Summerwind Mansion

It was a dark and stormy night. Ok-it was really a bright and sunny August day. I had been working at my job for well over a year and a half and I finally worked the courage up to take a couple of days off during the week to have a 4-day weekend and travel to Northern Wisconsin to visit the haunts of where my mother had grown up almost 40 years earlier. Among my travels, I planned to visit the site of Wisconsin's most famous haunted house-Summerwind. Now my mother's cousin had a lot of knowledge of the place and actually knew Wolffgang von Bober, the pen name for Raymond Bober who wrote the book The Carver Effect, a story about his family's efforts to buy the old mansion in the woods and turn it into a restaurant. That effort had failed in main part because they believed the house to be haunted. My mother's cousin actually had many photos taken inside the place long before its notoriety resulting from the book release.

The mansion was originally built by Robert P. Lamont in 1916 who became US Commerce Secretary during the Hoover Administration. Mr. Lamont encountered many strange phenomena while living there and ultimately decided that the place was haunted and moved out in the mid-1930's. The tipping factor was the night he opened the basement door and saw a ghostly figure before him. He closed the door, got his gun and fired two shots into the door. When he opened the door, no one was there. The bullet holes in the door remained unrepaired as the house was abandoned and left vacant for nearly 40 years.

Without getting into a lot of detail, the Bober family was also spooked and abandoned the mansion in the late 1970's. The mansion gradually fell into ruin and became a local party hideout by the time I decided to check it out. I talked with my mom's cousin and got very vague directions on how to get there. I decided to try to get as close as I could to the area and ride my bicycle into the property. Fortunately the Northwoods of Wisconsin is very desolate, with few roads so I had a good idea of the general vicinity of the mansion. I also knew it was about a half-mile from the Michigan border.

It took about an hour to get to the mansion from the motel I had stayed at. Autumn was in the air and the feel was much different than I was used to living in the Twin Cities Metro at that time. I found what I thought was the road and drove on until I came to a large sign with "Gogebic County" written on it. Oops, that meant I was in Michigan. I turned around and slowly drove until I found a quarry where I parked my car. I took my bike off the carrier and started riding. Nearby I came upon a dirt road that seemed to be the way to the mansion.

"Interesting", I thought. "This almost looks like some sort of reverse psychology ploy to keep people out". However being cautious, I decided that I had better check out some of the other dirt roads in the area before checking this road any further. . I found dirt road that went up a short hill and seemed void of the tall pines that I would have expected to be near the mansion. I rode a little farther, took the right fork bringing me closer to the lake that I knew was near the mansion, and there it was.

At least I didn't have to return to the dirt road that had the "Do Not Enter" signs written on them! I started walking around the grounds and went to the area near the servants' house to get inside.

The mansion was in pretty poor shape and about all that was left was literally the kitchen sink. I was told that the basement used to have a billiards table but that it had been vandalized and demolished long before my arrival. I first went upstairs to get what I hoped was a good view outdoors. For some reason, my memories of being upstairs are relatively blank. I only noticed a few rooms and totally missed much of the upstairs while I was there. That was very uncharacteristic of me during that time. I did notice that there seemed to be a trapdoor in the ceiling leading to the attic. Not having a ladder, I was out of luck climbing up there. I went back downstairs and down into the basement. Surprisingly the basement was not completely walled in and in fact I was able to walk through arches on the side away from the basement door and I was outdoors once again.

Take a good look at the photo above. It's something I never really caught until I read information on the Summerwind website in 2013. The middle of the photo is out of focus, yet the nearby AND more distant objects are in focus. This is supposedly impossible although I believe this could be duplicated with a negative that wasn't lying flat when exposed against photographic paper. Haunting? You be the judge.

There wasn't really any more to see, and since I knew that I was trespassing on private property, I wanted to get away from there, and fast! My unbiased thoughts were that there was some strange feel to this place. And the fact that I looked at these photos well after my visit and wondered why I missed poking around in nearly half the house made me think;, did I have the jitters while being there, or was there some strange force at work? I know one thing, I used to get a lot of flat tires when I rode my bike, easily getting several flats a year. After my trip to Summerwind, I never had a flat on those particular bicycle tires again and finally threw the tires out after they wore a few years later. Coincidence? It was like the spirits made the tires puncture-proof, a fact even more startling knowing that I rode another few thousand miles on those tires during the next couple years until they wore out.

Upon my return to the town where my mom's cousin lived, she asked me how many fireplaces I saw inside. "One", I said. She said that some people saw one, others saw two. There were two fireplaces in the house. Did I miss one? I guess I'll never know. In June of 1988, lightning struck the mansion burning it down as well as the nearby servant quarters. Only the stones remain at Summerwind today. It was a fitting spooky ending to Wisconsin's most famous haunted house. ~Alan R. Stachowitz

Author's note: There are many websites, literature and media concerning Summerwind. Certainly the book, The Carver Effect, is a must-read. The main website for Summerwind (presently under a great deal of construction) is at http://summerwindmansion.com . There is also a DVD put out by the Discovery Channel called, "A Haunting: The Haunting of Summerwind." You ought to be able to find those on eBay or even Amazon.com.