BELLEFONTAINE CEMETERY
Cemetery — St. Louis, Missouri
Status: Operating · Access: Open to public
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/bellefontaine-cemetery-st-louis-missouri/

The 1849 rural cemetery where St. Louis’s history is buried.

A cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, Bellefontaine Cemetery is filed here for what the record attaches to it. The 1849 rural cemetery where St. Louis’s history is buried. The file’s recurring figure goes by a name, not a description: the lemps. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 2 legends and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The grounds are open to visitors.

The cholera epidemic of 1849 killed 4,317 people in St. Louis — nearly seven percent of the city — and buried the case for anything but a modern cemetery along with them. That same year, banker William McPherson led a board of trustees in buying 138 acres north of the city limits; the board sent James Yeatman east to steal a superintendent, and he came back with Almerin Hotchkiss, the man who had designed Brooklyn's Green-Wood. Bellefontaine, dedicated on May 15, 1850, became the first rural cemetery west of the Mississippi River.
It grew into a 314-acre arboretum holding over 87,000 graves and what is effectively the St. Louis power structure at rest: William Clark of the Corps of Discovery, Adolphus Busch, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, William S. Burroughs, and — in the file's most recurring entry — the Lemps.

THE DOCUMENTED RECORD
The cemetery was a civic project from the start, modeled on Mount Auburn and Père Lachaise and laid out with Hotchkiss's rolling roads, lakes, and plantings across ground that already held graves — the Hempstead family lot on the site dates to 1816, older than the cemetery by three decades. The name came from Fort Bellefontaine and the road that ran to it.
The architecture became a record of its own. The Wainwright Tomb — designed in 1892 by Louis Sullivan for Charlotte Dickson Wainwright, a domed cube of carved limestone that is among the masterpieces of American funerary design — sits on the National Register. The Busch mausoleum went up in flanking grandeur. The cemetery now holds the largest collection of private and family mausoleums in Missouri, Union and Confederate dead in the same ground, and an accredited arboretum — the only one in St. Louis — over the whole of it.

THE LEMP LEDGER
The name the reports keep returning to is a brewing dynasty with a documented history of dying badly. The Lemp family built one of the great beer fortunes of St. Louis and then spent half a century dismantling it at the pistol's end: William J. Lemp Sr. shot himself in 1904 after his son Frederick's death and the brewery's decline; his daughter Elsa died by her own hand in 1920; William J. Lemp Jr. shot himself in the family's Cherokee Street mansion office in 1922; Charles Lemp, the last brewer, shot himself — and, the record coldly notes, his dog — in 1949.
The family plot at Bellefontaine is where all of it settles into the ground, and it is the plot the legend files as visited — figures seen near the Lemp graves, attributed by the telling to the family that spent two generations producing candidates. The mansion where most of the dying happened files its own dossier elsewhere in the archive; the cemetery is where the dynasty keeps its ledger.

WHAT WITNESSES FILE
Beyond the Lemps, the reports are of the usual cemetery genre — figures among the monuments, presences near the older sections — attached to a ground whose residents include a man who mapped the Louisiana Purchase and the painter who mapped the American mural. Nothing in the file rises above local lore, and the cemetery, which runs history tours and arboretum walks, does not advertise the ghosts. It does not need to; the monuments are doing the work.

WHAT REMAINS
Eighty-seven thousand graves under one of the finest tree canopies in Missouri, a National Register listing, and a Sullivan tomb that architecture students make pilgrimages to. The Lemps keep their plot, and Bellefontaine keeps the nineteenth-century city it was built to bury — cholera dead, riverboat fortunes, brewers, explorers — filed in order by lot number. The ghosts, per the file, are the only residents who go visiting.

FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified
· [Local folklore] apparition: Reported figures among the monuments. Bellefontaine Cemetery's dead are the site's permanent residents; the reports are how the living say they keep noticing. Local lore carries the account; no documentation has ever caught up with it. It is the sighting the place is known for, and it hasn't stopped.
  source: Bellefontaine Cemetery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellefontaine_Cemetery)
· [Documented legend] named ghost legend: The Lemp family plot is reportedly visited by its ghosts. The Lemps is the name the reports keep returning to. Bellefontaine Cemetery's dead are the site's permanent residents; the reports are how the living say they keep noticing. 'Bellefontaine Cemetery' preserves the telling; the record keeps it filed where it belongs, as lore. The name travels further than the proof; the sightings keep renewing the lease.
  source: Bellefontaine Cemetery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellefontaine_Cemetery)

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· [1849] Founded 1849; Clark and the Lemps are buried here. A cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri with this much on record gives the file real ground to stand on. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. 'Bellefontaine Cemetery' documents the entry. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Bellefontaine Cemetery — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellefontaine_Cemetery

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