely through the hour-long tour during which our guide showed us the room where Sarah Winchester supposedly held seances, noted the cobweb patterns and the number 13 in the decorative touches, and pointed out the gash in Sarah’s bedroom door where rescuers had supposedly employed an axe to free her after she was trapped for hours due to the 1906 earthquake.

Afterwards, at lunch, one of my children said, “That was really interesting, but I looked up the Winchester Mystery House online before the tour, and I’m not sure that all of that was true.”

So of course, I looked up the Winchester Mystery House online, and it turns out that not all of that was true. Not at all.

Here’s what is true: Sarah Winchester suffered great loss. By the time she was 40, she’d grieved her infant daughter, her husband, her mother and her father-in-law. Sarah Winchester was also very rich, having received a large inheritance from her husband. In 1885, following the death of her eldest sister and beginning to develop the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, she took the advice of her doctor to try a warmer, drier climate. She purchased an eight-room farmhouse on a 45-acre ranch near San Jose and named it Llanada Villa. She went on to purchase several additional homes in the area, as well as a houseboat.

Here’s what seems to be true: Sarah Winchester did begin renovations to expand Llanada Villa. She and her husband had become interested in design while building a home in Connecticut, so she designed and supervised the project herself. She seems to have been a perfectionist, tearing down or abandoning features that didn’t please her. The curving stairways with small steps were adapted for her arthritis. There is no actual evidence that Sarah was in the house during the 1906 earthquake; she was likely at one of her other residences. The earthquake did do substantial damage to the house, and some of the more bizarre features (like doors and staircases to nowhere) resulted because the earthquake destroyed an entire wing of the house. After the earthquake, Sarah Winchester had the rubble cleared away but did almost nothing else to the house until her death in 1922, preferring instead to live in her other, intact dwellings. At the time of her death, the San Jose house had 160 rooms, which seems excessive. But was it mysterious?

Here is what does not seem to be true: Sarah Winchester was never quoted expressing guilt over making her fortune from a successful gun company; at the time, guns were considered necessary for survival. Nor is there any record of Sarah Winchester ever visiting a medium or feeling compelled to build perpetually due to ghostly influences. The room that we were shown, supposedly used for seances, turns out to have been the gardener’s bedroom. People who knew her — family and employees — denied that she was superstitious.

The question remains: Why all the building? Perhaps she enjoyed it. Perhaps it kept her busy. Perhaps she was a little obsessive-compulsive. My favorite theory was advanced by Bruce Spoon, who wrote his master’s thesis on Winchester in 1951: After numerous interviews, he believed that Sarah Winchester continued building so long in order to keep workers employed. As all of her employees were named as beneficiaries in her will, she certainly seems to have been generous.

In the end, the biggest mystery may be: Why was Sarah Winchester, a woman who suffered both deep sorrow and chronic physical pain, yet nonetheless attempted to live a life of creativity and generosity, reimagined as a guilt-ridden, superstitious, spooky, compulsive builder?

If your guess is, “for profit,” I suspect you’re right.

When she died in 1922, Winchester’s San Jose house was a neglected heap of worthless disrepair. A group of investors bought it for a pittance and leased it to John and Mayme Brown, who opened it to the public nine months later as a tourist attraction. As the story goes, Harry Houdini visited the house in 1924 and suggested the name, “Winchester Mystery House.” Further renovations and mystique were added in in the 1970s and 1980s when Keith Kittle, formerly of Disneyland, acted as general manager. Many of the more bizarre features were additions made after Sarah Winchester’s death.

It turns out that a real life of grief, pain, resilience and poor architectural planning doesn’t sell as well as a creepy fabrication.

After our visit to the Winchester Mystery House, I thought — not for the first time — about how much the stories we tell matter. This is especially true of the stories we tell about other people. The truth is usually complicated, nuanced and unprofitable; it wins us fewer fascinated listeners — who may be willing to pay — than sensational stereotypes.

But the truth is so very important, and so deeply beautiful. So whether in private or in public, let’s do our best to stick to the true stories.

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Faith Gong has worked as an elementary school teacher, a freelance photographer, and a nonprofit director. She lives in Middlebury with her husband, five children, assorted chickens and ducks, one feisty cat, and two quirky dogs. In her “free time,” she writes for her blog, The Pickle Patch.