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.
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.
As others have noted, the guides are full of tall tales. I grew up in San Jose and remember when the property next to the Winchester Mystery House was a drive-in theater, and before the House was fire-damaged. The B.S. was well-known even then. My father, who moved to San Jose in the 1950s, even explained it to me as a child after some friends who were into ghost stories told me about it.
I don't know if it's still there, but my favorite part of the site was the detached museum showing some of the earliest pieces developed by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. Easy to miss as it is not part of the house or the guided tour.