Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's bango. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. My name is Lindsay. I am an art history PhD student, and woo! I totally knew that I was taking a bit of a risky gamble when I declared that major as an undergraduate, but I've made it work. I get paid, I get mine. But let me tell you, the job market has never looked bleaker. So what do we do? We pour ourselves another glass of wine and talk about cool stuff. Which is precisely what I will be doing today. First and foremost, I wanted to say a big thank you to all of the people who said such kind things about my last episode on Kahende Wiley. I put a lot of work into each and every one of these episodes, but I agonized over that one. So it was really nice to hear the positive feedback that people had. I also very much appreciate everyone's patience as I worked on this episode, or should I say, I took a month off from podcasting because number one, I moved out of my apartment in St. Louis, which took a lot longer than I thought it would. Number two, I'm working on a dissertation chapter, which is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. And three is there's a global pandemic, which is exhausting in addition to the 15 other things that are exhausting. And I've just been sleeping a lot, which is taking up more time than I thought it would. I mean, I'm not a physicist, obviously. I'm not a time scientist, but everything is taking so much time, and yet time is going so slow. But I'm back. I'm here, ready to do this. Thank you so much to the people who left iTunes reviews for the podcast since the last episode dropped. I just saw those last week. It gave me life, and it really motivated me to sit down and to do this episode for you all today. Thank you, kind ladies and/or sirs, and/or friends beyond the binary. It's very appreciated. Before we get into today's episode, I do have a few books to recommend to you. I have been waiting to recommend these to you for a couple of months because last episode didn't really seem the right place to do this. So please stick with me for about three minutes, uh, and then we'll jump to the subject at hand. But for now, books. The first book is called Drawing with Whitman by art historian and former curator Kristen McLaughlin. Kristen McLaughlin's agent, Nora, was kind enough to send me a copy of the book to read, and I really enjoyed it. Drawing with Whitman is about a young girl named Kat who is struggling to recover both physically and emotionally from a bad car accident. Kat meets a man named Mr. Whitman, who is a painter, and over the course of the book, she learns how to use art as both an outlet for her trauma and a vehicle for her healing. It is a lovely story that is universally applicable, especially these days. Ghost stop barking. Can't you see I'm recommending a book? Okay, he stopped. Good. Drawing with Whitman is a middle grade book, so it's probably aimed at ages 8 to 13-ish. But y'all, I'm 30, and I thought it was great. Better yet, you can read a few pages of it on Amazon before you buy it, and the Kindle version is only $4. So it's kind of hard to go wrong. That is Drawing with Whitman by Kristen McLaughlin. The second book that I have to recommend is not child friendly at all, but it is the perfect read for those of you looking for a little stimulation, shall we say, in more ways than one. That book is called Lo Régine, a novel, subtitle, The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece. Ooh la la. The novel was written by friend of the podcast Lillian Milgram, who is an award-winning international artist, and it's essentially a narrative retelling of the history of a painting, Gustave Corbet's La Régine du Monde, which is perhaps one of the most infamous paintings ever, given that it is a close-up of the female genitalia, complete with what I will call a 19th-century French carpet, if you get my drift. Even though it is technically fiction, the story is based on the facts of the painting's existence and its journey through time, including all of the people who came into contact with it, from its painter Gustave Corbet to Lillianne herself, who served as the painting's official copyist at the Musée d'Orsay. My favorite part of the book, personally, was reading about art history from the perspective of an artist. Now, obviously, again, most of the book is technically fiction, but there are parts from Lillianne's perspective as an artist, and that voice carries through the entire book, which I really appreciate. It's a really fun book. It actually checks out art historically speaking, which, not to sound pretentious, is kind of rare for books written by non-art historian people, which sounds very snobbish, but that's just my opinion. The book came out just a couple weeks ago on July 28th, and it is also available on Amazon. Better yet, if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read the book for free with your subscription. That is Le Regine, a novel by Lillian Milgram. Big thank you to Lillianne for sending me a copy of the book and being very patient as I read it over the past couple of months. Merci beaucoup. The third and final book that I want to recommend is a delightful little volume by an acquaintance of mine named Mary, who I met this December while I was staying in Florence after we were introduced through a dear mutual friend. Hi Julie. Mary used to write for The Florentine, which is an expat English language newspaper in Florence, and during that time she wrote a column about her experiences finding, paying for, and living in Florentine rental properties over the past few years. You can now read those columns in Mary's book, which is entitled The Rental Diaries. The book is less than 100 pages, which makes it really easy to read, and most of the stories are just a couple of pages long. So you can read one or two a day, or you can read it all in one sitting, which is what I did. I bought a digital copy of the book myself for $6.50 on Amazon, and it was worth every single penny. That is The Rental Diaries by Mary Gray. I will post all of those books and the appropriate links to them on the podcast's website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. I know that money is quite tight right now for a lot of people, including myself. So if you don't have the money right now to buy those books, it's always worth recommending them to your local library. I have found that all of the local libraries that I've ever had in my lifetime, both in Green Bay and St. Louis, have been more than happy to purchase books for me when they have the budget. It's also a great way to support authors, even though you don't have money to buy the books yourself. Ain't no shame in the library game, y'all. I love books. Okay, so we're eight minutes in, and we are finally getting to the subject of today's episode. I said it at the top of the episode, or at least I intimated it, and I will say it again. My motivation to work lately has been at an all-time low. It's like pulling teeth. And for the first time ever in my two and a half years of doing this podcast, I found it incredibly difficult to pick a topic for today's episode. I started researching probably five or six different things, but I have the attention span of a pet rock these days, and I just wasn't getting excited about anything. And in order to put the work in that is necessary to make these episodes, you have to be excited. Lately, though, one of the things that has captured my attention are books and TV shows and movies about haunted houses. I have always loved that genre of media, but for some reason, recently in the past couple of months, I've gotten back into it with a passion. I've even been listening to soundtracks for movies and TV shows about haunted houses as I write my dissertation. And let me tell you, I have almost had a heart attack several times when gentle piano music suddenly turns into violent violins and I freak out. But hey, it keeps me awake. Reflecting on this very long time interest in haunted houses, I remembered my first foray into the genre and the real life haunted house that inspired it. And I thought, what the hell? Let's do it. This is the par where I tell you stuff about a person, the house that she built, and the ghosts that may or may not haunt them both. Sarah Winchester and the Winchester Mystery House. Friday, March 29th, 1895, the San Jose Daily News. The first