WALTER MAGNUSON: When guests are coming for the first time, they don't fully know what to expect. They might have in their mind that it's, I don't know, a dilapidated roadside attraction or a haunted house.

ERIC JOHNSON: That's Walter Magnuson, the executive director of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. It's been a tourist attraction since 1923. The house has 160 rooms and its maze-like design has attracted both architectural acclaim and paranormal investigations.

OLIVIA MALDONADO: According to legends and stories that have been passed down for more than a hundred years, Sarah Winchester would come in here at midnight after ringing the bell in her bell tower 13 times, and we believe that was to summon spirits into this room.

ERIC: Even if you're not into ghost stories, there's a lot of cool reasons to visit this house.

WALTER: The fixtures and the furnishings and the types of wood. And so there's so much to see, and I think a lot of guests don't fully expect that.

ERIC: But at the same time, Walter doesn't make any apologies for the supernatural reputation of the Winchester Mystery House. And he says that in museum circles, he often doesn't feel welcome.

WALTER: Who am I to say my interests are more highbrow and acceptable than someone who is truly fascinated by the paranormal?

ERIC: This is Call 'Em Like Museum, a podcast about how museums work and why we love them. I'm Eric Johnson.

Today on the podcast, how do we draw the line between history and legend? When your museum is already supposed to be haunted, how do you make Halloween special? And what do historic houses have in common with the music of David Bowie? We'll talk about all of that and more with Walter Magnuson from the Winchester Mystery House, right after this.

ERIC: This episode is sponsored by transistor.fm. If you are starting a podcast, then you should use Transistor. Upload your audio or video and they'll publish your episodes to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocket Casts, Overcast, and more. Go to transistor.fm for a 14-day free trial.

Do you have a museum story? Maybe there was a time you got lost, a time that you were moved to tears, or a time you saw something that blew your mind. No matter what your story is, I want to hear it. Head to likemuseum.com and click "submit a museum story." It might end up on a future episode. That's likemuseum.com and click "submit a museum story."

I ask everyone who comes on the podcast first about their personal relationship with museums. What's your first memory of going to a museum?

WALTER: I grew up in New York, so we had tremendous luxury of having so many world-class museums and attractions locally. So field trips and with my parents to the Museum of Natural History in the city and the Met. And we did a couple trips to D.C. and Philly. And on Long Island, there's some beautiful activations. I remember a field trip to Sands Point Preserve in kind of that Gatsby-like part of Long Island. So yeah, I have some great memories going to some really incredible institutions that are thankfully still with us.

ERIC: When you were a kid in New York, did you ever hear about the Winchester Mystery House?

WALTER: Yes. Yes. I was always taking out books on history and books on ghosts and the supernatural and watching "Unsolved Mysteries" and all that in the '80s. So there was a ghost book that I would take out almost every week in my elementary school library if it was available, and it had a section on Winchester Mystery House. And then as I got older and started working at Disney and getting into a lot of that history, I understood that it inspired Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. It's inspired a lot of things. So yeah, it was on my radar pretty early as being a very famous, purportedly haunted mansion.

ERIC: Yeah. So we should say for folks who haven't heard of it, this was the home of Sarah Winchester, whose husband was the namesake of the Winchester Rifle Company. She died in 1922 and the house was bought shortly after her death and became a tourist attraction.

WALTER: Yeah. She passed on September 5th, 1922, and a married couple bought the house at auction and they intended on it being sort of the crown jewel of a resort-type destination with live music and swimming and a roller coaster and all sorts of different activations. And there was so much demand to see the house that 10,000 people showed up on the first weekend and a lot of those other dreams kind of fell by the wayside, but the house maintains its interest and popularity.

ERIC: When people find out what you do for work, what are the reactions like?

WALTER: They're usually intrigued. I think on the West Coast, we have great name recognition, so I think most people here know Winchester Mystery House. On the East Coast, it's less, but I'm always amazed. I mean, there's so many times I'm on a flight or I'm in a restaurant in Orlando or Philly or whatever, and you will see a Winchester Mystery House shirt, or if we strike up a conversation, they'll know of it or they've been or their neighbor's been. So pretty good name recognition. And usually people, no matter what their background, they're intrigued. They're interested.

