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The Haunted Lemp Mansion in St. Louis
22 Plays2 years ago
We’re back with Part 2 of our paranormal 2-parter from last week!
This week, Lauren is up as she explores the Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, Missouri - said to be one of the top ten most haunted places in America! Built in the 1860s, this mansion just off the Mississippi River has been everything from a millionaire's home to a boarding house and even a dead, er, bed-and-breakfast as it is today. But is it also home to specters, spirits, and spooks?! Find out the history of this historic and haunted house and its storied paranormal activity through the ages in this week’s episode!
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Transcript
Introduction to Sinister Sisters Podcast
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to the Sinister Sisters podcast. I'm Lauren. I'm Felicia. We're best friends. And we like spooky stuff. Yes, we do. We're back this week.
History of Lemp Mansion
00:00:33
Speaker
I'm taking us to be a classic ghost story sort of situation.
00:00:40
Speaker
It's a little bit nuanced, but it's one of the most haunted places in America, supposedly. So I'm taking us to St. Louis, Missouri, and I'm covering the Lemp Mansion.
00:00:55
Speaker
So it is one of those big buildings that has been many things over the course of its life. From a big, beautiful home is how it started to an office space. It eventually was a rundown boarding house. Feels like a recipe for ghosts. And now it has been quite successful as a dinner theater, restaurant, bed and breakfast kind of place.
00:01:23
Speaker
Excuse me, a bed and breakfast where there is dinner theater? Do we own? This feels the most like a business model for what either of us or both of us together I hope will do in retirement. Like it has ghost tours. That's my dream. We open it in Salem. Yes, I'm down. Okay, great.
00:01:50
Speaker
We're going to set that up, but I think we might have to visit this place too because it has like everything. It has ghost tours, it has like themed mystery parties, like it's the whole thing. But I'm going to be mostly talking about the Lemp family today who owned this beautiful mansion for many years. So Joanne Adam Lemp was the first one that arrived in St. Louis from Germany in 1838.
Joanne Adam Lemp's Brewing Success
00:02:19
Speaker
He started out by building this small grocery store and he was selling homemade beer there. The beer was like a lighter golden lager that was different than what people were drinking at the time, which was primarily dark beers. It was a recipe handed down from his father and it became super popular.
00:02:42
Speaker
He eventually kind of scrapped the grocery store portion and built it into a small brewery in 1840. And it eventually became so successful and it couldn't handle both, you know, storage and production. So he found this limestone cave outside of the city that he started using for making the beer. And they would like chop up the ice from the Mississippi River and put it in the cave and
00:03:12
Speaker
All this. It just adds to the creepiness, I think, that you know it's connected to a cave. Yeah. And I'm also grateful because I don't really like dark beer, so. Me too. Me too. I'm like, good for you, Lemp family. Good for you. So by the 1850s, Lemp's Western Brewing Company was one of the largest in the city. It won awards, and Adam Lemp was a millionaire by the time of his death on August 25th, 1862.
00:03:42
Speaker
So I don't even know what that translates to if you were a millionaire in 1862, but it feels like a lot of money. Probably a lot. Just a ton of money. So his son William bought more area near the caves. They eventually just kept expanding the brewery and just became this kind of iconic, wealthy family in St. Louis. So from the mansion, William
00:04:12
Speaker
had a tunnel built from the basement through the caves to the brewery. So all this was kind of connected in what I'm imagining to be like a Disney World sort of setup with all these underground tunnels. But I do know that part of the cave and that underground area was eventually made into a theater, a large swimming pool, a bowling alley,
00:04:37
Speaker
So it kind of became this whole big complex, which I think is cool, especially at that time. So by the middle 1890s, the brewery had reached national success, and they were the first brewers to establish coast to coast distribution of the beer.
Tragedies of the Lemp Family
00:04:58
Speaker
But then tragedy began to hit.
00:05:02
Speaker
So I should have said this at the top, this family has maybe the most tragedy or back to back insane sad stories that I've ever seen. So I think that's partially why it's gotta be the most haunted building, but it's gonna be a little sad. The first of the tragedies was Frederick Lemp, who was William's favorite son and heir to all of this. He died in 1901 at the age of 28.
00:05:31
Speaker
So he had never really been in good health. He died of heart failure, but his father William was never the same. Very devastated. He kind of retreated from the public eye after his son's death and got kind of weird. But on January 1st, 1904, so I guess that's three years after Frederick, William's
00:05:58
Speaker
other close friend whose name was Frederick Pabst also died.
00:06:04
Speaker
So we got two Fredricks down, but this really sent, it's really a lot. So William was sent into, you know, even more of a downward spiral and he'd still go to the office and run the brewery, but was really never himself again. So on February 13th, 1904, just after, you know, a month after his friend died, he shot himself in the head.
00:06:30
Speaker
which is super sad. And I also feel like this is me talking truly out of my ass, but I do think that suicides were less frequent in previous times because of all the religious stuff. Oh, maybe. I don't know. I feel like you hear that suicides have gotten worse. Yeah, it's like a sin, right? That's a sin.