view of the house fills one with surprise. You mechanically rub your eyes to assure yourself that the number of turrets is not an illusion, because they are so fantastic and dreamlike. As you approach nearer, others and many others are revealed in a bewildering spectacle. Ten years ago, the handsome residence was apparently ready for occupancy, but improvements and additions are constantly being made, for the reason it is said that the owner of the house believes that when it is entirely completed, she will die. Those of you who have heard of the house before undoubtedly know it because of that legend, not because it's a great architectural monument. No. Any discussion of the architecture is always, always subservient to the legend that has been building, pun intended, building around the house and its owner since the late 19th century. The legend is almost bigger than the house itself. And that's saying something. Because today the house comprises four floors, 160 rooms, two basements, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, and a total square footage of 24,000 feet. For my metric friendly listeners, that's something like 2,200 square meters. In other words, it is big. For today's episode, I am going to do what I do and go into it all. How and why was the house built? Who was Sarah Winchester? What is the legend of the Winchester Mystery House? And of course, is any of it true? Before we get fully into it, I do want to say that I kind of hate the name The Winchester Mystery House. Which is nothing against the Winchester people who currently run that show, but can't really take myself seriously when I say the Winchester Mystery House. So I'm just going to call it the Winchester House. That name even feels weird because the Winchester House isn't even really a house. It's an architectural monster. I first learned about the Winchester House when I was probably 11, maybe 12, which is when the Stephen King miniseries Rose Red aired on TV. I was obsessed with that miniseries. So much so that when I was at the local library, I did an Ask Jeeves search about it. Like the total nerd that I was, am, and will continue to be. When I found out that that miniseries was inspired by a real life place called the Winchester Mystery House, I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever heard. And I have been a fan of the Winchester House ever since. In case you haven't gleaned this particular bit of information yet, in which case, I think we might have a problem. But first things first, who is she? Sarah Winchester was born Sarah Pardy in New Haven, Connecticut in 1839 to her parents, Leonard and Sarah. I don't really know why I'm including this detail, other than it creeps me out that Sarah Winchester was named both after her mother, but also her dead older sister. Um, hello, you're not making things easy on your daughter. Now I realize that in the early 1800s there were only like three names in existence. However, can we please not name our children after our other dead children? That'd be great. Okay, thanks bye. The party family waxed and waned between having financial troubles and being very comfortable. Thankfully for Sarah, by the time she was a child, she could receive a top-notch education. Over the course of her schooling, Sarah learned four foreign languages fluently, including Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. She also learned to play three instruments. That love of music and culture would follow her for the rest of her life and manifest itself in physical ways in the house that she would eventually build. But first she needs the money. Long story very short, Sarah Pardy became Sarah Winchester when she married a childhood friend by the name of William Winchester in 1862. Despite the fact that the Winchester family was one of the most affluent in all of New Haven, the wedding was a modest affair, given that it was taking place during the height of the Civil War. The Winchester family made their money originally from manufacturing shirts, but what the Winchesters are most famous for is their eponymous company, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which of course invented the Winchester Repeating Rifle. The Winchester Repeating Rifle was an innovation in the fact that it was really easy to reload. It was repeating, meaning that you didn't have to load the bullet into the gun by hand every single time that you wanted to shoot it. The Winchester Repeating Rifle was an absolute game changer during both the Civil War and also westward expansion. The gun would go on to be known by the tagline, quote unquote, the gun that won the West. Of course, all of this meant killing and or dislocating tens of thousands of Native Americans and killing thousands of American soldiers. We'll get back to that. For right now, just know that all of this made the Winchester family a very, very, very wealthy. In 1866, Sarah gives birth to the couple's only child, Annie. Unfortunately, Annie was born with a super rare condition that prevented her body from processing food properly. As a result, Annie died of starvation about five or six weeks after she was born. Now think about this. Nevertheless, in spite of that absolutely horrible experience, Sarah and William seem to have a relatively happy and content marriage, though they never did have any more children. Unfortunately, in 1881, William Winchester dies of tuberculosis, making Sarah Winchester a widow. In many of the accounts of the Winchester house that you read, the legend makes it sound as if Annie and William's deaths happened one right after the other, which allegedly caused Sarah Winchester to spiral into madness. That's just not the case. There were 16 years that separated Annie and William's deaths. However, between 1880 and 1881, Sarah Winchester did lose three of the most important people of her life in quick succession, which included her mother, her father-in-law, and her husband. When you take that and compound it with having suffered the traumatizing death of a child even 16 years before, that's enough to break anyone. Those deaths saddled Sarah with more than grief. The death of her father-in-law and her husband left Sarah with both an inheritance and a massive stock in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. I'm gonna drop some numbers on you, and the crazy. Let's start with stocks. As an about 50% shareholder in the Winchester Company, Sarah earned approximately $1,500 a day from her stocks alone. That's $1,500 a day in 1880s money. In today's money, that's something like $30,000 a day. If you do the math, carry the one, subtract the whatever, math's not my strong point, that's almost $12 million a year in today's money. But that is Trump change compared to her inheritance. When her husband tragically passes away, yeah, R.I.P. and all of that, Sarah automatically inherits about $20 million in 1880s money. In today's money, that's upwards of $500 million. Flush with cash. Sarah uses that cash to purchase properties and land in California. She and William had been to California before, she clearly likes the area, so she buys a bunch of land. In 1884, she also buys an eight-bedroom farmhouse in San Jose, California, known simply as La Llenada, or the House of the Flatlands. The house was unfinished at the time of purchase and it sat on a massive plot of land, something like 160 acres. It is this quote unquote modest farmhouse. I mean, it's eight rooms, bro. I don't know if that's modest, but it's this farmhouse that will one day become the Winchester Mystery House. In the oldest known photograph of the house, uh, it really just looks like your average large house. It's three stories, it's got a small porch, you know, pretty standard for a big house. I don't know if that photograph is the original farmhouse or if it was taken after Sarah started building, but it does document either the original house or a very early step in the process by which the farmhouse became a mum mansion. But why this place? Why this farmhouse? Sarah Winchester wanted to build a house for her family. That's the basic fact of the matter. And yes, she did still have a family. In fact, Sarah had a sister who lived in San Francisco or the San Francisco Bay Area, and so that seemed as good a place as any to move after experiencing such tragedies in New Haven. Sarah was accompanied by another sister, and the plan was to build a house that would house both Sarah, her two