In Brief
At Forepaugh's, a Victorian mansion turned restaurant in St. Paul, Minnesota, one third-floor lamp keeps switching itself back on after the building is locked for the night. Staff call it Molly's light, after a maid who is said to have died up there.
The Full Story
At Forepaugh's, a grand Victorian mansion turned fine-dining restaurant in St. Paul, Minnesota, the staff close the building, shut off the lights, and leave. By morning, one lamp on the third floor is on again. They call it Molly's light.
"Just one light on the third floor, and that's Molly's light," a former general manager told CBS Minnesota. Molly is the maid at the center of the house's story, and the story is a love-triangle tragedy. The way it's told, dry-goods millionaire Joseph Forepaugh, who built the mansion in 1870, had an affair with a young Irish maid named Molly. When his wife Mary found out, Molly was dismissed. Heartbroken, and pregnant, the lore says, she went up to the third floor. One retelling, from a construction firm that has worked on the building, puts it plainly: she "tied a rope to a third-floor chandelier and looped the other end around her neck." Then, the story goes, she fell from a window.
There's no record she ever existed. No census line, no death certificate, no newspaper. Her name, her grief, her end are all legend, passed down by the people who work in the house.
Forepaugh's own end is closer to documented. In July 1892, he walked into the woods near Selby and Hamline and shot himself; his body was found days later. The mansion gained its haunted reputation soon after.
The third floor is where it all settles. Cold spots. Footsteps tromping overhead in an empty house. A table up there, "Molly's table," is the most-requested reservation in the place and gets booked every Halloween. Molly is said to appear most often near wedding parties, drifting past the celebration. One night, when a guest joked about the haunting, the glasses at a nearby waiters' station started shaking on their own. "We feel or see or hear things every single day here at Forepaugh's," the former general manager said.
The house has lived many lives — private home, boarding house, and a restaurant since the mid-1970s. It closed in 2019, then reopened in 2024 after a roughly $1 million renovation that brought back beef Wellington from the original menu.
Here's the wrinkle the legend smooths over. Forepaugh sold this house in 1886 and built a second mansion over on Summit Avenue, and he was living in that one when he died in 1892. The whole tragedy, the affair and both deaths, is pinned to a house he had already walked away from years before.
