CASE No.1 |THE CARVER EFFECT: The Haunting of Summerwind
In the far reaches of the Wisconsin Northwoods, the ruins remain of one of the world’s most legendary haunted houses.
Transcript of podcast narration:
The Northwoods of Wisconsin and Michigan cover a sprawling expanse of those states’ most remote lands. Though these dense and stunning forests of pine, maple and spruce have long drawn fishermen, hunters and others looking for a respite from modern life, even now few live year round in these parts—which are as cold and brutal in winter as they are idyllic in summer.
Along with the isolation have come, of course, tales of the supernatural—and the legends that have lived in these woods for generations and even centuries.
Madeleine Island in the Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands of Lake Superior is said to be home to the Wendigo, a supernatural predator from Ojibwe lore. When winter chills plunge and food stores run low, the Wendigo appears, with its heart of ice, empty eye sockets and a black hole for a mouth. They say the Wendigo influences the desperate into cannibalism and drives the sane insane.
The mysterious Paulding Light has been seen by ghost chasers and hibernators for countless years, all marveling at the elusive spirit orb seen flitting through a dark valley near Watersmeet, Michigan.
Between 1897 and 1992, at least four people disappeared without a trace within the so-called Ontonagon Triangle--a 50-square-mile area between Ontonagon and Houghton counties in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. No one—from police to federal agents to psychics—has ever solved the vanishings.
And in the summer of 1934, at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowosh Waters, Wisconsin the Dillinger Gang and Federal agents infamously tangled in a shootout, just weeks before Dillinger’s own death in a hot Chicago alleyway. Some say the lodge is haunted today by an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire that mythical night of long ago.
But no Northwoods tale of the supernatural can touch that of the fabled mansion whose ruins still stand, silent, on the shores of Wisconsin’s West Bay Lake.
The house called Summerwind.
A SIMPLE FISHING LODGE
The name itself seems to cast a spell on all who first hear of this storied estate, now crumbling, hidden in a sea of trees near the town of Land O’ Lakes. Originally a fishing resort, then a rich man’s retreat, the house was christened by a poetic later tenant. The name change—and the tales he went on to tell of the enigmatic Northwoods villa—would combine to carve into immortality one of the greatest of all American haunted houses.
The land from which Summerwind rose was originally owned by a Ohio native named John H. Frank, whose family moved to Michigan in 1877. Frank worked on farms as a young man, then relocated to Washington State, where he learned the blacksmithing trade. Returning to the Great Lakes area, he traveled between Wisconsin lumber camps and sawmills practicing smithing and eventually settled in the Northwoods on the idyllic shores of West Bay Lake just below the Michigan border. Seeing the potential of his stunning homestead, he transformed it into a summer resort, building a hotel and four cottages and christening the site West Bay Lake Resort.
There is nothing to suggest that the Franks era was anything but pleasant. When he left, John told a local reporter that he held deep thanks to his neighbors for the joy he had experienced there, and doubtless all believed another family would come to carry on the bright days on that picturesque piece of Wisconsin shoreline.
But that didn’t happen.
Somehow, in the years that followed the Franks departure, a dark and menacing something seeped into the very soil they’d left behind, rotting every floorboard and seeming to poison the very air itself.
THE HOUSE AT LILAC HILL
In 1893, Robert Patterson Lamont had been a promising young engineer working on the famed Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He helped to design the glittering buildings of the mythical White City that would influence nearly every facet of human endeavor. He sought out and succeeded in the world of politics, becoming chief of commerce under President Herbert Hoover. But darkness underlay much of his celebrity. His name would become linked to the Teapot Dome Scandal, and he was fingered as a possible sponsor of an antilabor terrorist group--and even accused of aiding the group in destroying the commerce building in Washington DC and its census records as part of an election fraud operation. Ten days before the Black Friday stock market crash of 1929, he told the nation that fears of a depression were mistaken and misplaced.
But by then, Lamont was planning his own exit. And in remotest Wisconsin he’d been overseeing the building of a paradisal escape from the mounting pressures of his floundering career.