sisters, and their families. So she buys this big ass eight bedroom farmhouse that she plans to expand on just a smidge, to make the house a home for all of the people living there. And so she started construction. Very quickly, however, the number of occupants Occupants in the house changed. Nothing nefarious, just life stuff. Although I suppose you could consider marriage nefarious depending on who you are. One sister's husband got a job out of town, so they moved out, and Sarah's other sister got married, so she moved out. Sarah was then living in this house with just one other person, her niece, Marion. Logically, Sarah and Marion would have more than enough room in this eight-bedroom farmhouse, right? No. You're wrong. I mean, yes, they had plenty of room, but they wanted more room, apparently. This is where things get a little weird. Why would Sarah Winchester want to expand the house if only two people are living in it? This is where the legend of Sarah Winchester starts in earnest. Anyone who is even a wee bit interested in the Winchester House knows at least one of the two stories drummed up throughout the years to explain why Sarah Winchester undertook this building project. The stories go a little something like this. After the death of Annie in 1866 and William in the early 1880s, Sarah starts to believe that her family is cursed. She goes to see a psychic in Boston, one named Adam Coons, which is the lamest name for a psychic ever, but I digress. The lame name Psychic puts on a seance, as psychics are wont to do. And during that seance, the psychic channels some ghosty beings and tells Sarah that yes, her family is indeed cursed. In fact, her family is haunted AF by all of the souls who died as the result of the famous Winchester Rifle. And let me tell you, that's a lot of people, most of whom were Native Americans, who just wanted to be left alone, but were instead shot to death and were evicted. Not the best ghosts to have sticking around. Thankfully, the psychic has a remedy, because of course you can't just tell a woman she's haunted and not give her some advice. He tells Sarah to build a house, and to never stop building that house. Because if she stops, the ghosts will get her. I don't know. Apparently ghosts don't like construction noises, and hey, I don't blame 'em. Who does? The other story is a bit simpler, and perhaps better in terms of story value. Sarah doesn't ask the psychic if her family is cursed. She instead asks the psychic when she will die. The psychic responds, you will die when your house is done. As oo as this might seem, someone visiting a psychic is not really out of character for the time or the place in which Sarah Winchester was living. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was a movement, if you want to call it that, in the United States and Europe called spiritualism. And this isn't the whole 21st century, well, I describe myself as more spiritual than religious. No. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, spiritualism was a widespread practice that was mostly founded on the idea that the dead lived in the spiritual realm and the living could communicate with that realm through a person called a spiritualist. That's the gist. It's obviously a bit more complicated than that, but whatever. Spiritualism was particularly popular in the wake of the Civil War and amongst women, who were, of course, holding down their homes while their husbands, fathers, and brothers fought the war, and many of those men didn't come back. Spiritualism thus provided an avenue, or at least it promised to provide an avenue between the living and the loved ones that they had lost. Seances were very popular, as were mediums and psychics and spirits, all that ghostly jazz. As hokey as that might sound to us today, people back then really did believe in all of it. And why wouldn't they? Who wouldn't give anything to have 30 more seconds with a loved one who had died, especially one who had died unexpectedly. In more academic takes on the Winchester House, you often see people dismiss this idea that Sarah Winchester ever visited a medium, that she was ever told any of these things. It's all chalked up to being a legend made up after the fact. Instead, these academics claim that Sarah Winchester was a pragmatist. She was a woman who was interested in architecture, who got a bad rep over the years. I think that the truth is somewhere in the middle ground, in that gray area between pragmatism and well, spiritualism. Let's just entertain the fact that Sarah Winchester may have gone to a psychic, and that he or she did tell her some version of those things, that finishing her house would invite hauntings or that it would bring about her death. I personally don't think Sarah Winchester would take that at face value, but I also don't think that you'd be able to brush that kind of news off without batting an eyelid, especially when you've just gone through a series of traumatic deaths. Now I'm probably projecting here, but I also want to think that anyone who writes and talks about Sarah Winchester and the Winchester House are also projecting. You want to see what you believe. Some people want to believe in the legend, and some people want to believe in what they might think is common sense. What I refuse to believe is that Sarah Winchester was some sad, decrepit woman wasting away in her big house. She was not Mrs. Havisham, okay? She was not a Charles Dickens character. She was a real life woman. In preparation for the podcast, I was watching a documentary from 1963. And at one point the narrator shows the only known photograph of Sarah Winchester on the Winchester House estate. That photograph shows Sarah Winchester sitting bundled in a fancy dress and coats in the back of a sleek carriage. And this narrator of this documentary has the nerve to describe the photograph as, and I will try to do the voice, it shows her as a tragic, lonely old woman. And hearing that, I almost threw my computer across the room because, fair warning, there's a little bit of profanity here. The bitch, she don't look lonely. She looks rich as hell. Tragic lonely old woman, my butt. The distilled facts of the matter is that following the departure of all of her family members except for her niece, Sarah Winchester continued to build on and expand that original farmhouse. At the beginning of this project, Sarah actually hired architects to design and carry out the work, but she fired both of them one after the other and instead took up the mantle herself. Is this a sign that she was crazy? No. Sarah Winchester had a long-standing interest in architecture, and, most importantly, she had a bank account that could pay for that very expensive hobby. Now I shouldn't say hobby that belittles the work that she did, but ultimately, I don't think Sarah Winchester had a plan. I think she liked building things, and her house became her canvas. I guess there's like a mix of metaphors there, but whatever, you get the idea. She was even known to sketch ideas on envelopes and the backs of napkins to give to workers, some of which made absolutely no sense in terms of what they were building that day, and would later be demolished or rebuilt in the weeks to come. She was constantly building, tearing down, and rebuilding the house. This was not just her pastime, this was her full-time interest. Her house was her world. Between 1886 and 1922, Sarah Winchester expanded that original eight-room farmhouse to a sprawling four-story 24,000 square foot building. In terms of style, the house is a Queen Anne Revival style house. It's essentially a subgroup of Victorian style houses. Think asymmetry, think turrets and towers, think wraparound porches, the embrace of textiles and different colors in the facade, all of that kind of stuff. And the Winchester House has all of that. The inside of the house is characterized by something called the aesthetic movement. The aesthetic movement embraced the idea of beautiful things for beautiful things' sake, or uh art for art's sake is sometimes what you hear it called. In other words, it is a no-holds bard. Everything from picture frames to wallpaper to kitchen stoves to doorknobs, everything is made with beauty in mind. It's like details on crack. In a special on the Winchester Mystery House put on by How's TV, H-O-U-Z-Z-T, the person who narrates this 20-minute documentary calls the house a quote, explosion of creative