The history of St. Louis
St. Louis holds the Lemp Mansion, a 33-room Victorian house built in 1868 for a baker, later bought and expanded by brewer William J. Lemp Sr. Three generations of the Lemp family died by suicide within its walls before it became a restaurant and inn.
The Lemp Mansion in St. Louis is a 33-room Victorian house built in 1868 for baker Jacob Feickert, later bought by brewer William J. Lemp Sr. in 1876 and expanded into a showplace. Three Lemp men died by suicide inside it between 1904 and 1949. It now operates as a restaurant, inn, and event space.
A brewer's fortune builds a 33-room showplace
The Lemp Mansion is a 19th-century brick house in St. Louis, now a restaurant, inn, and event space known across the country for the deaths that happened inside it. A baker and saloon keeper named Jacob Feickert built the house in 1868 as an ordinary private home.
The house did not stay ordinary long. In 1876, William J. Lemp Sr. bought it. William's father, Johann Adam Lemp, had come to St. Louis from Germany in 1838 and started selling his own beer out of a grocery store. By the time he died in 1862, his small brewery had grown into a fortune, and William inherited it. William expanded his father's operation into the William J. Lemp Brewing Company, one of the biggest breweries in the country before Prohibition. William turned the house on DeMenil Place into a 33-room showplace, with African mahogany woodwork and Italian marble mantels. A tunnel ran from the basement through the natural cave system under the property, straight to the brewery, so the family could walk to work underground.
William's fortune came with a cost. His favorite son, Frederick, died suddenly in 1901 at age 28, a loss William never recovered from. His closest friend, the brewer Frederick Pabst, died on New Year's Day 1904. Six weeks later, on February 13, 1904, William Lemp Sr. Shot himself in the head in the mansion's marble-trimmed office. He was the first of three Lemp men to die by suicide inside this house.
Prohibition ends the brewery and a second Lemp son
William J. "Billy" Lemp Jr. Took over the brewery the same year his father died, having married Lillian Handlan five years earlier, and the two moved into a separate home of their own. Lillian's wardrobe of lavender dresses and carriages earned her a nickname that still clings to the mansion's ghost stories, the "Lavender Lady." He built a country estate called Alswel outside the city and spent more of his time there as the years went on.
The family's standing in the brewing world was never in doubt. William J. Lemp Sr.'s daughter Hilda married Gustav Pabst, tying the Lemps to the Pabst brewing family of Milwaukee. But Prohibition, which began in 1920, ended the Lemp Brewing Company outright. That same year, Billy's sister Elsa Lemp Wright, once called the wealthiest heiress in St. Louis, died by suicide at 38. The brewery complex, once valued at seven million dollars, sold off in 1922 for a fraction of that to the International Shoe Company. On December 29, 1922, Billy Lemp shot himself in his office at the mansion, the second Lemp man to die there by his own hand.
A highway swerves around the dying family's house
Charles Lemp, William Sr.'s son, lived on in the house for decades after his brother's death. In 1949, he shot himself in his second-floor bedroom at age 77. Some accounts count a fourth Lemp suicide elsewhere in the family, though the mansion's own death toll is usually given as three. By then the family that had once controlled one of the largest breweries in America was nearly gone. Edwin Lemp, the last surviving son, lived out his life quietly and died of natural causes in 1970 at age 90.
The house did not age well in between. It became a boarding house in 1950 and lost much of its ornate detail over the following decade. Construction of Interstate 55 through St. Louis in the 1960s tore up much of the grounds and leveled one of the carriage houses. The highway's route swung around the mansion only because the nearby Chatillon-DeMenil House next door had already landed on the National Register of Historic Places, making its demolition illegal.
A restoration turns the mansion into a haunted attraction
In 1975, Paul and Patty Pointer bought the rundown house and began restoring it, eventually reopening it as a restaurant and inn. The basement restaurant still shows the decorative iron gates from the mansion's old open-air elevator. The parlor ceiling is hand-painted, and the vaults where the Lemps once stored their art collection sit at the back of the house.
The haunted reputation grew alongside the restoration. Life magazine named the Lemp Mansion one of the country's most haunted places in 1980, and staff and guests since have reported phantom gunshots, cold spots, and the smell of lavender perfume drifting through empty rooms. Some tell of a child called "Zeke," said to have been hidden away on an upper floor and to have died there.
William Lemp bought the property from Feickert's family in 1876 and rebuilt it into the Victorian showplace that still stands. It passed down through the Lemp family until Charles Lemp's death in 1949, then changed hands several times as a boarding house before the Pointers bought it in 1975.
The mansion still runs as a restaurant, inn, and event space, drawing ghost tours and diners through the same rooms where three Lemp men died.
The Lemp Mansion still serves Sunday dinners in the rooms where three of its owners took their own lives.
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