Ghosts Had A Favorite Haunt

This article came from the Milwaukee Journal.

Oct. 21, 1985

Haunted Heartland Series.

THE NAME "Summerwind" evokes a picture of a stately home, light, and airy, expansive windows open to the breeze. So it once was. But now this mansion, on the shore West Bay Lake in Wisconsin's Vilas County, is a dilapidated ruin, its windows broken, its roof rotted and its dormers filled with bats. Summerwind is the most notorious haunted house in Wisconsin......

The mansion was built in 1916 by Robert P. Lamont, who in 1929 became President Herbert Hoover's secretary of commerce. For years, it was the Lamont family's summer home, a quiet haven in the North Woods far from the hustle and heat of Washington D. C.

Upon Lamont's death, Summerwind was sold.....and sold again. The house has had a number of owners, yet is still known locally as the "Lamont Place." Nothing out of the ordinary ever happened there.....or did it?

For six months in the early 1970's, Arnold Hinshaw, his wife Ginger, and their six children lived at Summerwind. Within these few months Arnold was driven mad by ghosts and his wife attempted suicide.

From the day the Hinshaws moved into the house they saw vague shapes flitting down the hallways and heard voices mumbling in dark corners. And every evening while they ate dinner, the ghost of a woman the family called Mathilda floated back and forth beyond the French doors to the living room.

For a brief time Ginger wondered if they were all imagining these things; but after numberous unexplained occurrences, she decided they were not imagining things. These occurrences included: A new water heater broke down, but started working again before the repairman could be called: the same thing happened with a new water pump. Other appliances failed, too, thyen mysteriously fixed themselves.

Windows and doors that were closed at night were open in the morning. A heavy window in the master bedroom, without sash weights or pulleys, was difficult to raise. One morning Arnold closed the window and started downstairs. Remembering that he'd left his waller on the dresser, he returned to the bedroom. The window was open! He drove a spike into the window casing. The window stayed closed. Months later, the spike was removed with a crowbar, but no nail hole could be seen!

The couple 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 told Ginger that they refused to work on that house.

The couple then realized that they would have to do the work on the hosue themselves.

One day they began painting a closet. A large shoe drawer was installed along the closet's back wall. The Hinshaw's rempoved it in order to prevent the paint from sticking. Behind the drawer they discovered a dark space. It aroused their curiosity.

Ginger got a flashlight and Arnold wedged himself into the openeing up to his shoulders. He beamed the light back and forth, then suddenly backed out of the opening. He was speechless -- a skeleton was jammed into the compartment!

Because there was a lot of plumbing and structural material in the way, Arnold couldn't squeeze far enough into the opening to be sure. The Hinshaw children then arrived from school, and their parents told them about the bones. Ginger said a bear had been trapped in the wall while the house was being built.

Their daughter, Mary volunteered to crawl into the space with the flashlight. Moments later she yelled that she saw a head of dirty black hair, a brown dried-up arm, and part of a leg.

The other children, thinking it was a game, wanted to see the bones, too. Each took a turn. And each emerged serious and quiet. Ginger made them promise to never say a word to anyone.

After the children skipped off, Arnold and Ginger speculated how the body had gotten there. Arnold suggested there may have been a murder while the house was being built and the body was dumped there. But the Hinshaws did not call the police, figuring nothing could be done about the crime since so many years had elapsed. Besides, most of the crew who had worked on the house and known about the crime would probably be dead anyway.

About this time Arnold began to stay up late and play the Hammond organ the couple had bought before moving to Summerwind. He always enjoyed playing in the evenings; it was a relaxing hobby. But now Arnold's playing became a frenetic jumble of melodies and chords, growing louder by the hour. Ginger pleaded with him to stop, but he said the demonds in his head demanded that he keep playing. Night after night, the family was kept awake until dawn by the awful music. The children were so frightend they huddled together in one bedroom.

Arnold soon had a breakdown, and not long after that Ginger attempted suicide. While Arnold was undergoing treatment, Ginger and her children moved in with her parents in Granton, in Clark County, Wisconsin. Ginger and Arnold eventually divorced. After Ginger regained her health, she married George Olsen. Her new life was happy and tranquil, and the days at Summerwind seemed only a distant nightmare.

But the past came rushing back.

Ginger's father, Raymond Bober, a popcorn vender, announced that he was going to buy Summerwind. He and his wife Marie would open a restaurant in the mansion and eventually turn it into an inn. They figured its beautiful North Woods location on a quiet lake would attract many guests.

Ginger was horrified. Although she had never given her parents all the details of her frightening experiences in the house, she begged them not to buy it. But Bober's mind was made up. He knew the place was haunted and said he knew who the ghost was -- Jonathan Carver! According to Bober, the 18th century English explorer was searching for an old deed to the land granted him by the Sioux Indians in return for negotiating peace between two warring nations. The grant supposedly took in most of the northen third of Wisconsin. The deed was locked in a black box and sealed in the foundation of Summerwind. Carver's ghost sought Bober's help in locating it.

But how did Bober know this? From communicating with Carver through dreams, hypnotic trances and a Ouija board, he claimed. At least thats what he wrote in his book "The Carver Effect," published in 1979 under the name Wolfgang von Bober.