ERIC: I think there's kind of two ways to get interested in the Winchester Mystery House. There's obviously the historical story of Sarah Winchester and what she did and the unusual architecture, the unusual building project she undertook. But then of course there's also the legend of the house. It's reportedly haunted, supposed to be one of the most haunted houses in America. I don't get to ask this of a lot of folks. Have you ever seen a ghost at work?

WALTER: Well, we have had a lot of strange experiences over the years and that goes back to Sarah's era, but shortly after it opened as a tourist attraction, there's been so many stories of caretakers and employees. And often you feel like you're not alone. You might hear a strange sound, footsteps, your name being called, hair being tugged, that kind of typical stuff. But there are folks who do see physical manifestations. I have not seen that, but I have had my window slam shut, kind of an exclamation point at the end of a sentence that I said in the meeting. I was doing a media tour and I had a door at the end of a hall slowly open as we were coming toward it. I've had definite feelings of not being alone, but gratefully and thankfully it is not a dark feeling or force, because there are places I've been where very sad things have happened and it's a very heavy feeling that people who are sensitive to that get.

The Mystery House, thankfully, as all the mediums and sensitives have told us, is a place that the spirit energy there wants to be there. They're happy to be there. They're reliving happy moments in their life. That's always ... I think [it] sits easier.

ERIC: This has kind of become an accidental theme of the podcast. I've talked to other folks who use spooky legends and ghost stories, things like that, as well as themed events around Halloween as a way of attracting people to the museum or to the historic house. So I talked to the Haas-Lilienthal House, they do an annual Halloween event. I talked to the USS Hornet Museum. They have a lot of legends of ghosts haunting that ship as well. And so yeah, it's a really interesting challenge I think for you and your team of balancing the history and the legend. Can you talk about how you approach that balance? How do you see your mission with all of that?

WALTER: We take it real serious that we're caretakers of this incredible masterwork, 25,000-square-foot house that Sarah built. And we've built great relationships with archives: Stanford, that has a lot of her correspondence with her attorney in New Haven. She founded a hospital in her husband's name, which is now a part of Yale, the Winchester Chest Clinic; the final resting places there at Evergreen Cemetery, which we've assisted to beautify the grounds and do some nice things there. So we take it all very serious. I think Sarah Winchester, there's a lot of legends and lore and a lot of different versions of why she came to San Jose and why she did what she did. The wonderful thing about Winchester Mystery House is that the name is so perfect because it is a mystery. And I think it is very desirable to actually be able to visit this incredible time machine and make up your own mind as to whether this was just a eccentric hobby or whether she was being directed by spirits or what.

So I think we take it very seriously and we try and share all of the legends in lore and leave it up to the guests to decide. In addition to the Sarah Winchester life story and her potential motivations, the house itself, as you saw, is an incredible architectural marvel. And if you're into that kind of thing — the fixtures and the furnishings and the types of wood and every little detail, I mean the door hinges are so —

ERIC: The wallpaper.

WALTER: Yeah. So there's so much to see and I think a lot of guests don't fully expect that, especially if they're being brought by someone who's more focused on the paranormal aspects. The house itself is just incredible. So yeah, we have a lot to share for sure, but it's really up to the guests to make their own conclusions as they leave as to what may have been her motivations.

ERIC: Right. I've asked some folks who've come on the show to visualize the museums they work in and kind of walk us through each room. We couldn't do that right now. That would take all day. But could you describe when someone comes in the house, they're coming on the tour, just generally, what is the feeling you want to create for them? What do you want them to experience? And at the end of the day, at the end of the tour, how do you want them to feel when they have experienced the Winchester Mystery House?

WALTER: Historic homes and historic locations, there's different approaches to the tour experience. You have areas like Bodie, an abandoned ghost town, and Alcatraz, probably, to an extent, where it's almost in a state of arrested decay where it is sort of as it was left and they don't want it to get any worse but they're not necessarily actively restoring things. And then you have places like Winchester Mystery House, I would say in some ways Graceland, Elvis Presley's mansion in Memphis. The hope is that when you arrive, you feel like Sarah just stepped off into town and it's still very alive and you feel her presence and it's not a dusty relic that hasn't been lived in 103 years. It's still a very active place that you're somehow time traveling to. So ideally, guests are greeted warmly and they should feel as if they're sort of stepping into her time and hopefully able to put themselves in that mindset to have that experience and we're here and it's all around us and it's immersive and it's 1907 and we're being received by Sarah Winchester.

