In Brief
The Lohman Building in Jefferson City, Missouri faces a stretch of Water Street nobody ever built on. Guides tie the figure seen in its upper windows to the cholera dead of 1849 — buried, the story goes, in a trench right out front. Diggers went looking. They found nothing.
The Full Story
Take the ghost tour through downtown Jefferson City, Missouri, and the guides will stop you at the Lohman Building and tell you to watch its upper windows. People keep seeing someone up there. A figure in one of the panes, looking back down at the street.
The building is old enough to have earned a few stories. Most sources date it to 1839, when James A. Crump put up a limestone block at the corner of Jefferson and Water Streets and ran a grocery in the basement while leasing the floors above as a hotel. By 1852 a German immigrant named Charles Lohman had bought it, and the riverfront around it became known as Lohman's Landing — a place where freight moved between steamboats and, soon after, the new Pacific Railroad.
The story the guides tell isn't really about the building, though. It's about what came up the river to it.
On May 10, 1849, a steamboat called the *Monroe* left St. Louis loaded with passengers headed for the California gold fields. Cholera broke out on the way. Two passengers died before the boat ever reached Jefferson Landing, and by the time it did, the captain and crew had abandoned ship, leaving behind roughly two hundred dying people — though the count was never settled, and estimates run anywhere from 64 to more than 200. The town buried the dead in a trench it dug along the waterfront, "from the Foot of Jefferson Street to the Depot." Some 900 feet long. Wide enough for 150 to 180 bodies.
That, at least, is how the story was passed down for a century and a half. The grave itself was never found.
In 2013, before a parking lot went in for the Amtrak station, an archaeology team trenched the ground right in front of the Lohman Building, following the old description. They turned up no remains. What they did notice was stranger: in all that time, no one had ever laid a utility line through that stretch of Water Street, and nothing had been built on it in over 160 years. As if the town had been quietly steering around something it couldn't quite point to.
The grave is only oral tradition. No record, no bones, no proof it was ever there. The building has just stood beside that empty ground the whole time, and people keep saying someone is watching from its windows.
