If you find yourself in Silicon Valley, ignore the tech bros and tour the Winchester Mystery House

In 1886, one woman's fear of ghosts and a spare $20.5 million (equivalent to $550 million in 2020) led to a 38-year-long project in which the Winchester Mystery House was built. 

Sarah Winchester was the widow of William Wirt Winchester, the treasurer of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. After Winchester died in 1881, leaving Sarah Winchester with a fortune, she began to fear that the ghosts of people killed by Winchester firearms would haunt her mansion. 

Sarah hired carpenters to work on the house around the clock. She didn't hire an architect, and added onto her home in a willy-nilly fashion until it became seven stories high. The mansion is full of bizarre additions such as doors and stairs that lead to nowhere, windows that look into other rooms, windows on the floor, hidden passages, and other oddities that were meant to confuse the ghosts from finding her.

From Wikipedia

In 2017, the Winchester Mystery House debuted their first new daytime tour in 20 years, the Explore More Tour. This tour takes guests through rooms never before opened to the public and explores the rooms left unfinished at the time of Sarah Winchester's death.

The Winchester house is now a designated California historical landmark, and is located in the city of San Jose. This strange architecture of this house puts it at the top of my list of haunted places I want to explore.

[image By The original uploader was Gentgeen at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons, Public Domain]