ERIC: Right. There's a play from a few years ago by Joe Christiano called, I think it's called "Mrs. Winchester, or, A Gun in the First Act." Lisa Morse was the star of it. It was really interesting because it was a one-woman show and she's talking to the audience as Sarah Winchester giving a tour of her own home. And the whole premise of the show is sort of, I think challenging popular assumptions about what would drive someone to build a house like this. Was this an eccentric project or was this an expression of grief, of trauma, of guilt for people who were killed by Winchester rifles, things like that? It's a really difficult tonal balance, I think, that you have to strike because I think people come in with assumptions about the legend. They've come in with a lot of baggage already. Do you find you have to confront or challenge what people bring in?

WALTER: No, because I don't think that's a fruitful exercise. I think there's a subset of guests that are very quick to apply a 2026 lens to history. For example, for the parts of the Sarah Winchester story, so spiritualism, was she a spiritualist? 2026, there's a lot of people that their knee jerk to spiritualism is that it's lowbrow and hokey and ghosts and who believes in that and all. In Sarah's time, which her lifetime actually coincides exactly with spiritualism in America, it was science. It was highly recommended by your doctor.

ERIC: Queen Victoria, Mary Todd Lincoln.

WALTER: Right, right, right, right. It's not up to us to decide for you. I think we just need to share all the different versions of the story and all the legends and lore passed down through the generation, continue to do research and we're still discovering little things here and there, which we always enjoy. But it's not at all a struggle for us. I think it's a struggle for the guests. It's for them to decide what ... We just want to take care of this incredible house and share it and hope that all those folks who have lived here forever and haven't come yet finally visit.

ERIC: Yeah. I mean, I was one of those folks. Until this week, I came to the house and took an amazing tour with your colleague Olivia.

WALTER: Yes.

ERIC: I had never been to the house before. This was my complete first experience visiting, and it was fantastic. One of the things that I brought in, absorbing some of the legend by osmosis, was I did not really have a good understanding of Sarah as a person. I thought of her as this character in the story, but I didn't have a great understanding of her and what she did, how she lived her life. And something that really surprised me from Olivia's tour was she was really talking about all these very positive, great things, the positive impacts that Sarah had on her community and on the world. I wonder if you could speak to that of how do you communicate that through her house?

WALTER: Yeah. When she passed, I mean, a lot of the obituaries list her as a philanthropist. She founded a hospital, the Chest Clinic, as I mentioned, [which] is now at Yale in New Haven. We know that she was very charitable and very, very involved in paying for things, often anonymously. So I think that's something that we make sure as we discover these things and as we uncover old clippings and as we make relationships with different archives that may have her correspondence in it, we try to incorporate that into the tour. We try and make sure that we call our tour guides the caretakers and we try and make sure that they have the latest and greatest that we find. But at least in my tenure, I know that they've always touched on Sarah, her philanthropic efforts.

ERIC: And then I've read or heard that one of the interpretations for why the house is so unusual with all of the famous stairs that lead to nowhere, the doors that open up in unusual places, some people say that it was a way of keeping people employed, of keeping people working consistently in her community, of hiring builders to just keep on working. Is that right?

Here’s what Olivia Maldonado from the Winchester Mystery House told me about the craftsmen who were constantly expanding Sarah’s home…

OLIVIA: They lived here for free. They also were fed for free at noon and 5:00 PM, and most of them were paid at least double the going rate. Some of them even up to $10 at the time, which is, again, people were making $1.50 a day. The people who worked here made more than those who built the Golden Gate. So Sarah really, really loved her employees and really treated them as like a chosen family.

WALTER: Yes. There are many theories as to why she did what she did, and we do know that she employed people for a real long time and paid more than what the going rates were for things. There's also some stories. We recently, through a wonderful partnership with the Campbell House Museum and local archive a few minutes from us, they have in their collection a blouse. It's a black blouse, and she had apparently donated it to a girl who was a neighbor, lived around the block, Minnie Yeager, and she passed in the '80s or '90s and donated everything to this museum, and it's beautiful. Apparently she donated it to a little girl to do princess dress-up kind of stuff. We worked out a deal where we now have it on display in the house, and it's been so moving to have, because we have so few artifacts because everything was sold at auction, but we do have her incredible house.

