Lemp Mansion

A 33-room mansion built in the 1860s for beer baron William Lemp, whose family fortune built one of the largest breweries in America. Now operates as a restaurant, inn, and dinner theater. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Lemp Mansion in the Benton Park neighborhood of St. Louis is widely regarded as one of the ten most haunted places in America, a distinction earned through a family history so saturated with suicide, scandal, and sorrow that the building has become a byword for cursed American wealth. The story of the Lemp family is the story of an empire built on beer and destroyed by grief, and the spirits that inhabit the mansion are the remnants of a dynasty that chose death over decline.

Johann Adam Lemp arrived in St. Louis from Germany in 1838 and opened a small grocery store that sold household items and homemade lager beer. His brewing skill proved extraordinary, and by the late nineteenth century, the William J. Lemp Brewing Company dominated the St. Louis beer market with its flagship Falstaff brand, becoming one of the largest breweries in the country. The family built their thirty-three-room mansion near the brewery, connected by underground tunnels and caves that served as natural refrigeration for the beer. But the wealth that built the mansion could not protect the family from the darkness that consumed them.

The tragedies began with the death of Frederick Lemp, William J. Lemp Sr.'s favorite son, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1901. Devastated, William Sr. shot himself in the head in the mansion's office on February 13, 1904. His son William Jr. took over the brewery but watched it collapse under Prohibition, and on December 29, 1922, he shot himself in the same room where his father had died eighteen years earlier. Elsa Lemp, William Sr.'s daughter, shot herself at her home in 1920. And in May 1949, Charles Lemp, the last family member living in the mansion, shot his beloved Doberman Pinscher in the basement, climbed the stairs to his bedroom, and put a bullet in his own head, leaving a note that read simply: "In case I am found dead, blame it on no one but me."

The mansion is said to house multiple spirits. The most frequently encountered is the Lavender Lady, believed to be Lillian Handlan Lemp, the first wife of William Jr. Despite their bitter divorce, Lillian's ghost has returned to the mansion, appearing in a lavender dress that gave her the nickname she carries in death. She is most often seen on the upper floors, moving through the halls with quiet dignity. The ghost of William Jr. has been spotted in the office where both he and his father took their lives, and visitors to that room report a crushing sensation of despair.

The mansion's basement, connected to the old brewery tunnels, is known as the "Gates of Hell" -- a name that reflects both the tunnels' appearance and the intense paranormal energy that pervades the underground spaces. Phantom footsteps, vanishing tools, and the overwhelming feeling of being watched are reported throughout the building. The Lemp Mansion has been investigated by virtually every major paranormal research organization in the country and has appeared on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Paranormal State, and dozens of other programs. Today it operates as a restaurant, bed and breakfast, and murder mystery dinner theater -- a place where the living dine and sleep in rooms where four members of a single family chose to end their lives.