But that brief, daytime visit wasn’t enough for Mary Beth and her friends.
Soon after, they decided to return—at midnight, with a Ouija board.
Immediately they were struck by a sense of foreboding.
“As we passed through the kitchen, we all noticed that it was about ten degrees colder than any other room,” Mary Beth remembered about that night.
The group settled into a back room. Mary Beth and a friend sat across from one another, the Ouija board balanced on their knees, their fingers lightly holding the planchette. First they “asked” the board a series of simple questions, waiting for the heart-shaped marker to spell out its answers.
At length, the pair was curious about the house’s reputation for being especially malevolent to women who lived or visited there.
“Do you want us to leave?” came their question. They waited anxiously for the Ouija to respond.
Slowly the planchette began moving, first to the “N” and then to the “O.” After a brief pause, it raced to the “W.”
N–O–W.
“We were all pretty terrified,” Mary Beth said. They hastily made their way out of that dark, dank backroom toward the wide door at the rear of the mansion through which they had come.
The small group hustled out the door and into the pitch-blackness, but once outside, Mary Beth paused long enough to swing around and take a photograph of a second-floor window above the portico. Earlier, a friend had told her she had seen what looked like someone peering out. She snapped a photograph using her small 35mm camera and a flash.
The night might have been deemed a fun, if somewhat creepy, midnight caper if not for what Mary Beth discovered when she got home.
“I had the pictures developed and that’s when I noticed there was a face peering out of the window,” she said. “There was absolutely no one in the house at the time. Everybody was outside.”
The grainy photograph clearly showed a wide, fieldstone arch entryway to the rear door, out of which Mary Beth and her friends had just fled. Tall weeds on either side of the small, sheltered porch threatened to overtake the pathway. The flash illuminated portions of the house’s grimy, wood shingle exterior. Above the door was a triple-paned window. And through the left pane of that window, in the lower left-hand corner, there appeared the rather clear image of someone gazing out. It was a murky face to be sure, but a hairline, a pair of dark, hollow eyes, and the bridge of . . . its? nose stood in stark contrast to the surrounding darkness.
That mysterious “face in the window” photograph was Mary Beth’s permanent reminder of one strange nighttime visit to one of Wisconsin’s most notorious haunted houses, though most traces of it have now vanished.
It was Summerwind.
The name itself evokes a picture of a stately home, light and airy, expansive windows open to the breeze. So it once was. But now the famous North Woods mansion is no more. What Mary Beth and her friends saw that night— a dilapidated hulk, broken windows and rotted roof, dormers filled with bats, fieldstone foundations and broad walkways to the lake—all of that has virtually vanished. But that doesn’t mean the house or its many legends have been forgotten. It continues to fascinate and confound all those irresistibly drawn to a place that evokes the classic “haunted house.” Books and television shows feature its story, Internet sites and cable television “ghost hunters” debate its history, and even the occasional car disgorges inquisitive visitors at the isolated location. Perhaps its appeal has as much to do with its convoluted history and colorful owners as with anything else.
President Herbert Hoover’s one-time Secretary of Commerce, Robert P. Lamont, erected the mansion in 1916. It was reputedly built on the site of an earlier fishing camp. For years, Summerwind was the Lamont family’s quiet summer escape, a twenty-room “cabin” of high ceilings, multiple staircases, grand entrances, and several outbuildings (including servants’ quarters, a laundry building, and a boathouse) all nestled on several acres along several hundred feet of prime lakeshore property. Lamont and his family used it for many years as their summer getaway, far from the oppressive heat of Washington, D.C. When Lamont died, Summerwind was sold . . . and sold . . . and sold again but always remained the “Lamont place” to locals. The Keefer family eventually bought the property in 1940. They tried to sell it several times over the years but without success. New owners seemed inevitably to default after having insurmountable difficulties in realizing their plans for the property. And so it remained associated with the family until the late 1980s when the land and its remaining structures were at last sold for the final time.
Skeptics maintain that nothing supernatural really happened there, that any ghostly manifestations or unexplained incidents took place purely in the imagination of the tenants. Or did they?
The paranormal “history” that became indelibly attached to Summerwind seems to have begun in the early 1970s when Arnold Hinshaw, his wife, Ginger, and their six children lived at the mansion. Hinshaw’s father-in-law, Raymond Bober, had actually rented the house but let his daughter and her family live there. Within six months, according to the family, “ghosts” drove Arnold “mad” and his wife attempted suicide.
From the day the Hinshaw family moved in they say they saw vague shapes flitting down the hallways and heard voices mumbling in dark corners; in the evening, as they dined, a ghost they named Mathilda would float just beyond the French doors leading into the living room.
For a time Ginger wondered if they were imagining all this. But then it became too odd, too frequent, to ignore. The litany of mysterious events never seemed to end: a hot-water heater stopped functioning but started up again before the repairman arrived; a water pump performed the same self-recovery. Appliances died and were resurrected with astonishing regularity. Skeptics say it was because of the irregular electrical service.