energy. And that's one of the most special things about this house is that it is so overwhelming. It's huge. And yet you can walk through it and you can see the tiniest details that were included throughout, almost to the point of obsession. I say almost definitely to the point of obsession. That to me prevents the interior from the house from seeming cold or unwelcoming. These details instead entice you. They make you want to look closer, and they exude a sense of love and passion for these spaces that I think are missing from many other large mansions. Obviously, the house has 160 rooms, and I can't talk about them all, but I will talk about some of the house's highlights. As I keep saying and will continue to say, the house currently stands at four stories. Five of you include the basements. Yes, basements plural. There are two. And it spans 24,000 square feet. Each floor of the house sort of serves its own function. So the first floor is where the common spaces tend to be: your dining rooms, your ballrooms, your sitting rooms, all of those kinds of rooms. Whereas the second floor is for the living spaces and the bedrooms, including Sarah Winchester's. The third floor is primarily to house the house's staff, and it is allegedly one of the more haunted areas of the house. You then have the fourth floor, which is primarily attic space and other functional spaces like a hayloft and storage, things like that. It goes without saying, but the house is pretty much a maze of rooms and hallways and stairwells indoors. There's 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 40 stairwells, 47 fireplaces, and six countum, six kitchens. So it's more or less your classic 40-bedroom, 13-bath layout. Legend has it that Sarah Winchester employed building crews around the clock 24-7, seven days a week for almost 40 years in order to make this house happen. If that sounds crazy, it's because it is. She certainly did employ builders to work on the house very often, sometimes around the clock, but her letters indicate periods of time in which she just completely calls off building for months. That particular fact interrupts the classic myth of Sarah Winchester, which is that she continued to build constantly in order to stave off the spirits. The spirits, it seemed, needed as much of a rest as Sarah did over the course of the 38-year construction period. It is true, however, that the house has its fair share of, let's call them anomalies. Some might say they're deliberate, others claim they are just mistakes, but they exist nonetheless. There are several doors that open to sheer drops, we're talking eight feet, thirteen feet, two stories, and then there are several doors that open to reveal walls. Just like straight up brick on the other side of the door. There is also one staircase that leads literally to nowhere. You just go up the steps until you run into a wall, and then you have to turn around and come back. There are windows on the floor, in some cases, that might function as early skylights, but some of them really do look like your classic four-paned window just installed on the floor. There are chimneys that don't extend through the roof. There are even rooms, or at least one, that was just completely boarded over and subsumed into the house without being cleared of its belongings, including a piano. I mean, I think it's technically called a pump organ. But I say it's a piano. It's got keys, it makes noise, he's a piano. The myth of these anomalies is that Sarah Winchester was attempting to confuse ghosts who walked her home. Apparently, if you bamboozle the ghosts, they'll leave you alone. Other more rational thinkers simply say that after almost four decades of near constant construction, you're going to have your fair share of mistakes. As someone who was an avid amateur architect, it's likely that Sarah Winchester didn't really care so much about these types of things. She was the one who often changed the plans from one day to the next, which obviously is going to have certain results. In my mind, I do think that there are a few too many anomalies for it to be entirely indeliberate. There are a few too many doors that open to either walls or a drop that would break your legs. It just seems a bit weird for me, but you can make your own call on that. Other aspects of the house that have been previously taken as being weird have since been debunked, such as the very short rise on some of the staircases. Sarah Winchester had rheumatoid arthritis in her later decades, and she couldn't do standard stairs easily, so she fit the house to meet her own needs. She even installed a shower in the house's 13th bathroom, which was virtually unheard of at the time. Not only because showers were this crazy luxury, but because women weren't supposed to take showers. It was unbecoming of our delicate constitutions, apparently. But as someone who had mobility issues due to rheumatoid arthritis, Sarah Winchester was probably not getting in and out of bathtubs too easily. And a wealthy lady gonna do what a wealthy lady gotta do to stay clean. And also, showers are the best. Who wants to lay in their own filth? Sarah's wealth is very clear, not just in the construction of the house, but also its decor. Now do note that most of the furniture that is in the house today is not original. If you could remove it, it probably is not. However, the furniture currently featured in the house is original to the time period and displayed according to early 20th century norms. But again, much of it is not original. What is original for the most part is the decor, the widespread use of California wood, for example, the beautiful wallpapers, the stained glass, the fireplace accents. And these things tend to appear throughout the house, not just in one space. So instead of talking room by room, I'm going to instead highlight these original aspects of the house and how they manifest in certain rooms. Sarah Winchester's bedroom, for example, is one of the many rooms in the house where you will find Lincresta Walton wall covering. Lincresta. Which is a terrible name for anything. Lincresta. Lincresta was a type of embossed wall covering that was a hybrid between wallpaper and tile and molding. It was invented in the 1860s, uh, by Frederick Walton, who fun fact also patented linoleum flooring. Lincresta wall covering is made from linseed gel and wood flour that was then fed through rollers that would emboss patterns onto the material, which would harden and then you could tile it throughout the house. It came in all sorts of fancy patterns, all sorts of colors, all kinds of stuff. It was also very expensive, and so it was primarily utilized in the fanciest of fancy places, including the White House, fancy hotels, and even the staterooms of the Titanic. So theoretically there is now Lincresta on the bottom of the ocean floor getting lincrested in crustaceans or something. One of the more interesting rooms on the second floor is not Sarah Winchester's bedroom. Again, without furniture, it's kind of hard to talk about the room from any other perspective than its decor. There are a series of rooms, though, on the second floor that Miss Winchester had constructed for her niece, Marian, who lived with her for something like 15 years. The rooms are known as the Oriental Rooms because they are filled with products either imported from or inspired by Asia. These include hand-painted wallpaper from Japan and bamboo accents on the fireplace. Sarah Winchester's penchant for Asian motifs extended to other rooms in the house as well. For example, one of my favorite accents is the fireplace in the front parlor, which is lined with these beautiful shiny ceramic tiles that are embossed with a cherry tree branch, as well as sunflowers growing out of a vase with koifish on it. And often the fireplaces are some of the coolest things about the house. So for example, in the guest reception hall, the fireplace appears to be covered by a pagoda roof, which is like a classic Japanese style roof. It's just really interesting to be able to walk through this house and pick out these different accents from across the world. It's these kinds of details, these aesthetic movement aspects of the house that make the house such a joy to look at and explore. Every bit of it is covered with something that begs to be seen and appreciated. As with the Oriental rooms, for example, and I'm not really sure that that title is