The story
Summerwind rose above West Bay Lake in Vilas County, Wisconsin, built in the 1900s-1910s as a fishing lodge and remade into a mansion by Robert Patterson Lamont, later U.S. Secretary of Commerce — whose own era contributed the first story, a shot fired at an intruder-or-apparition in the kitchen. The house's fame came in the 1970s, when the Hinshaw family's published accounts described window-filling apparitions, voices, appliances with minds of their own, and the notorious legend of a corpse found sealed in a closet crawlspace — claims investigated, embroidered and disputed ever since, with later owners and writers arguing every detail; folklorists treat Summerwind as the Midwest's great haunted-house narrative rather than settled fact. Struck by lightning, the abandoned mansion burned in 1988, leaving chimneys and foundations in the woods on private land, and the record must be plain: there is no public access, and the ruins are not to be sought out. Present Summerwind as a completed legend — its documented owners real, its hauntings a famous, contested telling.