In 1916, Lamont had bought the Franks property on West Bay Lake and set to creating a second home for his posh, political family. Chicago architecture enthusiasts are well acquainted with Lamont’s West View Farms estate in the North Shore community of Lake Forest, Illinois. The veritable palace was designed by noted architect Howard Van Doren Shaw in the 1920s, when Lamont’s veneer was just starting to crack. It was a showplace among many like it in the glitz and glam belt of Chicago’s rich and famous. But it was another Chicago firm—Tallmage and Watson—that Lamont tapped to build his Northwoods retreat. Construction was completed in 1918, and when the last receipts were logged, the twenty-room mansion had cost Lamont a whopping $125,000 (the equivalent of some three million dollars in 2024).
Lamont called the Wisconsin estate Lilac Hills for the fragrant boughs that flanked it in springtime when the family first went up to open the house for the summer. Large windows let in the fragrant scent of pine, and wide verandas overlooked the placid waters of the lake. It should have been heaven on earth. As in all good haunted house stories, however, Lamont’s dream retreat soon became a nightmare.
DARKNESS IN THE CORNERS
It was the servants who first noticed that something was wrong.
They said they’d seen shadowy figures, heard noises behind them as they worked, and smelled strange smells they couldn’t quite identify. At first Robert and the family dismissed their strange comments, but it wasn’t long before they came to believe. Small voices from the corners and an uncanny feeling of unease plagued Robert and his family’s days, and as the years rolled on, the weeks spent at Summerwind became increasingly clouded.
Then, in the mid-1930s, after some fifteen years of brushing off the creeping feeling of supernaturality, Lamont and his wife were at dinner one soft summer evening. The windows were open, and a warm breeze drifted into to the dining room, where a maid had just set down plates of custard and poured the coffee before exiting the swinging door to the kitchens. Picking up their coffee spoons, the couple suddenly stopped, spoons hanging in midair. There had been an unmistakable sound, soft and faint but definite—a noise from down the cellar stairs. It echoed gently from behind the cellar door directly facing the table. The sound grew, the initial rustling followed by what was doubtless the tread of feet on the wooden stairs leading down. The next moment, without warning, the cellar door began to shake violently and deafeningly, the noise thundering through the room and out into the peaceful dusk air Pale, Robert rose from the table and, as if in a trance, opened the door as his wife audibly gasped.
Behind it stood a thing the couple would later describe as a ghoul: a man (or something like a man) , dressed all in black, much taller than a man should be. It moved as if it were made of smoke, swaying in the summer breeze, without any form or substance at all.
Shocked out of his trance, Robert slammed the door, sprinting to the China hutch to rummage for a pistol kept behind the top door. Turning back to the shut cellar door, he fired two shots into it.
When he regained his nerve to reopen it, there was no one there. The bullet holes made with his pistol, however, remained as long as the door did. Years later, it was stolen by ghost hunters, after the house’s notoriety had taken hold.
Following their encounter, Lamont and his family fled the house, never to return.
Though it stood empty and dark for over a decade, it’s said that Lamont refused to sell it. The place that had literally frightened away he and his family had some kind of hold on him, and he couldn’t let it go. It was only after his death in 1948 that a new and even more disturbing chapter in the history of the house began.
NEW BLOOD
A Mr. and Mrs. Keefer were the next owners of the property and its increasingly unstable home. But though he loved the house on sight, Mr. Keefer unexpectedly died of a heart attack just months after the couple moved in, leaving Lillian Keefer alone on the grounds. Lillian didn’t share her husband’s love of the house; she began to sell off pieces of the property, the estate growing smaller and smaller as she painted herself into a corner, behind the walls of the mansion.
Finally, she, too, fled. When the house was up for sale, prospective buyers said she refused to take them through it during showings. She gave them the keys and asked for them back when they’d seen their fill. And though many fell in love with it—some five others to be exact—the financing of all of them fell through. The house seemed to refuse to give up its owner.
That is, until the Hinshaws arrived.
Ginger Hinshaw always said it was love at first sight when she beheld the house that first summer day, the shadows of the pines and firs playing across its blank windowpanes and butterflies flitting among the wildflowers. With her husband, Arnold, she snapped up the property and waited for the financing to go through.
This time, it did.
Enchanted by every inch of her new home, Ginger immediately set to redecorating it herself, painting the walls and trim on her own and filled with visions for what she vowed would be her last, permanent home after a lifetime of moving from place to place. After doing the work of an army of decorators, she realized her vision far exceeded her abilities. Wanting more extensive changes, the couple tried to hire workers to build out rooms and rework spaces in the house, but they found that no one would set foot on the property. At best, contractors would give advice—by telephone—on how to do the work themselves; at most they dropped off supplies at the end of the driveway, refusing to come any nearer. Much later, Ginger would later discover the reason for their trepidations, but that revelation would be a long time coming.
