Lemp Mansion

John Adam Lemp arrived in St. Louis from Eschwege, Germany, in 1838 and ran a grocery at Sixth and Morgan whose distinguishing product was the lager beer he brewed himself. By 1840 he had abandoned groceries for the Western Brewery on South Second Street, using the natural caves beneath the city to age the beer. He died in 1862 a millionaire. His son William J. Lemp built the business into an industrial empire — the William J. Lemp Brewing Company formally from November 1, 1892 — and launched the Falstaff label in 1896.

The collapse is equally well documented. William's favored son Frederick died of heart trouble in 1901, and the father never recovered. Prohibition finished what grief started: the brewery closed its doors permanently in 1919, sold the Falstaff label to Joseph Griesedieck in 1920, and in 1922 the entire brewery complex went at auction to the International Shoe Company for a fraction of its former value.

The register reads as follows. William J. Lemp, February 13, 1904, in the mansion. His daughter Elsa Lemp Wright, 1920 — found shot through the heart; her brother Billy, arriving at the scene, is reported to have remarked: that is the Lemp family for you. Billy himself — William J. Lemp Jr., who had converted part of the mansion to company offices — shot himself through the heart in his office on December 29, 1922, six months after the brewery was auctioned. Charles Lemp, the last of the line in the house, shot his dog and then himself in his bed in 1949. He was the only one to leave a note: in case I am found dead, blame it on no one but me.

The family rests, mostly, in the Lemp Mausoleum at Bellefontaine Cemetery — even Billy and the divorced wife he had buried beside their son, the so-called Lavender Lady whose divorce proceedings had aired the family's private life in public.

The paranormal file rests on this documented foundation and builds in the expected directions. Staff and overnight guests report footsteps, doors that lock themselves, and objects displaced at the bar. A story circulates about a Lemp son kept hidden in the attic because of deformity — the Monkey Face Boy — for which the archival record offers no support and which the file lists as legend.

The mansion operates today as a restaurant and inn, and guests can sleep in the rooms where the record was made. Whatever one makes of the haunting claims, the paperwork underneath them — four suicides, a collapsed empire, a house that outlived everyone — is solid enough to need no embellishment.