Day 6: I go to a haunted house and invent a pillow hat

I did a few more things in San Francisco before heading out: I walked over a little bit of the Golden Gate bridge, I went back to Golden Gate park and went to the Japanese tea garden, drove by the Painted Ladies, and drove to the intersection of Haight-Ashbury. Saw a hippie.

Then I drove to San Jose to go to the Winchester Mystery House. Here’s the story of the house: In 1884, Sarah Winchester, distraught over the deaths of both her husband and baby daughter, began construction on the mansion. It’s believed that a medium told Mrs. Winchester that if she had construction going 24 hours a day, every day, then she would pacify the evil spirits that were haunting her. The spirits were those killed by Winchester rifles (being the Winchester widow, that’s where she got all the money to work on the house). Also, if she kept construction going, the medium said she’d live forever. So construction went on all the time for 38 years. Eventually there were 160 rooms in the mansion, and she’d remodel and redo them just to keep construction going.

The house is kind of an oddity because there’s weird stuff, like windows in the floor, staircases that go nowhere, staircases that you have to go up then down then down then up, etc. The guide said that there were two possibilities for this: one, that Mrs. Winchester did it that way to confuse the evil spirits, and that two, Mrs. Winchester did not have much architectural experience so she just did things wrong. When you have construction going for that long, you have some time to make mistakes.

The guide was a hoot….definitely some sort of fine arts major who had the script memorized and who worships Mrs. Winchester. Mrs. Winchester was obsessed with the number 13, so the guide kept pointing out when things had thirteen letters, I guess like that Jim Carrey movie. She mentioned that the tour guides clean the mansion and she was always very reverential when she talked about this task. But it would be fun to be a tour guide there, and to run around the house when no one was there. Plus, it would be the most amazing haunted house (staged haunted house, since I guess it’s already haunted by Mrs. Winchester’s demons). Rooms opened onto themselves so you could really turn around and get the shit scared out of you. At night…with a flashlight…that place would be off the hook. Let’s book it for my next birthday.

Anyways, in the tour, you walk about a mile through 100 rooms that only had one shower, and the shower was built to suit Mrs. Winchester, who was only like 4’10”. Crazy Mrs. Winchester.

Then I cut back to the coast, ending up in Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz has a big ol’ boardwalk in the best sense of the word, with rides and games and unhealthy food. I got the unhealthiest thing I could find, which was a sandae, which is two chocolate chip cookies with vanilla ice cream in the middle, dipped in chocolate and nuts. Although I should note that I got this before I saw the fried cheesecake, which would have won the prize if I had seen it earlier.

There’s also a beautiful beach, so I walked on it for a bit and stuck my feet in the Pacific. Then I drove to a Motel 6 that was about 10 miles outside of Monterey.

Now, as soon as I walked into my room, I thought, “thin walls,” because I could hear the television next door VERY CLEARLY. It only got worse from there, because the tv meant that just the adult was in the room. A bit later, about three boys showed up, who had to have been the loudest boys ever. The ringleader appeared to be Dylan, whose hobbies include yelling, wrestling, and calling his brothers gay, which leads to more wrestling. The popular move in this wrestling involved kicking in the nuts, as in, “I’m going to kick you in the nuts so hard,” or, “Man, you really kicked my nuts hard.” Every now and then, the ineffectual father would scream at them and then it would all begin again.

For awhile I just considered this cosmic payback for how loud my family must have been in hotel rooms when we were growing up, but then it started to bother me when I couldn’t hear the tv over the yelling. So I went and talked to the Motel 6 lady about switching rooms but the hotel was full. She said she’d give them a call, which I could hear from my room. It involved Dylan picking up the phone, throwing the phone across the room, and disconnecting the lady before she delivered her message. The dad yelled that he had to call back and apologize but he seemed pretty unconcerned with why the front desk might be calling him.

I think before bed they moved an entire futon into their room for one of the boys to sleep on. Just a futon that they had in their truck. It wasn’t so bad once they went to sleep, except they left their tv on, tuned to Blood Diamond, a movie which involves a lot of shooting. So I used a long sleeved shirt to tie a pillow to my head to block out the noise, and went to sleep. The pillow head thing I would recommend, because no matter which way you roll, there’s a pillow on the side of your head. On the minus side, it makes you feel kind of like a special kid who rides a different bus.