02. Summerwind Mansion

Badger Bizarre

Known since the 1970's as the "most haunted house in Wisconsin," Summerwind Mansion's ghostly legends have dominated the Badger State's folklore for decades.

Built in 1914 as West Bay Lake Fishing Lodge, it was converted into a summer home by Robert Patterson Lamont and his family in 1916. Lamont was a wealthy businessman and steel industry tycoon who later became Secretary of Commerce under President Hoover in 1929. Their time at the mansion was fairly quiet, according to the lack of written records and verbal accounts of the time, until the 1930's, when legend says Lamont was so startled by a full-bodied apparition in his kitchen that he attempted to shoot at it, leaving bullet holes in a door still reportedly visible decades later. This frightened the family so badly that they left the home suddenly after that event and never returned.

In the decades that followed, the home had several mysterious changing of hands and was vacant for many years until 1969 when it became the home of Arnold and Ginger Hinshaw and their 4 children.

What followed was the family being tormented by disembodied voices, paranoia, items seemingly moving on their own, a reported partially mummified human skeleton found hidden in the walls, and a descent into madness which led to the family leaving the home, and ultimately, an end of the marriage itself.

After being abandoned again for many years, the home burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances during a storm in 1988, leaving a stone foundation and 2 large chimneys as the only remnants of a once grand home.

In recent years, more rumor and innuendo have painted a possible much darker history to the home than previously thought...

Summerwind as it appeared, abandoned, in the 1980s.

The ruins of Summerwind Mansion.

Main Sources:

Bell, Devon - Haunted Summerwind: A Ghostly History of a Wisconsin Mansion

Cleaves, Enid; Nehring, Craig - Wisconsin's Most Haunted

"Ghosts of Summerwind," A Haunting Television Series - New Dominion Pictures/Discovery Communications

Attribution for logo design:

Red Claw Scratch Photo

Attribution for Music:

Trailer: Composer: Adam Phillip Zwirchmayr https://www.pond5.com/

Intro: https://pixabay.com/

Outro: Composer: Viacheslav Sarancha https://www.pond5.com/

Opening Trailer:

Ed Gein Sound Byte : "Hard Copy" - Paramount Domestic/CBS Televsion

Frank Lloyd Wright and Jeffery Dahmer Sound Byte - WISN 12 News - Milwaukee, WI

Jeffery Dahmer Quotes: "Inside Edition" - King World/CBS Television/CBS Media