The most honest thing that can be said about Summerwind Mansion is that the ruins are real, the suffering is real, and the ghost story is almost certainly not. What’s left on the southern shore of West Bay Lake in Vilas County, Wisconsin is a stone foundation and two chimneys rising from the trees on privately owned land — the remains of a 20-room summer estate that cost the equivalent of nearly $4 million to build and burned to the ground in 1988. The building was called Lilac Hills when the Lamont family lived there. The name “Summerwind” came later, coined by a man named Raymond Bober, who also wrote most of the mythology.
Bober was the father-in-law of Arnold Hinshaw, who moved into the decaying mansion in the late 1960s with his wife Ginger and their children. Arnold had a nervous breakdown. Ginger attempted to take her own life. They left and eventually divorced. These facts are documented and not disputed. What caused their decline — isolation, the strain of an impossible renovation, something else — was never determined. Bober published a book in 1979 claiming the mansion was haunted by the ghost of Jonathan Carver, an 18th-century explorer who died in England in 1780, more than a century before the building existed. Journalists who investigated found no evidence for the claims, and multiple locals confirmed the property had no haunted reputation before Bober’s book.
None of this makes the ruin less worth seeking. A stone chimney in a Wisconsin pine forest, with a real family’s breakdown as its backstory and a manufactured mythology that became famous anyway — that’s its own kind of haunting. You don’t need a ghost for that.
Story Source: paranormalmilwaukee.com
Address: West Bay Lake, Land O’ Lakes, Vilas County, Wisconsin
Accessibility Rating: No Public Access — Private property, active restricted site, or location no longer physically accessible to visitors.
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What Others Have Experienced
Co-owner Jerry Olk told the Quad City Times in 1995 that he’d backed out of his stake in the ruins, saying that in everyone’s mind around the area, it’s still considered a haunted place.
— from Quad City Times (Jerry Olk)
Co-owner Roger Pfohl told the same paper that his life had been a nightmare since buying into the property: he lost a franchise business, his co-owning friends stopped speaking to him, and a psychic he brought in to investigate left in a hurry, saying the place felt too spooked.
— from Quad City Times (Roger Pfohl)
During a 2019 site investigation, a nearby resident’s nephew told researchers that as a teenager he and his friends invented several of the ruin’s ghost stories themselves, including a supposed haunted sofa, and used to sneak inside to scare off trespassers for fun.
— from Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee
