The Summerwind Mansion, as it is called, was a supernatural place that had such a story around it, it made the Amityville Horror look like a walk in the park. It was the tale of a house imbued with forces from another world that would eventually succumb to the elements one fateful night when a naturally occurring fire would consume everything within it, but not before consuming several victims along with it.
The victims would often lose merely their sanity, or sometimes even their life. After it was homesteaded in the late 1800’s, it was a fishing lodge and resort until it eventually came into the ownership of Robert P. Lamont, who bought the building in 1916. Lamont began “remodeling” the building to the point that over the course of one year, eventually became a lavish luxury mansion. Electricity was added, and several other forms of modernization were likewise implemented.
Soon after the house was built, however, rumors began circulating of the building. It was said Lamont was haunted by the ghost of a mysterious woman whose origin was unknown. Eventually the extraordinarily expensive mansion, which the Lamonts had spent a fortune remodeling and adding to, was abandoned. It’s said shortly before the sudden move, that Paul Lamont had seen a ghost and even shot at it twice before leaving the house behind forever.
Those who came into the house afterward would see mysterious shapes in the old structure, and would also hear mysterious voices speaking from around corridors or in hallways. Mrs. Keefer, who bought the estate in 1941 attempted several times to sell the place after owning it for a time and then passing on herself. Five owners of the estate bought and sold the old house and each suffered financial ruin and even in some cases death. Eventually the house, under its current owner, was struck by lightning several times on Father’s day of 1981, and burned to the ground. That night, as the fires raged, it was the last opportunity for many people who were present to look through the rubble to mention that the house had always had an odd haunted feel to it, and to wonder aloud why the lightning had struck the house so many times during the freak storm, and not the nearby trees which were much higher.
So what is there to this tale of a mysterious mansion gone mad? Is there any method to this menace, or is it merely another story of the beyond that goes only skin deep, but burns to cinders the second evidence is asked for? The mysterious history of the place combined with the witness testimony of its destruction and the details therein, seem to point to something incredible and most definitely unusual. Was the mansion a gateway to the other side? What was its real source of ghostly apparitions? And perhaps most importantly, what was the reason and occasion for the house to be burned down in the end? No details of the ghostly apparitions themselves seem to have survived.