Windows and doors closed tightly at night were open by morning. The lower sash of a window in the master bedroom, heavy and without weights, was nearly impossible to lift. One morning Arnold closed the window and started downstairs. Remembering that he had left his wallet on the dresser, he returned to the bedroom. The window was standing open.
The couple said they hired subcontractors to undertake restoration projects in the house, but invariably the workers failed to show up, pleading illness or non-delivery of materials. A few confided in Ginger that they just didn’t want to work on this house.
Perhaps the most bizarre episode reported by the family took place after they decided to finish all of the remodeling themselves. One day they began painting a hallway closet. A large shoe drawer ran along its back wall. The Hinshaws removed it to paint around it. Behind the drawer they found a hole in the wall and a deep, dark recess. Ginger got a flashlight and Arnold wedged himself into the opening. He shone the light back and forth, then suddenly backed out. He said what looked like a corpse was jammed into the back of the cubicle. Plumbing pipes and old building material prevented him from going in any further, he said.
The family’s children were in school, but when they got home Arnold and Ginger told them about the weird discovery. Their daughter Mary volunteered to take the flashlight and crawl into the space. Moments later she yelled out. She said she saw a head of dirty black hair, a dried-up brown arm, and part of a leg.
The other children looked too and somberly backed out. Their mother made them promise never to tell anyone what they had found.
The Hinshaws said they didn’t call the police because nothing could have been done about the crime so many years after it had taken place. Their claims of a decayed corpse wedged in the crawlspace were never substantiated by independent sources.
About this time Arnold began to stay up late and play the Hammond organ the couple brought with them to Summerwind. He enjoyed playing in the evenings, as he found it relaxing. But now Arnold’s playing became a frenetic jumble of melodies and chords, growing louder as the night hours passed. Ginger pleaded with him to stop, but he said the “demons”
in his head demanded that he keep playing. Night after night, the cacophony kept the family awake until dawn. The frightened children huddled together in one bedroom.
Arnold’s breakdown came quickly, followed by his wife’s attempted suicide. While Arnold was in treatment, Ginger and the children moved in with her parents in another northern Wisconsin community. The couple eventually divorced. In time Ginger regained her health and remarried. Her new life was happy and tranquil, and the days at Summerwind seemed only a distant nightmare.
But the past came rushing back far too soon.
Ginger’s father, Raymond Bober, announced that he would purchase Summerwind and there, with his wife, open a restaurant and perhaps an inn. He thought the beautiful North Woods location on a tranquil lake would attract a steady stream of customers.
Ginger was horrified. Although she had never given her parents all the details of the frightening experiences in the house, she begged them not to move in. But Bober’s mind was made up. Further, he knew the place was haunted and he said he knew who the ghost was—the eighteenth-century English explorer Jonathan Carver! Bober claimed that Carver was searching for an old deed to the land granted to him by the Sioux Indians in return for negotiating peace between two warring nations. The grant supposedly took in most of the northern third of Wisconsin. The deed itself was locked in a black box and sealed in the foundation of Summerwind. Carver’s ghost was seeking Bober’s help in locating it.
And how did Bober know all this? He communicated with Carver through dreams, hypnotic trances, and a Ouija board. At least that’s what he claimed in his book, The Carver Effect, published under the pseudonym Wolfgang von Bober.
Shortly after Bober moved into Summerwind, he, his son, Ginger, and her new husband spent a full day inspecting the mansion. The group was just leaving the second floor when Ginger’s husband George spotted the closet at the end of the hall. He began pulling out drawers and looking behind it. Ginger begged him to stop. He didn’t know what she was talking about, but later around the kitchen table she told the small group the entire story.
The men were undaunted at the prospect of finding a corpse. With flash-lights in hand, they returned to the closet, moved the shoe chest away from the wall, and found the crawl space. Ginger’s brother was first in, but backed out in a few minutes. What did he find? Pipes, beams, insulation, and debris but that was all—nothing even remotely like a corpse.
One by one the other men poked around the tight space. Where had the body gone? Had someone removed it? Or had there never been a body there in the first place?
Over the following Labor Day weekend, Karl Bober, Ginger’s brother, traveled alone to Summerwind. He had gone to get a repair estimate on the outside water well and also to look for an exterminator who could rid the house of its profuse bat population. He thought he might even trim some trees and tidy up the lawn if the good weather prevailed and he had some extra time.
The story he later told claimed that when it started to rain on the first day, he ran upstairs to make sure the windows were closed. In the long, dark hallway, a deep voice suddenly called out his name. The young man spun around just as the disembodied voice repeated the greeting. In the quiet that followed, no one showed his face.
Bober closed the windows and went back downstairs. But when he reached the living room, he was again shocked when two pistol shots rang out from somewhere close by. He couldn’t tell if they’d come from within or outside the house.
He found the kitchen filled with the acrid smoke of gunpowder. It seemed that someone had fired from inside the house. How could an intruder have entered or left without Karl knowing? The back door always stuck and had to be noisily pushed open or slammed shut, and the other doors all had inside security bars across them.