So to have an actual article of her clothing back in her room in her house on display has been really, really special for all of us who work there and all the guests.

ERIC: Yeah, there's actually a really interesting detail about how the house runs, is that a lot of Sarah's possessions, or maybe all of her possessions, were sold at auction after her death. And a lot of the story that you are telling as the director of this house, you are having to do a lot of compiling, compositing historical sources where you have records that the foreman kept, you have local historical records, I think Olivia was telling me that there's only two photos of Sarah at the house and one that was only found a few years ago. That's quite a challenge when you're trying to tell a historical story is putting all these things together.

WALTER: Yeah, of course. And that's what we need to do. I mean, I'm very jealous when you go ... Like Graceland, for example, we built a great relationship with that team and Angie Marchese, their archivist, and Jack Soden, the CEO, and Vern — Elvis's father was sort of his bookkeeper — and between his father and the Colonel, his manager, they saved every receipt, every product sample, everything. So truly, if you wanted to know where was Elvis Presley on July 3rd, 1971, there is the hotel folio, there is the gas receipt from the plane. You could do such a documentation of this dude every day, and that level of detail, if you're an archivist, is such a gift. And unfortunately, many of us, like Winchester Mystery House, we don't have that level of information, so we do have to go with what we have. And we have Janan, who Olivia may have mentioned to you, she's our house historian, and she started as a tour guide in the '70s and she's worked on and off since then.

And she truly is an incredible authority on Sarah Winchester, Winchester Mystery House. We've restored a few rooms and things like that where we have to make some assumptions as to what she would've wanted in this space. Janan's been a great resource for that.

ERIC: Yeah. Olivia took me to a room that maybe is not currently on the tour, but was a seance room or has been done up as a seance room. And there's pictures of people who practiced spiritualism or [had an] interest in spiritualism on the wall, as well as I believe it was a wreath made of human hair. Does that sound right?

WALTER: Yes. Yes. That was a big thing back in the day, which I'm not a huge fan of, and I'm glad that has not come back. But yes, hair wreaths, many Victorian homes have hair wreaths.

ERIC: That was new to me. I was a little alarmed. [laugh]

WALTER: Apparently that was done very loving and very much appreciated for those who have that treasure on their wall.

ERIC: So how do you decide what goes on the tour? How do you decide what to emphasize? I mean, it's 160 rooms in the house. It's a lot to cover. How do you direct people's focus?

WALTER: To be honest, the mansion tour, while we've done some secondary tours and we've done some self-guided experiences, and certain times of year we'll do a more theatrical kind of special event at night, the base mansion tour, which has been around since 1923, has not dramatically changed.

ERIC: Really?

WALTER: No. Much of the script shares the same origin story and the different versions of why she may have did what she did. And we've certainly made updates, and I can't speak exactly to before my time, but the core story has not dramatically changed. We have enhanced, we've added a few audio and video elements in the house that — and we don't want it to come off as gimmicky or theme parky — but we wanted to be able to give a little bit of an orientation because often if a group comes, one person really knows everything about the place, another person doesn't know anything about it or got dragged there, so we wanted sort of an orientation piece.

So we do that in the beautiful stained glass room early on in the tour and a projection happens on the stained glass that tells you a little bit about the story. The earthquake is a huge, huge part of the story, the 1906 quake. So we did want a little more of a sensory thing there so you could actually feel how long that quake would've shook the Bay Area. And so we have kind of an audio thing in that space. So we do add subtle things. I don't want them to be over the top or really take you out of it, but if it can enhance it in a way where you can feel what that earthquake may have felt a little more, or it's educational, we try and add those little bits.

ERIC: And now I want to play for you the audio from my tour of what the earthquake simulation sounds like. It starts with a brief foreshock…

SFX: [foreshock sound effects]

ERIC: And then after that comes the real shock, which goes on for 30 seconds. Video viewers, your screen is going to go mostly dark while this plays.

SFX: [earthquake intensifies]

ERIC: Could you talk about the decision to add that audio — the sound of the earthquake — and what did you want to do with that? What was the goal of adding that?