In the meantime, fissures were appearing, almost imperceptibly, in the Hinshaw’s dream house vision. Arnold’s formerly gentle nature had given way to bitter criticism, outbursts and moody reveries. Odd things seemed to be happening in the house, too. Windows would be found open after closing, and Arnold would accuse the small children of the deed, though they were much too heavy for the wee ones to manage. The children themselves told Arnold about the little whisperings they would hear, and the shadows that would disappear around corners. He brushed them off until he, too, began to see and hear them. More chilling still was the figure of a woman—a very much flesh and blood looking form—who would pass in front of the French doors of the dining room. Around this same time, too, appliances began to mysteriously break down but when repairmen arrived at the house, they would be found to have repaired themselves.
As the Hinshaws pushed on with their renovations, despite the malignant darkness that was growing, they took to painting a closet one day when Arnold removed a special drawer that had been built into the closet for shoe storage. Behind it, feeling for anything stored there, he grapsed what felt like hair and bone. Thinking he’d found a dead animal he summoned their young daughter and sent her into the wall to investigate. She emerged in terror, white as a sheet. It was a human body, she said, with hair and a skull . . . with arms and legs.
One of the many mysteries of Summerwind is why the Hinshaws never called the police after the gruesome discovery. It wasn’t until ten years later that any public mention was made of it. But though they kept quiet about it—or maybe because they did—things began to go very badly very quickly at the house they now called Summerwind.
It was Ginger’s father, Raymond Bober, who gave the mansion its now infamous name--and who would begin to document the events that, he claimed, had eaten away at the sanity of his family and the family before them.
And there were many, many to tell
One day Ginger found the original blueprints for the house. They had been wrapped around some object, and as she unwrapped the thin pages, she found cradled inside a Native American peace pipe. After the discovery, she became obsessed with the remodeling of the house, suddenly insistent on restoring everything to its original state, including the exact paint colors and wallpapers and furniture. What had been the happy home decorating tasks of a young wife and mother changed overnight into obsession.
In tandem, Arnold was developing an obsession of his own.
In addition to the whispers and whisps of things seen and unseen, and the mood swings and outbursts, another disturbing change was taking place in Arnold. He was fond of playing the organ he had brought with them to their new home, and the family enjoyed the occasional musical sessions after meals or on lazy afternoons. But as time went by and Summerwind began to change them, Arnold’s organ playing became relentless. He played it day and night, despite Ginger and the children begging for peace. He told them, through tear-filled eyes, that the demons in his head wouldn’t let him stop. If he did, they’d told him, his family would have to die.
Eventually, Arnold had a nervous breakdown and had to be committed to an asylum for treatment. Ginger left Summerwind with their children, and she tried to take her own life, The couple divorced and Ginger remarried. She thought she had left Summerwind—and all of its darkness-behind her.
But Summerwind had other plans.
Some time after the Henshaw’s tragic and broken departure, Ginger’s father, Raymond Bober, announced some disturbing intentions. Though the house had almost killed his daughter, destroyed her marriage and driven his son in law insane, he wanted to buy it from them, with plans to reopen it as a bed and breakfast. Ginger pleaded against the insane designs, but Bober was relentless. Just like Ginger and Lamont before her, Bober had fallen under Summerwind’s spell.
But as he tried to initiate the renovations, Bober came up against the same roadblocks his daughter and her husband had encountered years before. No worker would come near the place, though none would give a reason. He set about doing the renovations on his own, and commenced a plan for the changes and updates he had in mind, vowing to take his time and manage it somehow with his limited building skills. But his heart grew icy as he began to discover just why none of the workers would enter Summerwind.
As he went from room to room room during the pre-build, Bober was finding that the old adage to “measure twice, cut once” was of no use to anyone attempting to change Summerwind’s original design. Whether he calculated three times, four, five, ten or a hundred, the dimensions of the rooms were never the same.
Summerwind’s rooms could not be measured.
During a visit to Ginger with his son, Raymond Jr., Ginger (who had since her divorce become a hypnotherapist) offered to hypnotize her brother when she saw he was biting his nails, hoping to help him break his bad habit. During the session, all though of fingernails disappeared when the young man began to growl and speak in a deep voice, crying out” I am strong. You are weak!”
