Summerwind Mansion
Today’s entry will be my current google search history which is haunted Wisconsin locations. Specifically, Summerwind Mansion.
Way up north along the MI/WI border was a house built in 1916 by Robert Patterson Lamont. Legend has it that he was so startled by the ghouls of the home that he’d shoot at them, leaving visible holes in the wood and doors until the house’s destruction in 1988.
Based on the Wisconsin lore blogs I’ve read, this home drove away numerous families due to various spooky house-like reasons such as descending into madness, finding an unreported corpse in a closet, rooms changing dimensions, and the daughter having a friend no one else sees.
When I was young, we lived in Racine - my brother jake, mom, dad, and me. It was an old house, about 100 years old, with a kitchen that had a swinging door and relentless mice in the winter. According to my mom, that place was creepy as fuck.
One day Jake was sitting on the stairs (about four or five years old) talking to himself and when he came down by my mom, she asked who he was talking to and he said “that girl over there” and she asked what girl and he said “the girl on the stairs”, to which, of course, there was none.
Another time, my mom woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a baby crying loudly down the hall. But Jake and I were toddlers. She jumped up to see what the fuck was going on but it stopped when she reached the hall.
We left that house not shortly after.
Fast forward about ten years - we move from Kaukauna to Stockbridge. Technically, the rogue strip of Hwy 55 from where Stockbridge ends and Chilton begins, but the mailing address said Stockbridge. The house is beautiful, as old as the Racine house, and sits on five acres with a wooded creek at the end of the property. The driveway went in a big circle in front of our house and kept going up the hill, through some woods, then abruptly stopped at the top where there were just fields and fields of corn and wheat.
The house didn’t hesitate to get weird immediately. The first time I experienced something spooky was the first week we were living there. I had picked the bedroom on the south corner of the house, it overlooked the driveway and had the most windows. It was the first bedroom when you hit the landing upstairs, which meant it also shared a wall with the stairs to the attic.
The stairs to the attic. To get to them, you open a heavy, thick, dark wood door with brass antique knobs that never sit properly anymore, then you turn on a very old light switch on the wall that also doesn’t sit properly. At the top of the 10 or so steps was a big, heavy door that opened up and was almost always closed. So when the light was turned on, it just made a warm glow around the edge of the hatch-style door.
Anyways - when we first moved in, I started hearing a sort of muffled whispered arguing between a man and a woman, as if the couple were behind a closed door. This happened regularly for the years we lived there, and I only heard this when I was laying in bed at night. But my bed was against the wall that was shared with the attic steps.
Another time, I woke up in the morning and went downstairs, where my mom was sitting in the kitchen. I asked if she and my dad were up late talking or if my younger sister had been up late because I thought I heard a woman or girl’s voice talking in the hallway while I was half asleep. She said she was going to ask me the same thing. She had woken up to the sound of a girl talking and figured one of us was watching a movie or something, but then realized it was about three in the morning so she went to check the halls and it was silent, all of us in bed asleep.
One year, I woke up at exactly 3:00 am on the dot every night for months. At first, it seemed like it was just insomnia, I’ve always had trouble sleeping. But then I noticed a pattern if I checked my phone for messages or to play a game to fall back asleep, it always seemed to be around 3 am. So I started to deliberately check the time when I woke up, unable to sleep suddenly, and it was never a minute past 3:00 am.
Goodnight pals!