Overview

One of the most baffling and largely unanswered questions concerning paranormal and supernatural activity in a certain location is: why is this happening? Sometimes, it is discovered that there was a tremendous amount of Satanic black magic in a place. Other times, a place could have been the site of grisly and violent deaths. Or, as found with certain haunted prisons like the Wyoming Frontier Prison just a few streets over in the town of Rawlins, all that pent-up energy and frustration leaves an indelible paranormal imprint. But for the Dean Summer House, located in Rawlins, Wyoming, it has a few disturbingly classic reasons as to why it’s haunted.

The Wyoming Frontier Prison, as mentioned above.

The History of the Dean Summer House

The house was constructed sometime in 1902. Unfortunately, there are no images of the house, but it was described as a multi-story house with a carriage house out back. Additionally, there was another connected garage that branched into an extra-large studio apartment off the side of the house. It was constructed by the first female doctor in the area, and the connected parts served as the town’s only hospital while the large part of the house served as her private residence. For years, there were unconfirmed reports of the doctor actually keeping bodily mementos from patients who died at the hospital, ranging from locks of hair to human skulls!

The city of Rawlins, Wyoming. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Vasiliymeshko

Dean and Summer, the Sisters

Over the next few decades, the property was altered to convert the older part of the hospital into a duplex, and another carriage house was added. In the early 1970s, a pair of sisters with the respective last names of Dean and Summer moved their families into the property. The activity was somewhat low-key and harmless to start. Lights would flicker on and off, doors would mysteriously open, and items would go missing and reappear in different parts of the house. With a combined eight children between the two sisters, they chalked it up to childish horseplay, but then things took a frightening turn. Foul smells began to surface, along with scratchings heard throughout the home. Late one evening, one of the elder boys was mysteriously picked up by an unseen force while climbing through a window and violently tossed into the wall across the room! The apparition manifested at times and has best been described as a solid black shape with long, ribbon-like tentacles that wisp around the entity to the point where it looks like it wishes to snare the living!

The Clergy

Clergy was eventually called into the home, and house blessings became normal. Over the years, the attacks lessened in both frequency and intensity before research discovered that the entire dwelling was constructed over an old Wyoming Territory church graveyard. In one of the ultimate sacrilegious moves, the headstones were moved, but some of the bodies weren’t! It is believed by paranormal enthusiasts that being built over the graveyard, coupled with the unethical and bizarre behavior of the doctor and her on-site hospital, has caused what has been locally known as the Dean Summer home to be haunted. Today, the property is a privately owned home and is considered by the owner to be very haunted.