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You might have already heard about this house because the Summerwind Mansion is the spookiest place in all of Wisconsin. The dilapidated house still stands deep in the woods along the shores of West Bay Lake.
However, it was not always like this. At one point in time, it was a beautiful mansion fit for a king. And as you would expect from a haunted house, many legends and stories are retelling the tales of people who used to live there.
The legends might still be uttered and whispered by all the locals, although no one lives in the house because it is utterly ruined after it was struck by lightning and no one has tried to bring it to its former glory.
So let’s start with the first case recorded of strange happenings in and around the house. Nobody knows when it became haunted because it seems like it was always like this.
It was first bought by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Robert Lamont, in 1916. He bought it to use it as a vacation house for him and his family. The house seemed perfectly peaceful from the outside.
However, something dark was lurking inside the walls. The family used to come to this house to enjoy their vacation. Although the 15 years it was used by the Lamonts, they reported some strange things.
They shared these stories with their friends and family. Apparently, they saw objects move in thin air, strange voice coming out of empty rooms and disappearing shadows. And these might scare most people. The Lamonts didn’t let these ‘spirits’ bother them.
According to the Lamonts, everything seemed normal one evening when they were dining in the kitchen. However, that soon changed when the basement door flew open seemingly on its own accord, and a stranger appeared from the basement.
Lamont thought of him as an intruder, so he quickly grabbed his shotgun and filled this man with two bullet holes. However, the surprise came soon enough when he realized that the bullets apparently went right through him and that he was a ghost of some sort.
The Lamonts quickly ran from the house and never set foot in there again their whole life. The bullet holes from shots fired left as a mark to deter anyone who wanted to go there.
The Keefers only used the house to rent to other people for vacations. Many people claimed that the Keefers themselves never actually set foot in the haunted house giving the keys to the guests always standing outside.
The house was yet again sold to a new family in the early 1970s. This time, however, Hinshaws wanted to return the dilapidated house to its former glory. Although, they could not find any contractor that wanted to work in the haunted house.
So Arnold and Ginger Hinshaw moved into the house with their six children and decided to work on the house by themselves. One time when Arnold was apparently painting the wall of a bedroom closet, he discovered a small crawl space.
Unable to fit inside himself, he sent his youngest daughter Mary to investigate. The horror soon came when his daughter saw the pile of bones and a human skull with knotted black hair.
Rather than alerting the authorities, they sealed up the crawl space.
Soon enough even the Hinshaw’s couldn’t deal with all the strange and spooky happenings around the house. Ginger and her children always felt like that they were being watched.
Arnold also reported seeing strange things like apparitions, and he soon lost his job and began suffering from insomnia. Arnold and Ginger also started having marital issues. So not six months after, they decided to move out.
Ginger and her children left the house to move in with her parents while Arnold soon left the haunted house as well.
He tried again to renovate the house and turn it into a restaurant and an inn. However, the construction workers reported that they kept losing their tools and the rooms kept changing.
Ginger’s brother also saw a ‘replay’ of what happened with Lamont and him shooting the spirit. He too soon left the house and never came back.
Bober got fascinated by all the hauntings and started to communicate with the spirits with the help of an ouija board.
And he described that the actual owner of the house was Jonathan Carver and that the deed of the house was in the basement. They searched the basement but never actually found the deed.
Bober later wrote all of his strange journeys in a book in 1979 titled The Carver Effect. The house was yet again purchased in 1986. Three investors wanted to bring the house to its former glory, but all of their plans halted when the house got struck by lightning and burned down.
Since then, the structures of the haunted house remain daring for any passerby to come in and reveal it’s secrets.
