Winchester Mystery House. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

In a Halloween promotion, GeoSLAM has demonstrated its latest scanners by capturing California’s Winchester Mystery House.

The four-storey San José mansion covers some 7,315 square metres on a 1.8 hectare site, was built by Sarah Winchester, widow of firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester.

A sprawling Victorian mansion, Winchester Mystery House is renowned for the notable absence of an architectural plan, its mammoth size and the story that its ‘ground-up’ construction continued without cease until Sarah Winchester’s death in 1922.

Some of its more bizarre features include a ‘door to nowhere’ that leads out of an upper floor to a sheer drop, stairways that ascend straight into the ceilings — and a design fascination with the number 13.

Rumours abound of the haunting of Winchester House — and legend has it that it is marauded by the ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles.

Ghosts or no, GeoSLAM brought their scanners to bear — scanning the gargantuan home’s exterior in 20 minutes, and the interior of its 160 rooms in under three hours, according to the company.

GeoSLAM senior solutions architect Brian D Rosensteel said: “The Winchester Mystery House is one of the most complex buildings I have ever had the privilege to survey. However, with our mobile scanners it took only a few hours, when it would have taken weeks using terrestrial survey tools.”

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