WALTER: Well, that's a big part of the story, and the house had significant damage with that quake and some of the damage has never really been repaired so you can fully understand what this did. Sarah kind of abandoned certain areas of the house after that quake. I think it's a big part of the story, and it's one thing to have someone talking at you and giving some facts about the 1906 quake. It's another thing to feel the sounds, to understand that, in real time, that's how long that actual earthquake started. And while this whole thing is going, there's destruction. So I think everyone's seen blurry historic photos of the damage in the Bay Area of the 1906 quake, but I think if you can add sensory things and sounds and vibrations, it does make it a richer experience. When I got there, [we had] a lot of town halls and round tables with our tour guides and our managers and really understanding the parts of the tour that really resonate with guests and the things that they ask about.

And I'm always trying to find ways to enhance those points in the tour. So I think it's just if there is a technology or a thing we could leverage to further it, to make it a more emotional experience, we'll do that.

ERIC: This episode will be coming out in late October. Can you talk about what happens around Halloween? How does the house change? How does the programming [and] the tour change, and how does your job change, really, around this time?

WALTER: The nighttime event, which has grown significantly from the occasional flashlight tour that they did over the decades at night, it's now a fully theatrical show. We do more scientific ghost investigations and paranormal studies and lectures and things. Halloween nighttime is truly a show. It's a theatrical show, but the stage is Winchester Mystery House, so it's a pretty spectacular place to do something that time of year. Daytime, there might be different music. There might be theme food and beverage. The gift shop may be selling some interesting seasonal stuff, really beautiful decor to kind of make you feel fall and Halloween. But nighttime, typically anywhere between 16-17 and 30 nights in September-October, we will do a theatrical production. We work closely with a company who helps us produce it called 13th Floor Entertainment Group. This year it's called Festival Fright Nights. It's building on an experience last year, and there's a story and characters and takes over the entire estate, even the parking lot.

It's really a fun way to celebrate all things Halloween. The nighttime events, when we do that, we also do some Christmas programming and some other events throughout the year, eight or nine out of 10 guests, they've been here before, they come year after year. And during the day, even though we've been open over 100 years, it's almost entirely flipped where eight out of 10 guests, it's their first time. So the seasonal and nighttime programming skews a lot more local and it really is a tradition that they enjoy doing every year.

ERIC: When you are doing Halloween programming, when you're putting on this show, is Sarah a part of the story or are these original characters?

WALTER: Typically, it's a story that does not directly involve Sarah Winchester. We try to steer away from that.

ERIC: Why is that?

WALTER: Well, it's her house and the daytime is focused on her, and we're never going to do something where Sarah's coming at you with a chainsaw. We want to have respect for her. So typically, while she may be mentioned in the show, and it may leverage the fact that it is Winchester Mystery House and they may incorporate that into the story — like there's a new owner or it's becoming a hotel or something like that — typically, we don't feature Sarah Winchester as a character. I think it's more interesting to create a story where Winchester Mystery House is a part of it, but not necessarily her or her workers. So yeah, typically it's the perfect stage, but it typically becomes a different story.

ERIC: Something that came up when I was talking to Laura Fies from the USS Hornet Museum, she was talking about working with ghost hunter shows and similar things and putting on paranormal programming. She thinks of it as a kind of head fake in a good way, in a positive way, that if she can get people in the door of the museum — or the hull of the museum or whatever you call that — if she can get people in, regardless of their intent, and she can teach them something while they're there, she counts that as a win.

LAURA FIES: I consider ghost stories the clickbait of history.

ERIC: [laugh]

LAURA: They're going to learn history. We will teach them history during this ghost story. We'll inject it somehow and they'll walk away knowing something more. And if we have to wrap it into a ghost story, so be it.

ERIC: Does that resonate with you? Is that how you think of Halloween or is this a different sort of —

WALTER: No, I got to tell you, I think there is a lot of shade thrown at ghost hunters, at people who believe in UFOs, people who believe ... And there really is a holier-than-thou attitude and almost a permission to look down on those people that, well, it gets them in the door, but ... And you know what? I reject that. Who am I to say my interests are more highbrow and acceptable than someone who is truly fascinated by the paranormal? I've heard of other historic sites talk about, "Oh yeah, we do a flashlight tour and it helps pay our bills," and it's typically met with an eye roll or something, and I don't fully ascribe to that. I think that that might be the most interesting thing the USS Hornet does. I don't know. It's really up to the individual. I mean, if the White House offered a paranormal tour —

ERIC: I would go to that.

