In San Jose, California, there’s a mansion, built by a woman named Sarah Winchester. She was heir to the Winchester firearms fortune. It’s quite a tourist attraction today — a rambling hodgepodge of different architectural styles. It’s a builder’s nightmare but an eccentric’s dream.

The Winchester Mansion had its start in 1918, when Sarah’s husband died in the terrible flu epidemic. Filled with grief, she went to a séance and heard there a promise, spoken through the medium, that as long as she kept building her house, she would never face death.

Sarah began with a home of 17 rooms. The project continued until she died at the age of 85. The mansion cost $5 million to build, and was begun at a time when construction workers earned 50 cents a day. It has 160 rooms, including 40 bedrooms, two ballrooms, 47 fireplaces, over 10,000 panes of glass, 17 chimneys, two basements and three elevators. (“Winchester Mystery House,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House.) When Sarah Winchester died, she left such a quantity of building materials behind that the workers could have continued for many years.

Today her house stands as more than a tourist attraction. It is a monument to the human dread of death. “Death has been swallowed up in victory,” writes the apostle Paul. “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Would that Sarah Winchester had heard those words and truly believed them! Would that she could have trusted the testimony of those who heard the risen Christ say “Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”