Haunted Wisconsin by Michael Norman

Author:Michael Norman [Norman, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2011-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

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

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