Shortly after Bober bought Summerwind, he, his son Karl, Ginger and her new husband, George, spent a day inspecting the mansion. The group was just leaving the second floor when George spotted the closet at the end of the hall. He began pulling out drawers and looking behind them. Ginger begged him to stop.

George dropped his flashlight and asked what she was talking about. Until now, Ginger had never told anyone about the discovery of the corpse. Sitting in the kitchen later, fortified by hot coffee, Ginger told the entire story.

Undaunted, the men gathered lanterns and returned to the closet. Karl insisted on going into the space first. In a moment he backed out. It was empty!

Ginger's father and her husband also inspected the area. They saw pipe,s beams and insulaton.....but no body! Where had it gone? Who had removed it? Why? Or, had there ever been a body there in the first place?

Over Labor Day weekend Karl traveled alone to Summerwind. He had gone to get a repair estimate on the well and also to look for an exterminator who could rid the house of bats. He thought he might even trim some trees and tidy up the lawn if the weather was good.

It started to rain the first day and Karl ran upstairs to close a window. In the dark hallway, a deep voice called his name. The young man spun around. Karl saw no one. Perhaps it was a friend outside. Karl looked out a window onto the courtyard, but saw no one.

Karl closed the window and went downstairs. When he reached the living room, he heard two shots. A heavy caliber pistold, he surmised. Close by. Was someone hunting on the property? Karl started for the back door.

Once in the kitchen Karl found the room filled with acrid smoke of gunpowder. Someone had fired from inside the house! But an intruder could never have entered or escaped without being heard; the back door always stuck and had to be noisily pushed open or slammed shut. The other doors were all barred on the inside. Karl made a through search of the kitchen. He discovered two bullet holes in the door leading to the basement. But the holes were old ones that had been worn smooth on the edges! Karl left the house that afternoon.

In his book, Bober wrote that the original owner of the house, Robert Lamont, whome he called Patterson, had fired two shots at a ghost. But that had been decades ago.

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, Marie, understood the complaint. She was always uneasy around the house. Everytime she sat in the sunny courtyard, she felt someone watching her from the windows of the master bedroom.

On one occasion, her husband found one of the windows open that he knew he had closed a few minutes before, but he never mentioned it to marie for fear of alarming her.

If the ghost of Jonathan Carver wanted help in locating his deed, why did he manifest himself in such diabolical ways? Bober explained that Carver did not want any improvements made in the property and that he resented anyone living in the house or renovating it in anyway.

The Bobers never attempted to stay in Summerwind overnight. Instead, they cooked and slept in a camper on the grounds. And Bober spent many days searching the basement and chipping away at the foundation in efforts to locate the black box containing Carver's deed.

Will Pooley, a free-lance writer, visited Summerwind in the fall of 1983 to gather facts. His research had revealed that even if Bober had unearthed Carver's deed, it would have been worthless. Not only had the British goverment ruled against an individual's purchase of lands from the Indians, it was also later determined that the Sioux had never owned land east of the Mississippi River anyway. In addition, although the original deed apparently was found in an old land office in Wausau, Wisconsin during the 1930's, historians argue that it is very unlikely that Carver ever traveled as far north as Vilas County. Thus, how could the deed have gotten into the foundation of a house built 136 after the explorer had died?

Pooley talked to dozens of local residents who had some connection with Summerwind. They revealed the history of the house.

Herb Dickman of Land O'Lakes helped pour the foundation for the Lamont Mont mansion in 1916; he recalled that the only thing they put in there was stone. There was no black box containing a deed. Dickman also lived in the house for three months after it was finsihed. He said nothing unusual ever occurred.

Gene Knuth, Resident of the area for over 60 years, told Pooley that children started calling the mansion haunted only after it had been abandoned and became dilapidated. It never had that repuation while it was occupied.

Carolyn Ashby of Land O'Lakes lived in the mansion as a child durning the summers in the early 1940's. She didn't remember any ghosts, but admitted that the place seemed spooky, especially at night, because of its many rooms.

Other neighbors told writer Pooley that the Bobers spent less that two full summers on the estate. After Bober abandoned plans for his restaurant, he tried to get a permit to operate a concession stand near the house, but local ordinace prohibited it.

There is some uncertainty as to whether Bober actually owned Summerwind. One area resident told Pooley that Raymond Bober had tried to buy the property on a land contract, but was unsuccessful.

Is the myster of the haunted house based on publicity and the deterioration of a once-magnificent home? Summerwin's neighbors think so. And they resent strangers tramping over their lawns and driveways and knocking on their doors. Today, even charted buses disgorge ghost-hunters on the grounds of the Lamont mansion.

What do the visitors see? Only the gray skeleton of a Victorian relic in a grove of pines. Yet, when winds whine through the shattered windows, and doors creak on rusty hinges, and bats fly low in a sullen sky, it's easy to believe that something lurks behind those weathered walls

But, of course, everyone knows there's no such thing as a ghost. A longtime area resident Gene Knuth remarked, "I don't beleive in ghosts -- but I've been afraid of them all my life."

From the book Haunted Heartland wrote by Beth Scott & Michael Norman.

Blog Owner's note:In the 1980's Summerwind was struck by lightening, and burnt to the ground. Only pieces remain standing.

Related Posts: Summerwind Part 1
Summerwind Part 2
Summerwind Part 3