WALTER: Yeah, I would go in a heartbeat. And I think it's okay. I think people are hesitant to admit that they're interested in this stuff sometimes, especially in scholarly circles. And I don't think there's any shame in it if you're into it, because even the folks who claim they're skeptics and they're not into it, they're usually the ones asking the most questions on the tour. They're usually ... So I just think people have to ... It's okay. It's not ... It's a fascinating topic that's been around since the beginning of time, and it's not something to be ashamed of.

ERIC: I think the way, when Olivia and I were talking about spiritualism, the history of spiritualism in America, one of the things that she said was at this time, psychotherapy wasn't really a thing. In terms of ways of dealing with our questions and our fears about death and all that, this was a great way for people to confront their feelings about death. And I think as science and these other things have changed and moved, I think you're right that there's probably been a lot of stigma attached to any sort of belief in ghosts and life after death and the occult, things like that. And so it's this question of can you own the historical story of what spiritualism meant at the time? And then also, can you give people permission to enjoy and to maybe practice and to feel these ways to have the same experience that people in Sarah's time might have had?

WALTER: Yeah, I think so.

ERIC: Does that sound right?

WALTER: Absolutely. I think we need to celebrate all forms of how people spend their time. And whether you want to go to Great America or Six Flags or you want to go to the de Young or the Walt Disney Family Museum or you want to go to the Louvre or the Met or Winchester Mystery House, those can be in the same conversation. They don't need to be ... And I think there is such a alienating separation in almost an elitist fashion. I mean, look at my background, right? So Disney and Winchester Mystery House. When I go to different gatherings of museum types, I'm not sure I'm always welcomed in the same circles.

ERIC: Really?

WALTER: Just because it's ... I think the pendulum is swinging a little bit where people are understanding that storytelling, earned revenue, commercialization, merchandise, these are not bad four-letter words that we should [avoid] , these are good things. But I'm not sure that was always the case. I think there was definitely a little bit of a, "Oh, Winchester Mystery House."

ERIC: They have an attitude about what you do.

WALTER: Not even an attitude, just that it's easy to dismiss. And we are an architectural marvel that's been open for 103 years with greater visitation than the majority of museums and historic homes. Got to be in the top five or six historic homes in the country. There's no apology for that. We are who we are. And as you know, having met Olivia and Amelia, we have a team that is so dedicated, so knowledgeable, so passionate, so caring, so thoughtful, so kind. They just ... For a lot of these folks, it's a calling. They love this place.

ERIC: Olivia told me that when she trains new tour guides, she always tells them to “get lost.”

OLIVIA: I cannot teach that orientation. You have to just go in the house and go, "Okay, how do I get from here to out or from wherever, point A to point B?" And that's one of the biggest tests that they take of, "Okay, well, take me to the linen rooms. Okay, now that we're in the linen rooms, how do I get to the basement?" And watching them have to go through ... Because there's also not just one way. There's five ways to get anywhere you need, which is really convenient when there's tours in the house and you have to do the five D's of dodgeball: Duck, dive, dip, and dodge around everybody.

But it also can be so overwhelming when you're a new tour guide trying to figure out which way is the right way. It's a lot of fun, though.

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I'm sure that you have had a lot of interesting interactions with folks who are coming through there, both staff and visitors. Do you have a favorite story, like a favorite thing you've heard a guest say?

WALTER: Favorite thing I've heard a guest say? Oh my gosh. The mercantile, which is sort of the gift shop portion, the guests will spill out into the mercantile after the tour and my office is near where they come out. So if I'm coming down for meetings or just to take a walk in the gardens or hit the restroom, I'm constantly pulsing through. And it is really, really rewarding to see them coming off tour, engaged, smiling, telling stories to one another. I mean, there's so many times I'm washing my hands in the restroom and you're overhearing a conversation. And while we do research and guest surveys and things like that, hearing it firsthand is always really, really impactful because you could hear the family saying, "Oh my gosh, it was amazing. Oh my gosh, did you see that?" I truly think that when guests are coming for the first time, they don't fully know what to expect.

And they might have in their mind that it's, I don't know, a dilapidated roadside attraction or a haunted house, and it is such a beautiful estate and the gardens and the colors and the fixtures and the wallpaper, that still gives me a thrill. It's wonderful to see guests coming off tour and just really, clearly it left an impression on them.

ERIC: It can be a lot of things to a lot of different people.

