Summerwind

West Bay Lake, Wisconsin

Called Wisconsin's most famous haunted house Summerwind did invoke images of fear and foreboding.  It sat among a stand of pine overlooking West Bay Lake in northern Wisconsin.  This once proud mansion had fallen into disrepair as vandals, bats and the harshness of the Wisconsin winter combined to reduce the structure to a  mere shell of it's former glory.

Many stories are told of strange happenings at Summerwind, apparitions of a woman in white dancing around the dinning room, a disappearing corpse in an upstairs crawl space, former owners shooting at a ghost, expanding and contracting rooms, spontaneous fires, electrical and heating malfunctions, windows opening and closing, strange sounds, attempted suicide, mental breakdown, and a hidden deed to the northern two thirds of Wisconsin. These and other events at Summerwind are chronicled in The Carver Effect: a paranormal experience by Wolffgang von Bober (aka Raymond Bober) : Stackpole Books, 1979. Bober's daughter, Ginger Hinshaw, lived at Summerwind until a mental breakdown and failed marriage led her to move. After Bober's failed attempts to turn the mansion into a restaurant, Summerwind remained empty and became a haunt for local teenagers looking for a good scare.

Summerwind was struck by lightning and burnt to the ground in 1988. Was it ever haunted? Who is to say, but the stories of Robert Lamont shooting at a ghost seem to be accurate as I discovered when I visited the mansion in 1987.  The door from the kitchen to the basement did indeed have two bullet holes in it. The door mysteriously disappeared some time between my first and second visit to the mansion. I have always wondered who took the door and where it might be today.

Bullet Holes in Kitchen Door

Summerwind 1987

Wausau Paranormal Research Society

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