2 Best Sights in San Jose, The Bay Area

There is something for everyone at this longtime Downtown favorite. Dating back to 1972, it’s technically still a market (there are a handful of boutiques), but it’s really a lively, vast food hall with more than a dozen tempting choices and plenty of places to sit and watch sports on TVs or enjoy live music outside.

One of the Bay Area’s grandest and strangest attractions is the 24,000-square-foot, 160-room Victorian mansion once owned by Sarah Winchester, the heiress to a firearms manufacturing fortune. Much of its mystique centers around the tragedies that Winchester faced in her life, and the mystery of what drove her to build and live as a recluse in this sprawling mansion after the deaths of her husband and young daughter. The mystery name, though, came after she passed away and the famous magician Harry Houdini visited the home in 1924 to investigate the stories of ghostly visitors. Apparently even Houdini was spooked by the home, and so what was the Llanada Villa became known as the Winchester Mystery House.