The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif.

“We find it delightfully unlivable here,” the Ghost Host says as you ride in your Doom Buggy through Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. “Each room has wall-to-wall creeps, and hot and cold running chills.”

Many people claim that San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House provides the same kind of creeps and chills, especially at this time of year, when it holds its annual haunted house. Most of the legends behind why Sarah Winchester built — and continued to build throughout the remainder of her life — the enormous and strange 160-room home have been debunked. She didn’t build 24 hours a day to hide from the spirits of the people killed by her family’s Winchester rifles, and didn’t design the home like the labyrinth it is to confuse those same spirits, who were intent on claiming her life as penance for building a fortune on firearms.

But still, people claim to experience supernatural things in the mansion. Even if the home isn’t haunted, there’s an undeniable aura in the place. There are staircases that lead to nowhere, windows built into the floor, a strange recurrence of the number 13, a “witch’s cap” turret with preternaturally perfect acoustics, doors that open onto nothing but a three-story drop to the ground below. It might have been named the “mystery house” in 1923 when it opened as an attraction, but even if they didn’t tell you before you went inside, you’d more than likely pick up on that air of mystery once you did go in.

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The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Calif., on Aug. 3, 2024.

It’s that air of mystery — and its ghostly reputation — that drew the attention of Walt Disney Imagineering (the creative designers of Disney attractions, once called WED Enterprises) when the company was first envisioning its haunted house attraction for the yet-to-be-built Disneyland. In fact, one Imagineer, Ken Anderson, even went to the house on a research trip when the attraction that would eventually be called the Haunted Mansion was in its earliest ideations.

“We believe there’s a lot of parallels and a lot of things that carried through to the final........

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