The Winchester House Story Part 1

With breakfast out of the way, it was off on our first excersion, to a local historical landmark, the Winchester Mystery House. Seventeen of us (all women apart from a token man from Austria), boarded the coach with high expectations of a great day out.
We'd only been travelling for ten minutes when the coach driver pulled over.
"Typical," I thought. "We've broken down already."
In fact I was wrong. We were actually at our destination. We could have almost walked there, but then nobody walks anywhere in America.
The house was extraordinary (see pix in next entry). Interestingly it was built by the heiress to the Winchester gun family, who lost her mind after her husband and child died. She believed if she kept the building work going (which she did 24 hours a day for 38 years), it would keep the evil spirits away from her. She spent millions of dollars on the huge project, which only came to an end when she died in 1922. (Not that she felt guilty about the effects the family business had on the native Americans, you understand).
The house is full of bizarre features, most of which were done purely to keep the building work going. Staircases leading nowhere, tiny doors opening up onto brick walls, after a while it made some of the latest gothic monstrosities in Naperville appear normal.
The irony is, if Sarah Winchester had lived in England, she would have had none of these problems. You can find builders there who wouldn't be able to finish a simple house extension in 38 years.