alt Hacker News> That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades.
The house is run by an organization that has a very vested interest in playing up the supernatural element of the house. Some tour guides have gone on record discussing their frustrations with having to repeat known falsehoods to guests.
> Visit the house (the tour is rad) and see for yourself the architecture. There is no reasonable explanation for internal doors leading to sheer-drops, throughout the house, and other bizarre 'traps', apart from Sarah legitimately believing she had to confuse the ghosts.
Parts of the house were damaged by the 1906 earthquake and were not rebuilt. A lot of the weird path-to-nowhere stuff is "the destination collapsed during the earthquake", nothing particularly mysterious there.
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Wikipedia agrees with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House#Labyr...
>The house is run by an organization that has a very vested interest in playing up the supernatural element of the house.
Sure, but we're dealing in oral-folklore that's over a century old here. I don't see any reason to value the earthquake-theory over the ghost-trap theory.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Except, of course, that modern academia is opposed to accepting, or investigating, anything paranormal (see Wikipedia etc).
I first visited the Winchester house in 1985, as a child, and it sure felt ghost infested to me back then. You can't get more scientific than that. My sister (also a child at the time) peer-reviewed my findings.