Summerwind, once the Lamont Mansion, is a ruin on the shore of West Bay Lake in Vilas County, in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, and it turns up on almost every list of the state's most haunted places. It began early in the 20th century as a fishing lodge. In 1916 Robert Patterson Lamont, an executive of the American Steel Foundries Corporation and later Secretary of Commerce under Herbert Hoover, bought it, and the family renovated and enlarged it into a summer home.
The first ghost story belongs to the Lamonts. Servants, the legend goes, complained of hearing voices, and one night an apparition appeared in the kitchen and Lamont fired two shots into the basement door, after which the family fled and never came back. Nothing of the kind appears in Lamont's own writings. The house stood largely unused through the 1930s and was sold in 1941 to the Keefers, who used it for holidays but never lived there full time; in the stories Mrs. Keefer was afraid to go inside.
The haunting really took off in the 1970s, with Arnold and Ginger Hinshaw and then Ginger's father, Raymond Bober. From them come the disembodied voices, the cold gusts, the eerie organ music, the corpse said to have been found hidden behind a wall, rooms that changed their size and shape, Arnold's breakdown and Ginger's attempted suicide. In 1979 Bober, writing as Wolfgang Von Bober, published The Carver Effect, claiming the house was haunted by the 18th century explorer Jonathan Carver and his otherworldly land claims over the Northwoods. A 1980 Life magazine photo essay on nine haunted houses carried the tale to the country. Locals were less impressed. A neighbour said Bober never lived in the mansion or even spent a night there, but kept to a trailer on the property; at least two earlier residents denied it was haunted, and people in Land O' Lakes said the stories began with the book. The historian Gary Entz has put it plainly: none of it can be corroborated.
By the 1980s the house was empty, a hangout for teenagers that the sheriff blamed for burglaries at nearby cottages, and a town attempt to demolish it in 1985 failed. On 19 June 1988 lightning struck it and it burned. Neighbours said the strike woke them, and fire officials found nothing suspicious, though some still allege it was set. The chimneys and foundations stand in the woods on private land, closed to the public.
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