Summerwind Mansion

Summerwind began in the early 20th century as a fishing lodge on the shore of West Bay Lake, near Land O’ Lakes in Wisconsin’s far northern Vilas County. In 1916 it was bought by Robert Patterson Lamont, a Chicago steel executive who later served as Secretary of Commerce under Herbert Hoover, and his family renovated and enlarged it into a summer home. Locals have always known it simply as the Lamont mansion.

The haunting legend reaches back to the Lamonts – servants supposedly heard voices, and one night Lamont is said to have fired two shots at an apparition near the basement door before the family fled for good – but local historian Gary Entz notes that none of this is corroborated. In fact the house was little used in the 1930s, was sold in 1941 to the Keefer family as a vacation home, and passed through several attempted sales before the 1960s. No ghost stories were reported in that decade.

The tales took off in the 1970s, when Arnold and Ginger Hinshaw, and later Ginger’s father Raymond Bober, owned the house. They described disembodied voices, cold gusts of wind, rooms that seemed to change size and even remains hidden behind the walls. Bober, writing as Wolfgang von Bober, set it all out in a 1979 book, The Carver Effect, which claimed the house was haunted by the 18th-century English explorer Jonathan Carver – and which gave the house the name “Summerwind.” According to a neighbour quoted by the Milwaukee Journal in 1985, Bober never spent a night in the house, living instead in a trailer on the land.

By the 1980s the mansion stood empty, a magnet for teenagers and vandals; in 1985 the town tried and failed to have it demolished. On June 19, 1988, it burned after neighbours heard a lightning strike, leaving only its stone chimneys and foundations. Fire officials found nothing suspicious, though some locals still suspect a deliberate fire. The ruins remain on private land, and the Discovery Channel’s A Haunting retold the story in 2005.

According to the 1970s owners and Bober’s book: disembodied voices and eerie organ music, sudden cold gusts, rooms that changed shape and size, workers refusing to enter, and remains said to be hidden behind the walls. None of these claims has been independently verified.

The ruins of the house – foundations and chimneys – on a wooded private lot on West Bay Lake. The property is not open to visitors, and trespassing is prohibited.

Summerwind appears in nearly every list of Wisconsin’s most haunted places and in books such as Michael Norman’s Haunted Wisconsin, Tom Hollatz’s The Haunted Northwoods, as well as the Discovery Channel’s A Haunting.