WALTER: Yes.

ERIC: I mean, any museum, people can have very personal, subjective experiences. That's the whole point of this podcast is how these things are so personal to us. But you can go to Winchester Mystery House if you care about history, if you care about the legend, if you care about the architecture. There's a lot of different ways in, I would say.

WALTER: I'm a big David Bowie fan, and David Bowie, I got to see him. I got to meet him.

ERIC: Oh my gosh.

WALTER: I have an ashtray with his cigarettes that I should not have taken, but I took and it still sits in my old room in my parents' house. He, as you probably know if you're a fan, really ascribed to — which I think is frustrating when you're first listening to his music because you really want to better understand why he wrote this and what he means and what inspired this — but he truly was of the mind, frustratingly so, that the listener's interpretation of his music, of the art, was far more important than what his intent was or inspiration was in writing it. It is an interesting way to look at any experience because, to your point, people are going to leave with a lot of different takeaways of Winchester Mystery House. And to be honest, that's more important, looking at it from a lot of different perspectives.

If they had emotional impacts from different things they saw or different parts of the story that they heard, that's great.

ERIC: Do you have a favorite detail in the house? I know this is a really hard question because there's so many rooms, there's so many small details, but is there maybe something that is special, meaningful to you, that not everyone would notice?

WALTER: A few things come to mind. I think at the end of the Hall of Fires, which has a lot of different sources of heat, which we believe was to try and offset her arthritis discomfort, there's this gorgeous fireplace that, if you don't duck your head in and look around, you wouldn't even see. And there's this little kind of a bench settee thing next to a beautiful window and it's such a cozy area of the house where you would figure if all this heat was fired up and you're overlooking the beautiful central gardens. There's a lot of cozy nooks in the house that I think are hard to fully appreciate when you're just visiting for an hour as part of a guided tour. I don't know if when you take the tour or if you've only visited once, you would describe the house as cozy, but there are some little nooks that are like, oh my gosh, how wonderful would that be to curl up with a book or just take a nap or just ...

I love those parts of the house. And I also love the more majestic ... I mean, how can you top the Grand Ballroom in terms of the look and feel of that space and the incredible details and materials used and craftsmanship.

ERIC: In the Grand Ballroom, there's a hidden door with some secrets inside.

WALTER: Yes.

ERIC: Can you talk about it? That was one of my favorite things from the tour.

WALTER: Yeah. So there's a huge safe right off the Grand Ballroom floor, which, the story goes that I think people thought they hit a gold mine when they found the safe and it opens up to a smaller safe and that opens up to an even smaller safe. And the story is they found, I believe, an obituary from her husband and a lock of her baby's hair.

ERIC: Her baby who died in infancy, right? Yeah. It was a really tragic story.

WALTER: Yeah, just a few weeks old. Yeah. She had a condition that, unfortunately ,she passed. She couldn't fully process nutrition, and that was heartbreaking. That story, I think, has been told since the beginning that what does she really value and what would she put in a safe? They thought, my gosh, she was so wealthy, it's going to be gold bars. I think that's a really heartfelt part of the story. I think founding the hospital in her husband's name, the care she put into her family and the things she paid for, and that was one of the first things we did at Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven. The Winchester plot is gorgeous and beautiful, serene, just huge mature trees and rolling hills and the breeze and it's all the prominent families of Connecticut, Evergreen Cemetery, many of them are there. But a few years ago, I guess this is a thing on the black market, but someone had stolen the headstone of Baby Annie, of their child.

ERIC: Oh my God.

WALTER: And it's small, so I can understand how they could transport it, but I guess there's a market for these kind of dark objects. We were very sad about that and so we helped them. Those are things we take very seriously and want to make sure that we're doing the right thing by Sarah.

ERIC: I've been asking everyone this, about how they've been inspired by other museums. Are there things they borrowed in terms of the way they display their exhibits? But for you, I'll also bring in from your theme park experience or from any other sort of destination, what inspiration have you drawn from other places that people might go?