PC anymore, but that's what they call it. Many of the rooms in the Winchester House are named after their attributes, like the Daisy bedroom, which is a bedroom that, you guessed it, features these gorgeous stained glass windows with daisy motifs. It's just like absolutely incredible. Speaking of accents and stained glass, one of the greatest non-spooky riddles about the house centers around one of my favorite of the house's many features. It's stained glass windows. For a long time it was believed that Sarah Winchester custom ordered all of her windows from Tiffany and Company, or at least her stained glass windows from Tiffany and Company. Very swanky. However, in recent years, a bunch of architectural historians have come out of the woodwork to question that attribution. The stained glass in the Winchester house just doesn't really look like Tiffany stained glass, specifically because some of the main features of the Winchester stained glass were things that Tiffany just really didn't do, such as the use of beveled glass, which, as the name suggests, is beveled or cut. And each one of those cuts or bevels creates a prism through which light travels and refracts, creating really beautiful juxtapositions between the texture of the glass, the color of the glass, and the light within. And with beveled windows, you often get really cool light patterns on the floor and on the wall. In addition to that, the fact that Tiffany didn't really do a ton of beveled glass is the fact that many of the Winchester House windows feature quite unusual aesthetics. There'll be asymmetrical, for example, or they will include really bright colors, or conversely, pastel colors, which were all things that Tiffany really wasn't known for. As of a few years ago, it was still very much a mystery as to who designed and made these windows. But what architectural historians all agreed on was the fact that the windows were top notch quality. Cut to 2019 when someone I'm sorry, I don't know who, someone noticed that the windows in another massive estate all the way in British Columbia, Canada. Bore a striking resemblance to those in the Winchester House. Architectural historian Jim Wolfe came to the rescue to solve this almost 100-year-old question. Wolfe eventually uncovered that stained glass maestro John Mallon was responsible for producing the glass for both of these homes. Oh, you've never heard of John Mallon? Well, get in line, neither did I until about two weeks ago. Even so, he was pretty well known in his day and age as a stained glass maker, though, you know, stained glass makers don't tend to be super high on the art history lists these days. I'm not sure why. I think stained glass is a highly underrated art form that is also one of the most beautiful. Stained glass is some of my favorite stuff. Anywho. Mallon trained in New York to be a stained glass maker, but then he decided to try his hand with gold mining. Not sure that that was a great idea because Homeboy arrived to California after all the gold was gone. So he decided to make money the old-fashioned way by setting up a stained glass shop in San Francisco and pimping out his skills to rich ass people living in California. Enter one Sarah Winchester. In the wake of that hypothesis that John Mallon was responsible for the Winchester windows, the hunch was confirmed by a recent discovery in the Winchester house itself. Workers who were clearing some rooms in anticipation of a massive restoration project discovered an envelope behind one of the walls. It is an envelope from Malon's stained glass company addressed to Sarah Winchester. Now, with any other house, I'd be like, wait, they found an envelope behind a wall? But the Winchester house was under construction so consistently and constantly that I am sure a ton of stuff went missing in those walls. I mean heck, I just found a 20-year-old shirt of mine balled up in a sewing machine case. Life works in mysterious ways. These stained glass windows are absolutely incredible, and there are a lot of them in the house. There's probably a couple of dozen. One of the more famous of them is the so-called spider's web window. This arched window features two intersecting spiders' webs with 13 dots colored in yellow and blue. It is believed that Sarah Winchester herself designed this window because she had an odd obsession with both spider webs and the number 13, both of which appear throughout the house and are often lauded as another example of how Sarah Winchester was obsessed with whatever. In my mind though, these gorgeous stained glass windows speak to Sarah Winchester's love of beauty and the fact that she wore her wealth like perfume. Woo! Smell that money. And yes, the stained glass windows did cost money. One of the windows, believed to be the most expensive one in the house, ran Sarah Winchester $1,000, or something like $25,000 in today's money for a window. Mind you, for Sarah Winchester, that was chump change. The mere existence of the Winchester House speaks to Sarah's wealth, but much of the wealth that she invested into the house isn't actually visible from the outside. I am, of course, talking about how the Winchester house was fitted with both electricity and indoor plumbing throughout the entire house, including cold and hot running water. Those are perhaps some of the most outrageous aspects of the house because they were so uncommon for the time, unless, of course, you were super rich. And it really goes to show that Sarah Winchester did not spare any expense when it came to the house. Because who cares about luxury if you have to pee in a chamber pot, okay? The plumbing and electricity are just two examples of how the house's luxury goes beyond its surface. Or maybe I should say that how the house's luxury embraces practicality. There are plenty of other instances that demonstrate how Sarah Winchester embraced innovation in order to make her life and the lives of those who served her easier. In the 1963 documentary that I mentioned before, the one that called her a tragic old lady, the narrator talks about how secretive and protective Sarah Winchester's employees were of her. The documentary makes it sound real salacious, like somehow they were bound by a secret or, you know, something occultic and weird. But when you look at the design of the house, Sarah Winchester's consideration of her staff shines through the design. Obviously, these people are still servants and workers and all of that, but the Winchester house had state-of-the-art indoor plumbing that ran throughout the entire house. It also had electricity. There were also indoor installed laundry tubs complete with built-in scrub boards, built-in soap holders, and taps for cold and hot water. One of my personal favorite details are on the stairs, where Sarah Winchester installed these corner pieces that prevented dust from settling there, making it much, much, much easier to sweep the stairs with minimal effort. You didn't get that crust that sort of builds up in the corners because there weren't any corners. The fireplaces in the house were designed with chutes to the basement so that the workers just had to sweep ash into those chutes and it'd go downstairs to the basement, where it could then be very easily discarded. There were even communications systems installed within the house that allowed Sarah to communicate with her staff across the whole thing. I mean, this house was like the Google of houses back in the day. Why the heck would you want to work anywhere else? Not only do you really only ever have two people to clean up after and serve, but the house is designed for easy cleaning. Mind you, it is 24,000 square feet, but it would have been a pretty good place to work. And Sarah Winchester seems to have been very generous with her workers. Those workers are still very much present in the house itself, and not just in the sense of, oh yeah, they built it. Throughout the house, especially in unfinished portions of it, you can actually see pencil writings on the wall that show measurements, calculations, or delightfully, just workers who signed their names on the house. Some even put the dates when they worked there. It's really, really cool, and it shows something of the pride that those workers had in their participation in the house, one likely fueled by the time that they were typically paid several times more than the average wage for that kind of work. I mean, no wonder they