The Lemp Mansion

Before there was Anheuser-Busch, the beer of St. Louis was Lemp.

In the 1890s, the William J. Lemp Brewing Company was one of the largest breweries in the United States. Its Falstaff label was known across the country. Its brewery complex covered several city blocks on the south side of St. Louis, built over a network of natural limestone caves that kept the lager cold. And the family that owned it lived in a magnificent thirty-three-room mansion a short walk away, connected to the brewery by a tunnel through those caves.

The Lemps had everything a family in America could want: wealth, power, art, music, a private ballroom, servants, and a name on every barroom sign from St. Louis to Texas.

Within half a century, the dynasty was gone. And four members of the family had died by their own hand — three of them inside the mansion itself.

A note before you read further: this is a story about suicide, told because it is part of the documented history of the house. If that subject is difficult for you, you may want to skip ahead.

The Lager King

The story begins with Johann Adam Lemp, a German immigrant who arrived in St. Louis in the 1830s and started selling groceries and vinegar. He soon began brewing a light, crisp German-style lager — a novelty in an American market used to heavy ales. It was a hit. When Adam died in 1862, he left a thriving brewery to his son, William J. Lemp.

William turned it into an empire. He modernized everything — refrigerated railroad cars, a bottling plant, an ice plant — and by the late 1800s the Lemp brewery was shipping beer nationwide. In 1876, he moved his family into a grand Italianate mansion near the brewery, which had originally been built by his father-in-law, and enlarged and remodeled it into a showplace with marble fireplaces, hand-painted ceilings and a three-story atrium.

William had several children. His favorite, by every account, was his son Frederick, who was being groomed to take over the business. Frederick was bright, charming and hardworking.

In December 1901, Frederick died suddenly, at the age of twenty-eight, of what was described as heart failure.

The First Shot

William Lemp never recovered from the loss of his son. Friends said he became withdrawn, nervous and unpredictable. He rarely went out. In January 1904, his closest friend, the brewer Frederick Pabst of Milwaukee, died.

On February 13, 1904, in his bedroom at the mansion, William J. Lemp took his own life.

His son William Jr. — known as Billy — took over the brewery. Billy had a passion for spending money, not making it. He married a wealthy heiress, Lillian Handlan, who became famous in St. Louis society for her fondness for the color lavender; she dressed in it so often that people called her the “Lavender Lady.” Their marriage collapsed in a scandalous public divorce in 1909, filled with accusations of infidelity, drinking and cruelty, splashed across the front pages.

Prohibition

In 1919, Prohibition arrived. Overnight, the brewery that had made the Lemps rich became worthless.

Other brewers, like Anheuser-Busch, survived by making ice cream, soft drinks, yeast and malt syrup. The Lemps simply closed. In 1920, Billy’s sister Elsa Lemp Wright, recently remarried to the husband she had divorced, took her own life at her home in St. Louis. She was in her mid-thirties.

In 1922, the great Lemp brewery complex was sold at auction to the International Shoe Company for a fraction of what it had once been worth. The Falstaff name was sold to another brewer.

On December 29, 1922, Billy Lemp took his own life in his office at the mansion. He was fifty-five.

The Last Brothers

The mansion stayed in the family. Billy’s brother Charles, a reclusive, eccentric man, moved in and lived there with his dog, a Doberman pinscher named Cerva. He became more isolated over the years, terrified of germs, rarely leaving the house.

On May 10, 1949, at the age of seventy-seven, Charles Lemp shot his dog and then took his own life in his bedroom. He left a note saying that if he were found dead, no one was to blame but himself.

The only Lemp brother left was Edwin, the youngest, who had left the brewery business early and lived quietly on an estate outside the city. Edwin died of natural causes in 1970, at ninety. Before he died, he reportedly instructed his caretaker to burn many of the family’s papers, art and heirlooms. The Lemp line had come to an end.

The House That Watched

After Charles’s death, the mansion was sold and turned into a boarding house. The neighborhood declined. The once-grand rooms were divided into apartments. Tenants complained of strange noises: knocking, footsteps, voices. Some refused to stay.

In the 1970s, the Pointer family bought the house and began restoring it as a restaurant and inn. Workers on the restoration crew reported tools disappearing, the feeling of being watched, and sounds of someone walking in empty rooms. Some refused to work in the building alone.

Since it opened as a restaurant, the stories have only multiplied.

Staff and guests report glasses that fly off the bar. A piano that plays by itself. Doors that lock and unlock. Faint sounds of a dog barking — in Charles’s old room — when no dog is in the building. Women have reported seeing a lady dressed in lavender gliding down the halls, or a face peering out from the upper windows, said to belong to Lillian, Billy’s divorced wife.

The Boy in the Attic

There is one Lemp legend I need to address carefully.

According to a story that has been repeated in countless ghost tours, books and television shows, the family kept a secret child: an illegitimate son of Billy Lemp, born with a disability, who was hidden away in the mansion’s attic for his entire life. He is sometimes called the “Monkey Face Boy,” sometimes Zeke. Visitors claim to have seen his face looking out of an attic window.

I have found no historical evidence that this child existed. No birth record, no census entry, no mention in the family’s extensive press coverage or legal documents. The story appears to have emerged in the twentieth century, as the house’s ghostly reputation grew. It is, as far as I can tell, folklore. I mention it because you will hear it if you visit — and because I think it’s worth recognizing how often haunted-house stories invent hidden, suffering people to explain the strange feeling of a place.

A House of Grief

What happened to the Lemps is not really a mystery. It’s a tragedy.

A family that built enormous wealth found it could not buy them happiness, or health, or peace. One death led to the next. The loss of a beloved son broke a father. The father’s death left his children rich and rudderless. Prohibition took away the business that had given them their purpose. Grief and isolation did the rest.

St. Louis papers called it the Lemp curse. I’m not sure I’d call it that. But I understand why people walking through the mansion today feel something heavy in its rooms. A house that sees that much sorrow — four lives ended, three in its own rooms — may hold onto more than paint and marble.