New Discoveries At the Winchester Mystery House

I wasn't going to do another entry about my work yet but I'm just still so thrilled by what happened at work today that I really can't help myself! I turn 26 in three days, and as a birthday present to me I suppose, Mrs. Winchester's "beautiful but bizarre"™ mansion has revealed some more of its beautiful secrets!

Today at work, I was cleaning before the tour when I noticed two of my superiors in the tour department crouched in the tiny closet in the Carriage Entrance Hall. I questioned what they were doing in there (it's a very tiny closet) and one of them told me they had found a dry well:

The way Mrs. Winchester's dry well system works is that all the rain gutters and water pipes in the house drain out into these dry wells, and each well is connected to the others. So the first one collects water from some pipes and drains to the next one, which gets the water from the first well and some more pipes and drains to the next, which gets all that water plus more water from more pipes and so on. Some of the wells were lost when the property got smaller after her death, but the current theory is that these wells would have been draining towards the orchards to give them more water, based on the direction of water flow in the wells we do have. (And they're all over the property. You can see one in this photo under the grate.)

The discovery of another well was big enough in and of itself. This means that the Carriage Entrance Hall must be a relatively late addition to the House, because that well would have been outside, which is exciting because it helps us piece together when more of the House was built. The history nut in me was, of course, excited. But we didn't know which pipes drain into this particular well.

So we did the only thing we could do to try and find out. We got buckets of water and poured water into sinks and storm drains near the well to see if any water went into it. We haven't yet found any pipes that go into this particular well, but this experiment led us to yet another discovery.

When one of my coworkers poured some water into the daisy-shaped drain in the post-1906 kitchen (the House has 6 kitchens so they have titles to distinguish them) and we checked the small courtyard near it to see if that pipe went in the direction of the well-in-the-closet, we heard water trickling somewhere beneath the mass of ivy that's taken over half of that courtyard.

One of the two guys with me told me to go get some hedge clippers, which I did eagerly. He began clipping the ivy, while the other guy and I helped pull it away. Words cannot describe the chills that went down my spine as we did this only to uncover another well.

I was thrilled! To have discovered two wells we didn't know about was huge, and the fact that I got to be part of that discovery, to help uncover a piece of a history I love - that means more to me than I have words for. Even if we couldn't find the pipes that led to the closet-well, the fact that we know the daisy-drain goes into this well is a really awesome discovery too!

Oh, but the thrills don't stop there.

We continued to clip the ivy and also found this:

What you are looking at is a square-shaped hole that had once been lined with wood, but the wood walls mostly caved in over time. You can see one wood wall near the top of the photo by my coworkers hand. Other than a lot of dirt, all that we found in the hole is what you see there in that picture: A valve.

We have no idea what that valve is for. We don't know what it did, but it is original. It is Mrs. Winchester's. A century ago, her servants turned that valve so it would do something.

Now, as of this writing, these discoveries still need to be studied more. But the fact that I got to help with the discovery stage? That's a bigger gift than I have words to express, and I'm still so pumped up over it.

-Nym-