Summerwind — The Mansion That Would Not Stay Furnished
A 1920s lakeside mansion in the North Woods, twice abandoned and burned by lightning in 1988 — the most famous 'haunted house' in Wisconsin, whose canon is a 1979 book by the family that lived there.
Case File No. 360
FILE 01 The Legend
The house on West Bay Lake began as a 1920s fishing-lodge estate for Robert P. Lamont's circle; its haunting canon began in the 1970s, when Arnold and Ginger Hogan, daughter of the then-owner, lived in the house and published their account in 1979 — the foundation of the Summerwind file: a ghost of the fishing-camp era encountered in a bedroom, rooms that refused to stay furnished, footsteps in the halls, a woman in dining-room windows, rooms that changed size, and the discovery of human remains in a closet during renovation — the last verified only by the family's account. The house changed hands to the Bober family in the 1980s, who found it unlivable and left; it was struck by lightning and burned in June 1988, and the ruins stand, roofless, on private land. The canon is small — one family, one book, four decades of retelling — but its product is large: Summerwind is regularly called the most famous haunted house in Wisconsin, and the site (visible from the lake) remains a destination for kayak and urbex visits.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The Hogan and Bober family accounts, published via the 1979 book and retold in Wisconsin folklore collections, describe footsteps, unfurnishable rooms, a woman in the windows, size-shifting rooms, and remains in a closet; visitors to the ruins report disorientation and unease, and the foundation blocks remain visible from the lake.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The entire canon traces to a single 1979 book by the family that experienced it, no contemporary corroboration exists for the remains in the closet, and the 'rooms change size' motif is a standard exaggeration of old-house architecture. The lightning fire of 1988 is documented, and the ruins' eeriness is the eeriness of any roofless mansion in the North Woods — Summerwind is famous because it was written, not because anything was ever documented.
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