Haunted Wisconsin

A walk along Lake Michigan can be a chilling experience on a late-fall evening. The Great Lakes are infamous for ghost ships. Ever heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald? It was lost in Lake Superior. But to hark back to older times, the book Haunted Heartland tells the story of the Griffon, the first sailing vessel on the Great Lakes. As the great French explorer, La Salle, and his men built the ship with a goal of reaching modern-day Wisconsin, local Iroquois  told them that their vessel would never float. An Iroquois prophet, Metiomek, is said to have cursed the ship and La Salle because of the explorer's pride, which showed contempt for the Great Spirit; Metiomek told La Salle that his boat would sink and that he would die at the hands of those he trusted.

The ship set sail on August 7, 1679, and battled through fog and storms to make it to Washington Island. La Salle decided not to continue on to Fort Niagara with his ship, and he watched it leave. His was the ship's last verified sighting. It is said that a deep, rhythmic chanting was heard when the Griffon set sail for the last time and that the same sound is heard whenever a ship is lost on the Great Lakes. According to the book, "La Salle was later murdered at the hands of his own men on a small Texas river he mistakenly believed was the Mississippi."

Perhaps the best-known of all Wisconsin ghost stories is that of Summerwind, a haunted mansion on Wisconsin's West Bay Lake. It was built by Robert Lamont (who later became Herbert Hoover's secretary of commerce) as a vacation home in 1916. When Lamont died, the house went from owner to owner until Arnold and Ginger Hinshaw bought it in the early 1970s. The couple and their six children were visited by a female ghost every dinner. Appliances would break and then fix themselves. Windows and doors would open and close of their own accord. Arnold's car burst into flames as he was walking out to it, and a mechanic could not explain why. Contractors refused to work on the house.

When painting a closet one day, the Hinshaws found a drawer on the back wall; they removed it in order to continue painting, but noticed a dark open space behind it. Arnold pushed himself in, holding a flashlight--and discovered what he thought was a corpse! He couldn't fit all the way in, so the children volunteered. They found a head of black hair, an arm, and a leg. Shortly afterward, Arnold broke down, playing jumbled chords on the organ all through the night, claiming demons were making him do it. Ginger attempted suicide. The couple moved out of the house and divorced.

Years later Ginger's father, Raymond Bober, bought the house. He said he knew explorer Jonathan Carver was haunting the house. Bober claimed to have communicated with Carver, who wanted a deed to the northern third of Wisconsin that he believed to be sealed in Summerwind's foundation. Bober later wrote a book called The Carver Effect, under the pseudonym Wolfgang von Bober. Bober experienced problems with the house similar to his daughter's and noticed that measurements he would take for a room one day would change the next, as if the house were shrinking and growing on its own. Even photographs would show the same room, from the same vantage point, looking noticeably different. If you want to know more, the Discovery Channel did an entire episode of The Haunting of Summerwind. The house has since burned down, and, because it is on private property, visitors are prohibited. But who knows where the spirits that haunted Summerwind are now?

What are your favorite haunted destinations?

Photo via Flickr users Mass Am Sam and lapstrake