What happened
The Lemps built one of America’s great beer empires: Johann Adam Lemp arrived from Germany in 1838 and was among the first to brew lager in St. Louis, and his son William turned the brewery into a powerhouse. From 1876 the family lived in a mansion in the Benton Park neighbourhood, said to be connected by a tunnel to the brewery’s caves. In 1901 William’s favourite son and heir, 28-year-old Frederick, died suddenly. When his friend, the brewer Frederick Pabst, also died at the start of 1904, William Lemp shot himself in his bedroom on 13 February 1904. Prohibition in 1919 finished off the business; William Jr. closed it without notice and in 1922 also took his own life in the mansion, two years after his sister Elsa had done the same. In 1949 Charles Lemp shot himself in the same house. The mansion later became a boarding house and offices, and since the 1970s it has been a restaurant and inn that runs ghost tours. Guests tell of objects moving in Charles’s room, of the “Lavender Lady” – Lillian, wife of William Jr. – and of a child’s ghost.
Witnesses
Inn guests, staff and participants in tours led by psychic Betsy Belanger; the story is told by Colin Dickey in Ghostland (2016), among others.
Explanations and hypotheses
The Lemp suicides are facts documented in the press and police reports – though part of the legend is exaggerated: according to Colin Dickey, the police report does not say that Charles shot his dog before himself, and Elsa died in her own home. Dickey sees the tales of a “cursed family” as a way of coming to terms with a family tragedy in which hereditary mental illness such as depression probably played a part. A St. Louis Magazine reviewer noted that he could find no record of anyone outside the family dying in the house, which undercuts some of the guides’ stories. No one has independently investigated the phenomena.
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
- Colin Dickey, The Family That Would Not Live – fragment książki „Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places” (Longreads, 2016)
- St. Louis Magazine – The Lemp Mansion ghost tour, reviewed
- The Lemp Mansion – Haunted History Tours
More: Wikipedia (en)