Winchester Mystery House cinematic/drive-in movie ad

I don’t want to dump a whole bunch of stuff on you at once, so I thought I’d just start small, with something that’s nostalgic for me personally, but which I haven’t seen in years.

There was this filmed commercial that played drive-ins across the Bay Area in the 1970s advertising the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. It was a pretty campy ad, using lots of filters and optical printer layers to create “ghostly” effects, and an over-the-top female voice kept saying, “Keep building!” I definitely remember seeing this during intermission at the Hilltop Drive-In in El Sobrante/Richmond into the early 80s, and presumably at the other drive-ins I went to as a kid (the Rancho in San Pablo and the Solano I & II in Concord). I’ve talked with it with at least one friend who remembers it (I think he mentioned the Burlingame Drive-In, on the peninsula), and a blogger makes a reference to it in this post, linking it to the Moffett Field Drive-In in Mountain View.

Anyway, I have a bunch more drive-in intermission things I still obsess over. Some of them are very local ads that I’ve lost hope in ever finding again. But this one was at least locally pretty widely distributed, fairly well-remembered, and it seems likely that someone, somewhere must still have a copy!