Haunted Wisconsin

Summerwind

The young Wauwatosa woman and her family were doing what thousands of American families do every summer: spending their treasured vacation days at a beautiful lake resort in Wisconsin’s North Woods. In this case the family was about as far north in the state as you can travel, near Boulder Junction, in Vilas County, only a handful of miles from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. One evening as the family dined at a nearby supper club, the family struck up a conversation with their waitress. Among the stories she told them was an intriguing one about a strange, crumbling mansion on West Bay Lake, near the Wisconsin–Michigan border and only a few miles from where they were staying. Not long before, it had been listed as one of the nine most haunted places in the nation by Life magazine. The story was captivating, especially to Mary Beth, the family’s teenage daughter, who listened intently. She decided to do more than listen to the tale—she wanted to pay a visit to the place. A few days later, she and several friends found the rambling, abandoned house, after some searching, on the wide lake’s pine shores. From a distance, the wood and stone exterior looked like a set from a horror movie, albeit not nearly as terrifying with the sun shining. The girls found that someone had tried to nail shut the doors and windows, but to the curious, drawn by the house’s growing celebrity, getting inside was not that difficult. Poking through the rooms in the hulking mass did give pause if for no other reason than its 120 Summerwind dangerous physical condition. However, Mary Beth and the others, excited to have found a “real” haunted mansion, carefully made their way through the debris of shattered glass, past sagging walls with moldering wallpaper, and tiptoed their way across barely navigable, rotting floorboards. They discovered the two bullet holes in a door leading to the basement, allegedly made by someone shooting at a “ghost” in the house’s early years. A big old sprawling lake house slowly succumbing to the elements, yes, but certainly nothing outwardly unnerving or supernatural. But that brief, daytime visit wasn’t enough for Mary Beth and her friends. Soon after, they decided to return—at midnight, with a Ouija board. Immediately they were struck by a sense of foreboding. “As we passed through the kitchen, we all noticed that it was about ten degrees colder than any other room,” Mary Beth remembered about that night. The group settled into a back room. Mary Beth and a friend sat across from one another, the Ouija board balanced on their knees, their fingers lightly holding the planchette. First they “asked” the board a series of simple questions, waiting for the heart-shaped marker to spell out its answers. At length, the pair was curious about the house’s reputation for being especially malevolent to women who lived or visited there. “Do you want us to leave?” came their question. They waited anxiously for the Ouija to respond. Slowly the planchette began moving, first to the “N” and then to the “O.” After a brief pause, it raced to the “W.” N–O–W. “We were all pretty terrified,” Mary Beth said. They hastily made their way out of that dark, dank backroom toward the wide door at the rear of the mansion through which they had come. The small group hustled out the door and into the pitch-blackness, but once outside, Mary Beth paused long enough to swing around and take a photograph of a second-floor window above the portico. Earlier, a friend had told her she had seen what looked like someone peering out. She snapped a photograph using her small 35mm camera and a flash. The night might have been deemed a fun, if somewhat creepy, midnight caper if not for what Mary Beth discovered when she got home. “I had the pictures developed and that’s when I noticed there was a face peering out of the window,” she said. “There was absolutely no one in the house at the time. Everybody was outside.” The grainy photograph clearly showed a wide, fieldstone arch entryway to the rear door, out of which Mary Beth and her friends had just fled. Tall weeds Summerwind 121 on either side of the small, sheltered porch threatened to overtake the...