were so loyal. They were well paid, and there was always work to be done. Several of the primary workers, such as the foreman, John Hansen, even lived on the estate and raised their families there. John's signature was discovered on the inside of a floorboard. It's like he wanted to always be part of the house. That kind of behavior is actually quite common in the history of arts. You find statues with bits of paper inside of them or signatures stitched into the hem of liturgical robes. People are often very, very proud of their work, and they want to put part of themselves into it. Sarah Winchester's memory is, of course, the overwhelming presence in the house, but those who helped her achieve that also literally mark the house as theirs as well. In addition to these very thoughtful touches that helped her employees, Sarah Winchester also included innovations that helped herself. She was, for example, an avid gardener, and there are two conservatories installed in the house that she could use to partake in her pastime. Also, the house has these incredible gardens that I am not going into because this is already one of the longest episodes I've ever done. But just note, there are like crazy cool gardens there too. Anyway, back to the conservatories. The North Conservatory in the house has a series of super interesting features, including a spigot, and mind you, this is on the second floor, a spigot and a place for a garden hose, which was a very new invention at that time. Even more practically than that, though, was the fact that you could lift up certain patches of the flooring that then revealed a metal lining underneath. You could then water your plants over these metal sheets, and any excess water that came through the bottom of the plants, or if you spilled or anything like that, that water would be redirected to the drainage system. So there would be no damage to the hardwood floor and no mess to clean up. Which is amazing. It kind of reminds me of a very old timey version of the fact that you can now install vacuums in your house and you could install little chutes where you can sweep over dust and you can press it and it just sucks up all the dust from your floor. Can you imagine if Sarah Winchester had a roomba? Her house would just be filled to the brim with roombas. Some of the rooms in the house were not as practical as the conservatory, at least not in the everyday sense of the word. I am, of course, talking about the so-called seance room. The seance room is a few hallways away from Sarah Winchester's bedroom, and it is the room that she would allegedly go to every night between midnight and 2 a.m. to hold seances, during which she would attempt to contact the dead and converse with the spirits living in her house. The seance room certainly has its quirks. There are three doors in the room, only two of which work, and only two of which look like doors. Spoiler, those two categories, functional and visible, do not necessarily overlap. One of the doors in the seance room leads from the hallway into the room. It's your usual door. The other obvious door leads to a one-story drop into a kitchen sink some thirteen feet below. I've said it once, I'll say it again, you'd break your legs. On a different wall there is a door disguised as a wall panel, which leads into something akin to a hidden passageway that would let Sarah Winchester come and go as she pleased without being seen in the hall. Some individuals who have written about this house want to spoil the fun by claiming that this room was not a seance room at all, but the bedroom of the gardener. I don't know where they got that information, but it does seem odd to me that the gardener would occupy a room on the second floor rather than on the upper story where the help lived. The room itself is quite close to the conservatory, so maybe that explains it, but it's also really weird that there would be a secret passageway into the gardener's room. Also, you're trying to kill the person with a drop to the kitchen sink, but maybe that's a story that's waiting to be told. As I said earlier though, seances weren't that weird during Sarah Winchester's time. They just weren't. It was a very common practice for those who engaged with spiritualism. Now do I think that Sarah Winchester spent two hours each and every night trying to conduct seances in her seance room? No. But I won't be surprised if such events took place in the house on occasion. All of the areas of the house that I've talked about thus far are still there and in theory visitable if the house is open. The house as it currently stands, however, is quite different than what it looked like in the early 1900s. By early 1906, the house had risen to seven stories and about 140 rooms. Today the house is only, you know, only four stories, not including the basements. That difference is due to an event that occurred on April 18th, 1906, when a massive earthquake hit San Francisco, completely decimating the city and its surrounding valley. The earthquake stands as one of the most destructive and deadly earthquakes in U.S. history, destroying approximately 80% of San Francisco and killing hundreds, if not thousands, of people, and leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless. It was really, really, really, really bad. That earthquake hit in the very early hours of the morning, and Sarah Winchester got stuck in the room in which she was sleeping. For some reason, she was sleeping in the Daisy bedroom rather than her own bedroom. Due to the incredible structural damage that occurred in the 90 seconds of that quake, Sarah was actually stuck in that room. She had to be rescued by house staff and workers who had to pry open the doors with a crowbar to get her out. The crowbar marks are actually still visible in the house. In the aftermath of that earthquake, the structural damage to the upper floors was so bad that Sarah Winchester decided to just tear down the upper three stories of the house. There is still considerable damage left behind throughout the house in its current iteration, though it is, of course, structurally safe for visitors. But the quake left its mark. The earthquake probably should have completely decimated the house like it did so many others. But the house was built on an innovative, though I think established building technique called a floating foundation, which would allow the house to shift to a certain extent without risking total collapse. And that's probably what saved it from total destruction during the 1906 earthquake and subsequent earthquakes that have hit the area throughout the years. The 1906 earthquake didn't just do damage to the house, it also did damage to Sarah Winchester. It inspired her to change her building strategy, so instead of building up and rebuilding the lost floors, she instead decided to build out. The earthquake, though, was really the beginning of the end for Sarah Winchester and her house. She had just watched as three stories of her life's work crumbled in a matter of minutes. She had felt the earth shake. She had been held prisoner in her own house by natural forces. And I think not only was that traumatizing, but it was also something of a bereavement. In the 16 or so years between the earthquake and her death, Sarah started to spend more and more time and her other properties in California, namely her estate in Atherton and her houseboat in Burlingame. And yes, she did own a houseboat. She called it the Ark, after, of course, the famous Noah's Ark in the Bible. It doesn't actually look like a houseboat. I don't know if it's actually technically a boat, but it's very flat. It's one story, it's quite small, it's the antithesis essentially of the house that she built in San Jose. One that I don't think that she ever felt safe in again after that earthquake. Which, hey, fair enough. But we aren't quite done with the Winchester house yet. The final room that I want to discuss is the Grand Ballroom, which is not only the largest and best preserved rooms in the house, it also is the most expensive. It cost approximately $9,000 to build, which amounts to about $230,000. That's over three times the cost of your average home in the late 1800s. The room itself is also obviously spectacular, as are all of the rooms in the Winchester House. In addition to featuring six different kinds of hardwood, it is also particularly notable for the organ, the fireplace, and the pair of stained