Lemp Mansion

Four members of the Lemp brewing dynasty shot themselves in or near this 33-room St. Louis mansion between 1904 and 1949, and the house is now thick with ghosts: the Lavender Lady on the staircase, a piano that plays itself at night, a phantom dog clicking across hardwood, and an EVP that says "I'm William."

Four members of the same family shot themselves in or near the Lemp Mansion in St. Louis between 1904 and 1949. Three of them did it inside the house. The last one shot his dog first.

Johann Adam Lemp arrived in St. Louis from Germany in 1838 and started selling lager beer out of a grocery store. By the late 1800s, the William J. Lemp Brewing Company was the fourth-largest brewery in the United States, competing directly with Anheuser-Busch for control of the St. Louis market. The family built a 33-room mansion in the Benton Park neighborhood, connected to the brewery by underground tunnels and caves that kept the beer cold. The Falstaff brand made them rich. Prohibition destroyed them.

Frederick Lemp, the favorite son, died under unclear circumstances in 1901. His father William Sr. never recovered. On the morning of February 13, 1904, at 10:15 a.m., William Sr. shot himself with a .38 revolver in the master bedroom. His best friend Frederick Pabst, of the Pabst brewing dynasty, had died just weeks earlier on January 1. William Jr. took over the brewery. When the Eighteenth Amendment passed in 1919, he saw the end coming and shut down the operation entirely, selling the brewery at auction to International Shoe Co. on June 28, 1922, for a fraction of its $7 million valuation. Six months later, on December 29, 1922, he shot himself in the office. According to family lore, his last words were "I'm going to see my father."

Elsa Lemp, the wealthiest heiress in St. Louis, had already shot herself on March 20, 1920, in bed at her home on Hortense Place. Then on May 10, 1949, Charles Lemp, 77, the last family member living in the mansion, took his Doberman Pinscher to the basement and shot it. He climbed the stairs, went to his bedroom, and put a bullet in his own head. His note: "In case I am found dead blame it on no one but me."

The ghosts are specific. The Lavender Lady is thought to be Lillian Handlan Lemp, William Jr.'s first wife, named for the lavender dresses and carriages she favored. She appears on the main staircase looking so real that guests have mistaken her for a living person. The scent of lavender perfume arrives in rooms without warning. There is a wrinkle, though: Lillian lived at the Chase Park Plaza penthouse during her marriage, not at the Lemp Mansion, which makes her attachment to this house hard to explain.

In the master bedroom where William Sr. died, visitors hear what sounds like a gunshot late at night. The office where William Jr. killed himself smells of cigar smoke with no source. Papers end up scattered across the desk overnight. In the attic, there are stories of a hidden child, possibly an illegitimate son kept in isolation. Visitors hear a child's laughter or crying from the attic level. The figure that shows itself there is described as small, hunched, shy.

An antique piano plays by itself late at night, keys depressing as if touched. A dog barks in empty rooms, claws clicking on hardwood. Glasses and bottles have flown off tables and shattered against walls. An investigator from the Missouri Ghost Hunters Society was physically shoved out of the Lavender Lady's Dining Room by what felt like a male presence. Women in the downstairs bathroom have seen a solid figure of a man peering over the bathroom stall. That bathroom was William Lemp Jr.'s private bathroom when he was alive.

The mansion has appeared on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, and Paranormal State. An EVP recorded during one investigation captured a voice saying "I'm William." Life magazine declared it one of the ten most haunted places in America. CNN Travel named it one of the ten spookiest buildings in the world. It operates today as a restaurant, bed and breakfast, and murder mystery dinner theater at 3322 DeMenil Place. Guests eat and sleep in rooms where the Lemps ended their lives. The brewery is gone. The beer empire is gone. The family that built all of it chose, one by one, to leave on their own terms.