Thinking he was playing a joke on them, Ginger told him to be serious so she could help him. She resumed the hypnosis, but her brother soon interrupted her again with his now louder and more ferocious intonation of, “I am strong! You are weak!”
Ginger was beside herself, confused and puzzled by the behavior, but across the table, their father was realizing something he’d already feared: his son was now under the same influence his daughter had fallen prey to: the influence of Summerwind.
Deeply disturbed by the transformation in his son, and convinced it was the house’s tentacles around him, Raymond Bober Sr. vowed to figure out just what Summerwind’s secret was—and what the house wanted from those who came under its spell. He asked Ginger to hypnotize him, hoping to make contact with the presence who had spoken from the mouth of his son. She did, and during the session Bober began to speak as if he were back at Summerwind, walking its dark halls.
As she gently encouraged him to speak of what he saw, her father told of walking down the cellar stairs, there he said he was taking a box from inside a hidden space in the wall. Inside the box, he told her, there was a deed, and now he was looking at the name on the deed. Ginger asked him what name it was.
Bober answered.
The name was Jonathan Carver.
DEEP INTO THE DARKNESS
Jonathan Carver was a British soldier and early explorer of the American interior, and he was the stuff of Wisconsin legend long before Summerwind rose on the banks of West Bay Lake. According to the legends, Carver was deeded a huge tract of land in Wisconsin and Minnesota by admiring Sioux Indians who made him one of their chiefs. He later abandoned his American family and returned to Britain and married again. After his death, the deed disappeared, though seemingly countless descendants attempted to cash in on it.
Bober became fascinated by the supernatural dimension of Summerwind and set about digging to the root of its preternatural personality. After long days and nights of study, he published a book on what he claimed to have discovered. In The Carver Effect, he shared his theory that the enraged spirit of Johnathan Carver was very much afoot, in search of his family’s rightful deed to what was now a mammoth portion of the United States.
Now here we must pause to point out that just about every professional and amateur historian in Wisconsin and beyond has called the story of Carver’s lost deed just that: a myth, a tall tale, or an outright lie.
That is, every historian but Raymond Bober.
As in so many cases of alleged hauntings, Bober became entrenched in the occult in his efforts to aid the s- called spirit of Jonathan Carver, turning to Ouija boards, automatic writing and more hypnosis to continue his communications with the otherworldly resident of Summerwind. And as in so many cases of alleged spirit communication, the “spirit” of Summerwind sent Bober and his family on a wild goose chase to find a “black box” that held the Carver deed. They tore the house apart quite literally in search of it, but to no avail.
Many Northwoods residents claim that no one thought of Summerwind as haunted until Bober’s book was published in 1979—an event which brought no less than Life magazine to the Northwoods to document the story in a photo essay about America’s most haunted houses. Though Bober’s book had been far from a bestseller, the Life spread turned Land O’Lakes into a paranormal bucket list destination overnight.
Eventually Bober fled Summerwind, as had those before him. After, the same inhospitable atmosphere drove any other tenants quickly away as well. With horror, West Bay Lake locals watched their idyllic resort area become a ghost hunter’s playground. It wasn’t long before vandalism, burglaries and arsons followed.
THE SEARCH FOR A REASON
Many have wondered just what could have happened on this idyllic piece of land that it should have come to host what would be known—even now, some four decades years after its demise—as one of America’s most notorious haunted houses. Some wonder if, in fact, there might be something to the story of an angry, vengeful Jonathan Carver. Others wonder if it’s the flipside of the Carver theory that brought so much darkness to the shores of West Bay Lake, referencing the Native American tribes who lost their Northwoods homelands so many years ago.
Or maybe it was the dirty dealings of Lamont that somehow cursed the place—or perhaps some voodoo or hoodoo worked by one of his unadmiring servants.
Though West Bay Lake was known as a quiet community, it was not exempt from the accicents and tragedy that befall every human settlement on earth. Could some forgotten event have sparked to life the unseen world of Summerwind?
On August 3, 1914 Gaylord Grant, the teenaged son of a local couple, drowned on West Bay Lake while canoing after finishing his work shift at th future Summerwind mansion, which was at that time Frank’s West Bay Resort. A massive search with grappling hooks led to the finding of the body two days later. Years later, in 1929, a local man took his own life in a nearby shack after sending a letter to an undertaker specifying directions for his own funeral, butt his was long after the Lamonts had fled the house.
