Most Haunted: Winchester House

Do you ever lie awake in bed at night and hear strange noises? “It’s just the wind or the house settling,” you tell yourself. There’s no way that what you’re hearing is actually a ghost. That’s just ridiculous. Right?

Well, what if the house you were living in was the Winchester Mystery House, a.k.a. “the house that fear built. “

On Friday, October 19, the Travel Channel will air live, for seven hours, an investigation of Winchester House (located in San Jose, California) by the Most Haunted Live paranormal investigation team.

The Winchester House, which was built during the Victorian era, was the home of Sarah Winchester. To say that the architecture of the mansion is strange, is putting it mildly. Very mildly. The house has, among other things, staircases that lead to nowhere, the number 13 appearing in various places throughout the house, and other oddities that are believed to be protections against evil spirits. The house boasts more than 160 rooms, 40 staircases (how many of them actually lead anywhere?), and corridors Sarah designed to confuse or appease the evil spirits she believed were haunting her. It sounds to me like Sarah Winchester was a wackadoo! But more importantly, who was hired to clean this gargantuan mansion??

In order to successfully determine whether or not the mansion is haunted, the investigation team will need the proper equipment. This includes night-vision cameras and thermal-imaging devices. Naturally. Whenever I’m laying in bed at 2 a.m. and I hear a strange noise out in the hall, I’m always cursing myself that I don’t have my night-vision cameras and thermal-imagine device!

If sitting at home on a Friday night for seven hours watching a bunch of “mediums” run around a maze of a house, taking pictures with their super special night-vision cameras, doesn’t sound like much fun (although it actually could be, with the proper provisions), then you can check out the Travel Channel’s Web site to catch live feeds from the Winchester House. That way, you can get in on the action too by e-mailing the investigative team tips (like which rooms to focus on), making predictions, etc. You can also submit comments that will air live on the broadcast.

And if that isn’t enough, you can even download the Ghost Detection application into your cell phone! Why would you do that? I don’t know.

If you can’t catch the broadcast the night it airs and don’t feel like going online to check it out, don’t worry! You can watch a 2-hour encore on Halloween! Woo hoo!

For more information on the story of the Winchester house, Click Here to view a video about it on the Travel Channel's website.