Summerwind Mansion: Inside Wisconsin's Most Haunted House

Summerwind Mansion is believed to be one of the most haunted places in Wisconsin. What happened there to give it such a fearful reputation?

Summerwind, also known as Lamont Mansion, is undoubtedly Wisconsin‘s most notorious haunted house. It was built on the shores of West Bay Lake in 1916 by Robert Patterson Lamont. While not much seems to be recorded from this period, legend says holes in the basement door were the result of Lamont firing his pistol at what he believed to be an intruder…until the bullets passed right through it.

After Lamont’s death, Summerwind changed hands several hands, and spent some time vacant before Arnold and Ginger Hinshaw moved in with their children in the 1970s. It wasn’t long before they began to experience strange phenomena, including mumbling voices in empty rooms, doors and windows opening and closing by themselves, and the apparition of a woman.

But it wasn’t until the discovery of a human corpse in a hidden closet compartment that things got bad. Arnold began to have a nervous breakdown, often playing his Hammond organ in a frenzy late at night, while his frightened family huddled together and cried. Arnold said demons in his head demanded that he play. During this time, Ginger attempted suicide. Eventually Arnold was sent away for treatment, and Ginger moved herself and her children out of the house.

They had only occupied Summerwind for six months before it drove them mad.

Ginger’s father, Raymond Bober, decided to buy the house. He wrote about his time there in the out-of-print book The Carver Effect, in which he claims the house is haunted by the ghost of an 18th century British explorer named Jonathan Carver. Bober claimed this spirit was searching for a deed sealed somewhere in its foundation that gave him rights to the the northern third of Wisconsin.

In June of 1988, lightning struck the abandoned mansion and it burned to the ground. All that remains today is the field stone foundation and chimneys being slowly swallowed by the forest.

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