In his book Raymond Bober presented numerous claims about history of Summerwind— part of his attempt to uncover the true darkness behind the West Bay Lake horror house. Of course, many question the authenticity of these. One of these stories was told to Bober—or so he said—by a woman named Emily Forsythe Warren, an elderly matron who claimed to have grown up on West Bay Lake when the Lamonts first built their dream retreat there. But the beauty of the mansion and its pristine surroundings, she said, were fine clothes on an abominable reality beneath.
According to Warren’s story, Lamont’s father had been a carpetbagger after the American Civil War. He’d taken as a mistress one of the daughters of a former plantation owner, and later he pressed her into marrying not him, but his son. The two lived for a time on the plantation before moving to New York, where Robert grew quickly into one of the city’s movers and shakers.
The mansion he built on West Bay Lake was no retreat for his love. It was a prison. Emily reported that Lucy was writing home to her family about the terrifying things occurring at the mansion…not only the monstrous abuses of her husband--but that things the shadows did and said in the darkness.
Lucy had given birth to a son, and then a daughter, also named Lucy. But Lucy died as an infant, and some point to a grave in a copse of trees on the Summerwind property as evidence of the unsubstantiated tale
Lucy tried to escape back to her Georgia family, but Lamont found her and forced her back home. They say she was not seen again for decades; when she was, she was a shade of her former self, a wasted and wiry skeleton with the look of death in her once flashing eyes. Since her death, many have sworn to seeing the ghost of “Miss Lucy” on the grounds of Summerwind, and in the house itself, trailed by the scent of lilacs and lavender.
But who could this woman have been? Robert Lamont was married to a woman named Gertrude Trotter of Davenport, Iowa. They had two grown daughters and a son, with no children said to have died in infancy. Gertrude, said the Washington, D.C. Evening Star newspaper in April of 1932, had “lived alone for six weeks at remote mansion the summer before, sketching canoeing and cooking. She also loved to write, but not a word of Summerwind has ever been found in her papers.
Some have speculated that Robert, finding his Southern mistress to be with child, built Summerwind to hide her away, a day trip away from his home in Chicago. His imprisonment of her at the mansion, then, would have been to save his own skin and not because of jealousy.
IMMORTAL
After five years of battling interlopers following the house’s final desertion, Land O’Lakes officials in 1985 decided to burn Summerwind to the ground, but the plan never transpired. The mansion stood for three more years, attracting regular hordes of legend-trippers, curiosity-seekers and ne’er do wells.
Then, on June 19, 1988, during a storm raging across West Bay Lake, Summerwind was struck by a bolt of lightning. The massive crack of it startled neighbors from their sleep. A fire broke out in the ruins, and in the morning all that remained of Summerwind were its two massive fireplace chimneys and its lakeside stone veranda. When arson investigators came to call, all concurred that no human hand had caused the conflagration.
After the fire, a named Robert “Skip” Pfohl was one of a group of friends who bought the Summerwind property and its ghostly ruins for $20,000. They are no longer friends, and Skip told a reporter his life had been a nightmare since he bought the interest in the house. Since the ill-fated association began, he no longer goes anywhere without a cross on his person. *
The abandoned house became a magnet for the curious and a target of both salvagers and supernatural souvenir hunters. But it came to be said that artifacts taken from the Summerwind ruins have brought bad luck with them. Bricks, boards and other material mementos are claimed to have ushered periods of darkness, illness and financial ruin into the lives of those who’ve carried them away from their home..
Even stranger, some say the mere thought of Summerwind is enough to initiate such a curse.
No one knows, today, what’s to become of this fabled place. The current owner, Harold Tracy, seems to—like the others—keep his distance. When I inquired with a public official in Land O’Lakes about contacting him, the only information available was his name. Voicemails to those I could find with the name have gone unanswered.
And so, like the silent woods around it, we can but wait to see what the future has in store for the ruins of the house that had long lived in legend among the towering pines. The house that brought so much unwanted—and, some say, unwarranted--attention to this sleepy little corner of Wisconsin. The house that will forever live in memory as one of the most haunted the world has ever known.
The house called Summerwind.
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* Skip Pfohl was quoted in the Quad City Times ,October 30, 1988, p.2.