00:06:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that might be. So I feel like, I don't know, maybe that's just my own, like, I know obviously mental illness is probably, you know, either worse than it's ever been now or just more documented or more treated or any of those things, but I do feel like this family in particular, all the suicide is really sad to me.
00:07:16
Speaker
But in November of that year, his son took over the brewery. His name was William Lemp Jr. So he and his wife Lillian just kind of went crazy with their spending. They bought, you know, servants, carriages, clothing, art. Lillian had come from a wealthy family too, so
00:07:37
Speaker
She was used to that, and people even called her the Lavender Lady for how much she liked the color. She even dyed their horses lavender, which I'm like, that is high living in the 1900s. Right? I'm like, sounds maybe unsafe for the horses, but sounds also like a gorgeous thing to look at. Right? Just some purple horses walking by. Yes. But they had gotten married in 1899. They had their son, William J. Lempe,
00:08:07
Speaker
the third in September of 1900. I don't quite know the timeline, but they weren't married too, too long. Oh, here it is. They only were married for eight years. So William eventually got sick of her and he kind of started. So before they got a divorce, he started having parties, living it up, eventually had an illegitimate son.
00:08:32
Speaker
So today there's no documentation of a child. There are pretty much just rumors that this boy was hidden in the attic for his entire life, very similar to-
00:08:48
Speaker
the story you were, or when we were talking about the changeling, I guess. But he lived up in the attic and we know that there was a St. Louis historian named Joe Gibbons who interviewed a former nanny and a chauffeur who lived in the mansion. And both of them verified that the boy did exist and that he was housed in the attic where the servants lived too. But he was supposedly born with Down syndrome.
00:09:16
Speaker
classic sad story of him being a total embarrassment. And so they kept him locked in the attic. And he's known today as the monkey face boy. Very scary. Very sad. Not a very nice term. Very rude. Yes. But you'll imagine that the monkey face boy is one of the ghosts that is seen on the property, which is very sad and scary.
00:09:44
Speaker
So William Jr. and Lillian got a divorce in 1908 and it was a very public, messy affair. I'm imagining a little bit like Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. Everyone went to the courtroom. It was kind of the start of bad times for this William.
00:10:03
Speaker
So they had this messy, very, very public divorce. Then in 1906, several competing breweries in the area combined to form a big brewery that finally was competition for the Lemp Brewery. And in that same year, William's mother died from cancer on April 16th. So basically, his mother's dead. He got a divorce. The brewery's declining.
00:10:33
Speaker
And then prohibition comes along. So things were not good and just seemingly got worse and worse for him. And I'm just gonna cover some more of the trauma that happened. So on March 20th, 1920, Elsa Lempright, who was William's sister, shot herself just like her father had done years before.
00:10:58
Speaker
supposedly hers was due to a rocky marriage. But this again kind of meant that William Jr., very similar to his father, became increasingly reclusive. He was complaining about his health. He was being weird, just like his dad. And so he shot himself in the heart on December 29th, 1922, in the same building that his father had died just 18 years earlier.
00:11:29
Speaker
So not good. I mean, yeah, that's going to be haunted. Like, there's just no, there's nothing around that. It's too many, it's too many deaths in this one mansion. In 1943, William Lemp III died of a heart attack at the age of 42. So then Charles William Jr.'s brother moved into the mansion. He too got weird as he got older. His kind of manifested as OCD
00:11:56
Speaker
intense fear of germs. He was constantly washing his hands, wearing gloves. And when he was in the house, this was at the time that William's illegitimate child, who was now in his 30s, died at the mansion, which again, I really don't know enough about Down syndrome to say if that feels young or not, but it feels young. Yeah, I really don't know.
00:12:25
Speaker
But he died in the mansion, and there is actually a plot of land that people believe to be his body at the Lemp Cemetery. It's a flat marker, and it just says the word Lemp. It doesn't have any other details on it, so people have thought that that's where he is buried.
00:12:48
Speaker
And then Charles, who's William Junior's brother, became the fourth Lemp family member to commit suicide. So this is really sad. Get ready. This is particularly sad for you and I, Felicia. So he shot his beloved Doberman Pinscher in the mansion's basement. I know. I'm like, all these people shot themselves and it's really sad, but the dog kills me. It's too much.
00:13:19
Speaker
So he shot his dog in the head in the basement. Then he climbed up his room on the second floor and shot himself. Very sad. Sad makes me mad because that dog didn't do anything. Nothing. Not fair. Nothing. Not right. Nothing.
00:13:36
Speaker
As my dad always makes the joke of like, why didn't he just change the order of those things? Why didn't he shoot himself in the head and then go? Right. Because it wasn't, the dog didn't choose that. It's just not right. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No. And the dog wasn't mentally unwell. It was fine. Yeah. So Edwin Lemp, who was the last living Lemp, which is kind of crazy. I guess not a ton of them had children.