glass windows featuring Shakespearean quotes that flank the fireplace. I think the Grand Ballroom is the most spectacular room in the house, not for its cost, not for its odd stained glass windows or its fireplace, not for any of the reasons visible to the eye, or at least not at first. In the ballroom, there is a carved wooden door that leads to a metal door, that leads to a safe, that leads to another door, that leads to the inside of the safe. This is the place where Sarah Winchester would keep her most treasured of treasures. According to stories, after Sarah Winchester died and the safe was opened, it only contained three things. The obituaries for Sarah's husband and her daughter, and a lock of her daughter's hair. That latter bit, the daughter's hair, might seem morbid, but by Victorian standards it was very normal to keep a lock of a loved one's hair after they had died. There was, in fact, an entire industry of Victorian mourning rituals that are incredibly interesting, that involve anything from hair to post-mortem photography, and a bunch of other practices that we might now consider macabre or morbid, but in those times were the truest expression of grief and love. In a way, the safe in the ballroom is an encapsulation of the house itself. I don't think it's a coincidence that Sarah Winchester kept her treasures at the heart of the house, stowed away in its most expensive room. I also think that there's something to be said for the treasures that she kept there, not money or diamonds or silver or gold, but scraps of paper and a lock of hair that while monetarily worthless meant the world to a childless widow. I also think that there's a metaphor to be made between the safe and the house, because one or house is but an extension of ourselves, one intended to ensure our safety and well-being. But think about the way that Sarah Winchester had been treated in the hundred or so years after her death, and really during her life. She was seen as an aging, lonely spinster who was a little touched in the head, paranoid about the paranormal, an eccentric at best, and a mad woman at worst. For real though, who wants to go out into the world when that's what's being whispered about you? Also, the early 1900s weren't that great of a time for women, even the wealthy ones. It's not a coincidence that one of the greatest fairy tale tropes ever is a wicked, haggard witch who haunts the forest. The older I get, the more I relate to that witch's motives. I built my house in the forest for a reason. Leave me alone. But in all seriousness, why go out into a world that is threatened by your existence when you can create a world for yourself, build it from the ground up, and remain completely in charge of whoever gets to come into its walls. This house was Sarah Winchester's kingdom, and within it she was its queen. But what about the ghosts? The house has had its fair share of alleged hauntings and ghost sightings over the years, which include hearing footfalls on the third floor when no one's there, or seeing workers in old timey dress working on a fireplace or whatever they worked on during their time, as if they've never quite left their job. But it's all pretty tame. Like I don't think I've ever heard stories of poltergeists or anything like that. I don't think that those stories of hauntings and sightings do the house justice. I'll try to explain. I think that the Winchester House is haunted, but not by ghosts. At least not the usual variety that we often encounter in media. I think it's haunted by grief. Grief can take over your entire life for years and years and years, and it never really quite goes away. Anyone who has lost a loved one, especially a partner, a sibling, a child, anyone who has lost someone dearly beloved to them knows the invasiveness of grief. I once read something very powerful that said that grief is love with nowhere to go. One of the things that bothers me the most when I read about the Winchester House, especially academic takes on it, is the almost outright dismissal of the weight of loss in a person. The few scholars who have written about this often say something along the lines of, um, and I'm not doing the right tone here, but they say things like, Oh, the legends claim that the deaths of her children and husband drove her crazy, but actually those two people died sixteen years apart. As if that time means anything. I mean, fifteen years or sixteen years, whatever it is, that's nothing when it comes to losses of that magnitude. Now, did those losses send Sarah Winchester batty? Probably not. But I'm sure they compounded one another, especially when you throw in the deaths of her mother and her father-in-law in a very short period of time. I don't think that people have enough compassion for Sarah Winchester, especially considering that she was a woman in that day and age. I mean, she went from having everything to being a childless mother to eventually being a widow. And for the first time in her life, she was on her own with an enormous sum of money. There's nothing more of a phase shift than that. I think that the Winchester House represents Sarah Winchester's genuine love for architecture and beauty, but it also serves as an arena through which she Expressed the inexpressible. It was a way for her to build a world around herself that in many ways reflected all of the things that she couldn't have. One of the reasons that big houses are often kind of creepy is because the presence of rooms suggests the presence of people. Hypothetically, when you buy a house, you buy one that serves your needs. If you have three kids, then you probably have at least three bedrooms. There's very little that disturbs people as much as spaces that are just extra, that serve no purpose, or worse, things that were supposed to serve a purpose, but that purpose never manifested itself. It's like a nursery in a house with no kids. I think that that is what disturbs us most about the Winchester House. We can't let that taboo go. And yet the Winchester House wasn't just home to two people. That's how many people may have technically lived there at certain times, sure. But there were obviously many servants, housekeepers, many, many, many builders and workers who were at the house. Maybe that's how Sarah Winchester populated her home. She wanted it to be a home for her family, but ultimately it became a home for a different kind of family. Maybe she continued to build in order to employ those people, to ensure those in her vicinity had jobs, as well as to foster the potential for one day filling those rooms, even if she knew that that day would never come. One of my favorite descriptions of the house comes from a Smithsonian essay by Pamela Haig, who wrote this Winchester's mansion conveys a restless, brilliant, sane, if obsessive mind and the convolutions of an uneasy conscience. Perhaps she only dimly perceived the sources of her unease, whether ghostly or profane, but she wove anguish into her creation just as any artist pours unarticulated impulses into her work. Over repeated visits I came to think that if a mind were a house, it would probably look something like this. End quote. Sarah Winchester died of heart failure in her bedroom at the Winchester House in 1922 at the age of 83. Contrary to what you might hear and read, she did spend the final decade of her life split between the Winchester House and another property in California. It seems fitting though that she died in the house whose layout and details and marvels had obsessed her for nearly four decades. She was not, however, buried in San Jose. Instead, her ashes were taken back to New Haven, Connecticut, where she was interred beside her beloved husband William and her daughter Annie. In recent years, baby Annie's gravestone was stolen from that cemetery, but as of 2018, it's been restored, paid for with donations from fans of the Winchester story and the blessing of the Winchester estate. In her will, Sarah Winchester left the house to her niece Marion, who had once inhabited it with her before she got married. Obviously, this house was not a tenable inhabitants for your average person, and so Marion took most of what she wanted from the house and put the rest up for sale. There is a rumor that movers had to work every day for six weeks in order to empty the house of its contents, which, given its size, doesn't really surprise me. Shortly after Sarah Winchester's death, the