A quick look around the room led to the discovery of two bullet holes in the basement door. But those holes looked as if they’d been there for some time, worn smooth around the edges. Karl Bober left the house that afternoon.
In his book, Raymond Bober wrote that the original owner of the house, Robert Lamont, whom he called Patterson, had fired twice at a ghost, though there was nothing to substantiate the claim. And that had been many decades earlier.
Raymond Bober’s attempts to renovate the house were as futile as those of his daughter. Workmen refused to stay on the job, complaining about being watched by “evil eyes.” Bober’s wife understood that complaint. She was always uneasy around the house. Every time she sat in the sunny courtyard it seemed that someone watched her from the windows of the master bedroom.
Most disturbing to Bober, he reported, was his discovery that the mansion apparently shrank and expanded at will. Bober said he measured rooms one day only to find their dimensions different the next. Usually his measurements were larger than those given on the house blueprints. Through measuring rooms, Bober estimated he could seat one hundred fifty people if he created a restaurant on the main floor, but after he laid out the plans on the blueprints, he realized the place would seat no more than seventy-five.
He said photographs he took from the same position with the same camera and only a few seconds apart likewise displayed amazing distortions of space. The living room in particular seemed to expand and contract.
On one occasion Bober compared his pictures of the living room with those Ginger had taken before she and her family had moved in. Ginger’s pictures showed curtains at the living room windows, which she took down after she moved in. Bober said the curtains “reappeared” in the photograph he took.
If indeed the ghost of Jonathan Carver wanted help in finding his “deed,” why did he manifest himself in such diabolical ways? Bober explained this by saying Carver did not want any improvements made in the property and that he resented anyone living in the house or renovating it in any manner whatsoever.
The Bobers never attempted to stay in Summerwind. Instead they cooked and slept in a camper on the property. And what of Jonathan Carver’s hidden deed? Bober spent many days unsuccessfully searching the basement and chipping away at the foundation in a futile effort to find it.
Wisconsin writer Will Pooley was among the first to visit Summerwind with the aim of discovering the truths hidden behind the old mansion’s many tales. He found, for instance, that even if Bober had come across Carver’s deed, it would have been worthless. Not only had the British government ruled against an individual’s purchase of lands from the Indians, but it was also later determined that the Sioux had never owned land east of the Mississippi River.
In addition, although the original deed was apparently found during the 1930s in an old land office in Wausau, Wisconsin, historians argue that it is very unlikely Carver ever traveled as far north as Vilas County. Thus, how could the deed have been sealed up in the foundation of a house built 136 years after the explorer died?
Neighbors, too, were skeptical of the supernatural claims.
Herb Dickman of Land O’Lakes helped pour the foundation for the Lamont mansion. He recalled that the only thing they put in there was stone. There was no black box. Dickman also lived in the house for three months after it was finished. He said nothing unusual ever occurred there during that time.
Another sixty-year neighbor said the mansion didn’t get a reputation for being haunted until after it had been abandoned and dilapidated. It never had that reputation while it was occupied, save for the short-lived Hinshaw and Bober occupancy.
Carolyn Ashby, also of Land O’Lakes, spent a number of summers in the mansion as a child. She didn’t remember any ghosts about the premises, but she did admit that the place seemed “spooky” at night, especially with the large number of drafty old rooms.
Other neighbors told Pooley that the Bobers spent less than two full summers on the estate. Bober abandoned plans for his restaurant, but then tried to get a government permit to operate a concession stand near the house; a local ordinance prohibited it. At one time Bober toured the country with a nineteenth-century popcorn wagon.
Also, there is some uncertainty as to whether Bober ever actually owned Summerwind; instead, he may have been trying unsuccessfully to buy it on a contract for deed basis.
Is the mystique of this Wisconsin haunted house based on publicity and the gradual disintegration of a once-magnificent home? Summerwind’s neighbors thought so. And they resented strangers tramping over lawns and driveways to get there, or knocking on their doors at all hours of the day. At one time there were even chartered buses that disgorged amateur “ghost hunters” onto the grounds.
And what did the visitors see? Only the gray, bat-and-guano-filled skeleton of a turn-of-the-century relic decaying in a grove of scrub oak and gaunt northern pines. Yet for even the most skeptical of visitors, when the winds blew through the shattered windows and the doors creaked on rusted hinges, it was easy to believe that something lurked behind those weathered, crumbling walls.
Even today, long after a lightning-generated late night fire left Summer-wind a smoldering relic, the mansion’s isolation and lingering questions about all that went on there keep television producers and Internet sites speculating on its haunted history. Even its few remaining traces—part of a massive wall, sections of stone steps descending to the lake, a portion of a fieldstone fireplace and chimney—add to the unnerving feeling that the place might well have once harbored spirits.
Perhaps its allure, and its thrill, come from imagining what a young Wauwatosa woman experienced on that late-night visit: a stern warning from one of Summerwind’s undying occupants to go away, and possibly even a glimpse of its pallid face. One long-time area resident may have put it best when he said, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve been afraid of them all my life.”
Haunted Wisconsin Page 16