00:14:02
Speaker
but he died of natural causes at the age of 90 in 1970. He was a reclusive guy as well. He really didn't have any involvement in the brewery. The creepiest thing to me is that in his will, one of his last wishes were that his butler burn all of the paintings that the Lemp family had collected throughout their life, as well as Lemp family documents and artifacts.
00:14:31
Speaker
So the Lemp family really disappeared from him destroying all of their things and the family line dying out. They're all buried in the Belafonteine Cemetery. I guess there's a section that's just the Lemp family.
00:14:50
Speaker
But it's so crazy that this big, wealthy, like powerful family just sort of quietly died off in this way. So the mansion was then sold at that time and turned into a boarding house. And pretty immediately people in the boarding house started complaining about paranormal activity.
00:15:11
Speaker
So it was in 1975 that Dick Pointer and his family purchased this boarding house.
Hauntings and Paranormal Activity
00:15:20
Speaker
I think it had been pretty run down. Seemingly from my research, it was like not a lot of people wanted to stay at the boarding house, which I'm assuming is paranormal activity, but maybe it just wasn't well taken care of.
00:15:33
Speaker
But dick pointer turned it into a restaurant and then in and workers within the house have all these crazy stories and you can look at you can look at more specifics but. Apparitions weird sounds tools going missing voices and sounds coming from nowhere.
00:15:52
Speaker
glasses lifting off the bar and flying through the air by themselves, doors locking and unlocking on their own, lights turning off and on, a piano bar that plays when no one is near, and this feeling of being watched. So many people in the 70s, at least, wouldn't stay at the job long because of how frightened they were, and they wouldn't want to stay in this house. So there are three areas that are said to have the most activity.
00:16:22
Speaker
There's the stairway, the attic, and the gates of hell in the basement, which I love that people just, there's no nuance, they just call the basement the gates of hell.
00:16:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's always a basement too. Like the the Gary Indiana house I did and the house in Hell House. Like it's like the basement is always the gate to hell. Yes, which I'm like, is that just because I don't know, basements definitely have a scary vibe. I think regardless of like all the horror movie content we've been fed that makes us fear basements.
00:16:59
Speaker
Did you? I know you did. I know you did. And I'll tell you that I did when you're leaving your childhood basement and you have the lights are at the bottom of the stairs. So you have to turn the lights off and then you have to sprint to the top to run away from the demons that are going to pull you back down.
00:17:15
Speaker
Every time, I still do it. I don't know what to say about it. I still can't walk up my staircase, really. No, it's a run. I have to run. I still feel like mine is based on my dad's room. My dad having his secret room makes me more scared. We should give some explanation of that one day on the podcast. I think I have at some point. If you don't listen to every episode,
00:17:43
Speaker
You'll never know what we're talking about. You'll never know. Sorry, go ahead. Keep going. I'm back.
00:17:50
Speaker
So the attic is said to be haunted by the monkey face boy, his illegitimate son that I mentioned. People see the face of the boy from the street peeking from the small attic windows. Ghost investigators have left toys. That is the one part of being a ghost investigator that I think I would love is all the science experiment kind of side of things.
00:18:16
Speaker
So ghost investigators have drawn a circle around toys in the room. And then when they come the next day, the toys are found somewhere else outside of the circle. So that's a little creepy. And in the downstairs woman's bathroom, many women have reported a man peeking over the stall.
00:18:36
Speaker
So I think that is William Jr., the one that was kind of the womanizer with the illegitimate son. People theorize that that's him kind of creeping on women. In William Lemp's senior's room, guests have often heard someone running up the stairs and kicking the door. So when William killed himself, William Jr. was known to have run up the stairs to his father's room.
00:19:00
Speaker
And then when he found it, it was locked. He tried to kick it open to try to save his father. So people, you know, claim to hear that happening. And then guides often report hearing the sounds of horses outside the room where William Lemp senior had his office.
00:19:17
Speaker
So there's definitely more specific stories that you can look into if you wanna be creeped out or if you wanna just go to the mansion yourself, you can. As I said, everything's been restored to what it looked like in period style and there's a restaurant for fine dining, there's the mystery dinner theater. You can also just take good old ghost tours there. So I want to check it out sometime. And I can't believe I used to go to
00:19:46
Speaker
St. Louis when I was traveling all the time to do that regional theater casting and I'm like that's what I should have been doing. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you don't know. Now we know and now we should go. It is a cute little town I will say it definitely I mean maybe I only experienced like the theater community there but they felt it felt very like I don't know like a cool city.
00:20:11
Speaker
That's awesome. That's the story of the London mansion and all the freaky ghosts that live there and all the suicide. All the suicide. It's very sad, but I love when someone accepts that they have a spooky place and then invest in making it even spookier. Yes, I think it's the way to do it. It's got to make the ghosts happier, right? Yeah, they feel more at home that way.
00:20:38
Speaker
Exactly. Well, thank you all for listening. We hope you have some sweet, sweet nightmares. Bye.