house went up for auction. I say auction rather than sale, because the people in charge knew that it would be impossible to sell this house. A man named John Brown offered to rent it with the intention of eventually buying it, and because there were no other takers, the city of San Jose agreed to let him do that. Brown never intended to live in the house. He wanted to turn it into one of the finest tourist attractions in the country. In fact, John Brown had made his money the old-fashioned way, as a theme park mogul whose specialty was designing roller coasters, as you do. Turns out though that he wasn't great at his job because he had to move from Canada to California after one of his roller coasters killed a woman. If anyone in this story is haunted, it's probably that guy. The once fiercely private home of Sarah Winchester was opened to the public in 1923, just five months after its original owner's death. Say what you will about his roller coaster building abilities, but John Brown and his wife knew how to market the hell out of this house. It's in 1923 and the subsequent years that the Winchester legend really stepped into high gear by the Browns who wanted to sell tickets to their newest attraction. It's this legend of the house that has gone on to inspire some of the greatest haunted house stories of all time, beginning with Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which is arguably the foundational text for American Haunted House stories, including being the inspiration for the 2019 Netflix series of the same name. In recent years, though, I've been very impressed by what I would call a realignment of priorities at the Winchester House estate. It seems to me that in recent years the estate that runs the tours and the website and all that kind of stuff has moved away from the sensationalism of the house to embrace its status as a historical landmark. Not because it's haunted, necessarily, doesn't hurt, but because it's a piece of Californian and American history. Of course, the legend of the Winchester House and Sarah Winchester and tauntings and all of that have not totally left the premises. And why should they? They're fun. But there's certainly a more measured approach to such things, or at the very least, they leave those stories up to the big budget movies and TV shows. The Winchester House is an architectural anomaly whose legend has gotten bigger than the house itself. In the end, though, the house is more than a building. It is a monument born out of a unique alchemy of grief, love, creativity, and passion. And, of course, money. The Winchester House stands not only as a historical monument that has both witnessed and embodied history, but it's also a monument to our collective imagination as a culture. In many ways, Sarah Winchester was a lightning rod for all of the things, both past and present, that have made society uncomfortable. A woman alone. A woman with unthinkable wealth, wealth made from the sale of guns that slaughtered thousands. A woman who didn't play by the rules. A woman that left behind a riddle that no one can seem to solve. And so we've crafted our own story. One about things that go bump in the night, of angry souls coming for vengeance, of a house that is thought to be the key to immortality. And in a way it was, just not in the way that the legend promised. The Winchester House has made Sarah Winchester immortal. It has inspired countless stories, which in turn have created genres, which in turn have created industries, from Houdini to Disney to Stephen King to Netflix. The Winchester House is part of our cultural consciousness, which begs the question: is the house haunted? Or does the house haunt us? That is all I have for you today regarding the Winchester Mystery House and its patron, the unparalleled Sarah Winchester. I wrote today's episode with the help of a number of sources, both academic and not. The Winchester Mystery House website and its accompanying materials and blog are actually super, super helpful. Especially the 360-degree tour that you can buy for $8.99. I spent the money on that. I am so glad that I did, because it really helped me get a grasp on the house and its details without ever actually having been there. Mind you, the ghosts are not included in the price of the tour. Unless your house is haunted, in which case, good luck. I also read Mary Jo Ignafo's biography of Sarah Winchester, as well as the chapter on the house in Colin Dickey's book entitled Ghost Land, an American History in Haunted Places. There are also plenty of essays online via websites like Atlas Obscura, The Smithsonian, and all that's interesting. Not only were those really helpful to read, but they're also fun. There are also a variety of videos posted on YouTube from varying accounts that range from tours to documentaries to travel shows. There were also a ton of podcasts about Sarah Winchester and the House, though one of my favorites is the one by the History Chicks, which is actually one of my favorite podcasts. I love Beckett and Susan. It's a great podcast, and it's definitely worth a listen if you want to hear two cool ladies talk about other cool ladies in history. So mark that one on your list. I will, of course, post links to all of these on the podcast's website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. I will also link to some of the more fictional interpretations of the Winchester House. My favorites are, of course, The Haunting of Hill House, both the book by Shirley Jackson, as well as the Netflix series, which is scary, as well as the aforementioned miniseries by Stephen King called Rose Red. And let me tell you, for being a miniseries made in 2001, Rose Red is still incredible. The special effects are very dated, but the acting and the story and the set design are all spot on. Again, I will post all of that to the podcast's website, stuff about thingspodcast.com.
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SPEAKER_00That was a long one. Oh my gosh, what a way to come back. I wrote this episode over the course of two days. Mind you, I've been doing the research for a while, and uh last night I was seeing stars and chugging wine by the end of it. It was a slog, but it was so much fun. As for Gus Corner this week, this Gus Corner goes out to listener Jill, who left a lovely, lovely, lovely review of the podcast on iTunes that I really appreciated, and in that review she gave a shout out to Gus Corner. So this one goes out to Jill. Gus is excellent, as always. I am now living at home, which he is taking full advantage of. Every morning he gets his four to five mile walk, rain or shine, and then he sleeps basically the rest of the day. When he's not zonked, he's either begging for whatever food is being consumed in his vicinity, or barking to go outside to chase turkeys and imaginary nothings. He also has an impressive internal clock. He barks every single day at 4:30 because he knows, he knows that that's when my dad takes a beef jerky break. And God forbid, Gus doesn't get some nibbles out of that. As for me news, I don't really often do this, but whatever. I am hard at work on my dissertation. It's slow going, but it's going, and I feel really, really good about what I'm producing and the ideas that I have. And I'm very proud of it. So why not toot my own horn? Toot, toot. Okay, what else? What else? What else? Rate, review, subscribe, all that jazz. Feel free to send me an email if you feel so inclined at stuffabout things podcast at gmail.com or through the website. Uh, check out those books that I mentioned at the top of the episode, including Drawing with Whitman by Kristen McLaughlin, La Régine du Monde by Lillian Milgram, and Rental Diaries by Mary Gray. The usual thanks goes out to hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org for the music, sounds, all of that stuff that you hear in the episode. The songs playing in the intro and the outro are a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod and a second song called Success Dreams. That is all from me. Such a long episode. I will talk to you when I talk to you. I'm really excited for some upcoming episodes I have planned, so send me some good pandemic productivity vibes because I need them. I hope that you are all staying healthy and some version of happy, and I hope that you are registered to vote in November. And of course, I hope you take the time to look at something beautiful today.