WALTER: Having a background at Disney where you learn storytelling and you learn how to operationalize story and how to share it in a three-dimensional way or four-dimensional way and have it hit all of your senses. So I think Disney is very good at that. And I think when I started, I built a relationship with the team at Graceland because I was looking at what are great examples of historic homes that may or may not have a famous person attached to them and how do they tell that story because there's so many different ways to do it. So I think we continue to be inspired from Graceland, from pop culture, from museums in both the for-profit and nonprofit space. I think Meow Wolf and Netflix House and Ministry of Awe in Philly. There's a lot of different places that are ... Especially the ones that are being built in actual historic structures with their own history, I think it's fascinating to see how they do storytelling in that place.

So we're constantly, we're getting inspired by everything out there, and you really ... Again, if people leave and you're like, "Oh my gosh, you just took the tour. How was it?" And they're like, "Eh," you've failed. I mean, they really need to have more of an emotional response, more of something that two weeks from now they'll still remember key parts of it and hopefully be our ambassador and our publicist and tell all their friends. So I'm always on the lookout. And as I mentioned, I think before we started, we just came from the Queen Mary and Catalina Island as part of Midsummer Scream down in Long Beach. And that's another great example of a wonderful historic attraction. And they offer tours and so we're always talking about what's the latest and greatest that your guests are enjoying, and we love it.

ERIC: Do you have any pie-in-the-sky goals for Winchester Mystery House, something that you want to do that you have not been able to do yet?

WALTER: Well, we certainly want everyone to visit. I think the challenge with many — probably all — attractions is always driving the urgency, especially if you've been lucky enough to be around for a long time. People assume you're always going to be there or they're going to wait till they have family visiting. So I think what we really like to do is try and get people to decide that this is the week, the month, the year to come visit us. And yeah, we've been around forever. And I share that with so many people. We have things close and I love history and I love old buildings and hotels and restaurants and museums. And as soon as they close, typically there's a big mourning and public outcry. But then when you ask the folks, "Gosh, well, when did you last go to that movie theater that you ..." "Oh, I haven't been there in 20 years, but I saw 'Star Wars' there and I went on my first date there."

ERIC: "I like that it was there."

WALTER: Yeah. But you know what? So I always, I tell my team this and we practice what we preach. If there are locations, especially historic ones, you got to go and you got to spend money and you got to support and you got to evangelize because these places need the visitation. They need the energy that comes with that. It's harder and harder, I think, to run any type of institution or business. You really need people's support. So if you love something, find reasons to go and bring people.

ERIC: My mom's spent part of her childhood in the Bay Area and I told her I went to the Winchester Mystery House and she's like, "Oh, that was a thing when I was in fourth grade and we never went." And she's in the Bay Area still. Now is the time. I'm going to get her there.

WALTER: There you go. Wow, I love that. I love that. Never a better time.

ERIC: Exactly. Last question I have for you, hardest question of the whole interview. When you're in a gift shop, what do you buy?

WALTER: These days, I have a beautiful 10-year-old son, Walter IV. These days, it's typically something with him in mind. So sometimes it'll be something edible, especially if it's something that's themed or local or unique. We love doing that. If I'm visiting a museum or an attraction that is out of state, I always try and look for, is there something a local artist created or is there something that came from a local farm? Because that's always fun when you get to try things that you might not be able to get locally. I also collect vinyl and I like books. So if it is the type of gift shop that might have a record, I'm a sucker for that. Love that, love soundtracks and things that are inspired by the attraction. And I do enjoy books. If I am given the choice, as much as I enjoy podcasts and enjoy different recordings, I still love the physical. There's something very special about that.

ERIC: It is. Yeah, it's so special. Well, it's also so special to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

WALTER: Thank you. My pleasure.

ERIC: Thanks again to Walter Magnuson for coming on the podcast! The Winchester Mystery House is open 10am to 4pm on weekdays, and until 5pm on the weekend, in San Jose, California. This year’s Halloween experience, Festival Fright Nights, runs through Sunday, November 1.

As you know I never leave a museum without hitting the gift shop and I bought some really cool goodies that are up for grabs in our gift shop giveaway. If you want to win a very classy Winchester Mystery House mug and this spooky magnet, then you should sign up for our free email newsletter at likemuseum.com.

Call ‘Em Like Museum is hosted and edited by me, Eric Johnson. It’s produced out of my podcast agency in San Francisco, LightningPod. Our social media specialist is Julia Wilde, artwork is by Rhe Civitello. Special thanks to Olivia Maldonado, Amelia Richardson, and Ashley Lagano. Thank YOU for listening, and I’ll see you at the museum!