Editor’s note: Every weekday in October, former Mystery House blogger Stephen will post an excerpt from his in-progress guide to the Winchester Mystery House. Previous entries can be found here.

Stop 9: The North Conservatory

As you leave the Unfinished Dressing Room, the guide will direct you across a hallway and into the North Conservatory, one of the many rooms Mrs. Winchester devoted to plants and gardening. The room itself holds a few interesting features, mainly water and time saving devices for plant care. For me, the big interest is not what’s in the North Conservatory, but what you can see from the room.

Once you enter the North Conservatory, cross immediately to the far side of the room. You’ll find an old hydraulic elevator in the corner, which is interesting enough, but you’ll also find a large window that looks into a locked off portion of the mansion. This is probably the best view of the locked-off portions of the mansion that you’ll get on the tour. Peering through the glass will give you a glimpse of the construction techniques utilized by Mrs. Winchester’s carpenters.

About one-third of the mansion is off limits to guests. Many of these off-limits rooms are used as offices, but some are locked because they’re too dangerous or fragile for guests to travel through. The unfinished rooms you see through the window glass in the North Conservatory belong to the ‘dangerous and fragile’ category of rooms, and even employees can not enter these rooms without special permission from the house management.

This particular locked-off area runs over two stories, and if you look closely you can spot a set of wooden steps that led up to the seven-story tower which collapsed in 1906. Although you won’t be able to see them from the tour route, the area also contains the only known remnant of the original house that stood on the property when Mrs. Winchester purchased it in 1884 and a mysterious room with no door or outward facing windows.