In Brief
At the Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, guests eat Sunday chicken dinner and sleep in the rooms where a brewing family destroyed itself. Four Lemps shot themselves between 1904 and 1949, three of them inside the walls. The staff say they never left.
The Full Story
At the Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, guests who stay the night keep reporting a woman on the main staircase in a long lavender gown, and a smell of lavender that arrives with her and fades when she's gone. The staff call her the Lavender Lady, and they think they know who she was. They say she's Lillian Handlan Lemp, who married into the family that owned this house and the brewery that built it.
The Lemps brewed beer. Under William J. Lemp, the Western Brewery became the largest in St. Louis, known nationally for Falstaff, run out of a 33-room Victorian showplace at 3322 DeMenil Place. Beneath it ran a natural cavern the family used to keep beer cold, and a sealed tunnel that once connected the house to the brewery; the official history says they carved an auditorium, a ballroom, and a swimming pool down into the rock. Then the family began to die.
William's favored son, Frederick, died in 1901. Two years later, weeks after his closest friend died too, William Sr. shot himself inside the mansion on a February morning in 1904. His daughter Elsa shot herself in bed in 1920. His son William Jr., who'd watched Prohibition force the brewery to auction for a fraction of its worth, shot himself in his office in 1922.
That left Charles. On May 10, 1949, the 77-year-old went down to the basement and shot his Doberman, then climbed back up to his second-floor room and shot himself. He was found gripping a .38 Army Colt. He left the only note any of them left behind, and it read: "In case I am found dead blame it on no one but me."
The reports never stopped after that. A piano that plays with no one at it. Dogs barking in empty rooms. Cigar smoke in William Jr.'s old office with no source for it. A man peering over a stall in the downstairs women's restroom, which used to be William Jr.'s private bathroom.
The Lavender Lady has a skeptic's footnote. One of the most-shared photos of the staircase figure was claimed by an actor who performs at the mansion, who said she was nearly certain it was her, caught on a night she was working there. The house draws that kind of scrutiny because of what happened in it, not in spite of it.
One Lemp broke the pattern. Edwin, the surviving brother, lived to 90 and died of natural causes in 1970. He is the one Lemp of his generation nobody reports seeing in the house, and the only one who got to leave it on his own.
