sarah winchester, the widow of the man who manufactured the winchester repeater rifle-"the gun that won the west"- was an ardent spiritualist who spent the last decades of her life building a house to ward off the spirits of the indians killed by her husband's rifles whose sale gave her the funds to pay the craftsmen who worked without cease for four decades. a spiritualist medium had told her she would be safe as long as construction continued, and the house came to seem like the imigrant west itself in its insatiable desire for expansion. her labyrinthine house is often written about as a prefiguration os silicon valley, at whose hear it sits, like the minotaur at it's center. it was a labyrinthe designed to baffle the souls whose enemy she was, and at its heart was a blue room where she held seances (and spied on her servants).