Home › United States › Missouri › St Louis, Mo
Historic haunted places in St Louis, MO. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
5 listings shown.
Haunted place
Built in 1823 by Captain Lewis Bissell, it is described as the oldest brick home in St. Louis. Bissell himself is said to stand watch in the parking lot, a woman in white drifts th…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Haunted place
This 1893 mansion, now a bed and breakfast, is said to be haunted by its original owner, felt or glimpsed in his former bedroom. Guests also describe shadowy figures, unexplained b…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Haunted place
The brewing family that built this 1860s mansion suffered a string of deaths and suicides, and many believe their spirits stayed behind. Reported ghosts include a hidden son said t…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Haunted place
Opened in 1925 as a movie palace and home to the St. Louis Symphony since 1966, the hall is said to host a mustached ghost called George in a white tuxedo. In 2010, during a parano…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Haunted place
The 1929 Fox is said to have toilets that flush themselves, phantom cigar smoke, and a shadowy figure photographed sitting in the seats. Staff in the projection area have reported …
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
St. Louis's haunted ground, in the material collected, is dominated by one family, one brewery, and the caves underneath both.
America's Best Online's history of the Lemp Brewery tells it in sequence. German immigrant Johann Adam Lemp arrived in St. Louis in the late 1830s and was soon selling one of the first lager beers in the city from his grocery store. Lager needs cold storage, and Lemp found it underground, in a natural limestone cave system on the city's south side; those caves became his lagering cellars, and the brewery above them grew into one of the biggest in the Midwest. His son William J. Lemp took over in 1862 and built the business into a powerhouse whose flagship Falstaff brand became a national name, shipped coast to coast in refrigerated rail cars. William, the same history records, used the caves to pipe beer to the mansion he bought nearby at 3322 DeMenil Place.
The collapse is documented in the same source. The Lemps modernized more slowly than rivals such as Anheuser-Busch; when Prohibition arrived in 1919, the Lemp Brewery closed for good; the Falstaff name was sold, and in 1922 the plant was auctioned to the International Shoe Company for a small fraction of its earlier value.
The family's private losses run alongside the business ones, and they are the documented core of the haunting. America's Best Online records four members of the Lemp family taking their own lives between 1904 and 1949, three of them inside the DeMenil Place mansion: William J. Lemp Sr. in his bedroom in 1904, weeks after his heir Frederick had died of natural causes at 28 in 1901 and his friend Frederick Pabst had died in early 1904; Elsa Lemp Wright at her own home in 1920; William "Billy" Lemp Jr. in his mansion office in 1922, after the brewery was sold; and Charles Lemp in 1949, who shot his Doberman and then himself and left a note that blamed no one. The last brother, Edwin, lived to 90 and died in 1970.
St. Louis's third haunt is not Lemp ground at all: a long-running produced haunted house in the Soulard district, covered in its own story below.
This section is folklore — reported by the sources cited, and never asserted as fact here.
America's Best Online reports that staff and guests at the Lemp Mansion have reported strange happenings for decades: doors opening and slamming on their own, footsteps crossing empty floors, glasses moving on the bar, and a dog barking where Charles Lemp once lived alone with his Doberman. Its most famous reported spirit is the Lavender Lady, believed by storytellers to be Lillian Handlan, Billy Lemp's first wife, whose love of lavender clothing earned her the nickname; visitors still claim to smell lavender perfume in empty rooms.
The same source carries the darkest tale on the tour — and carries its own correction with it. The legend of a hidden Lemp child with a disability, kept out of sight in the attic, is told by storytellers, but historians have never found records proving he existed.
The brewery has its own reported layer. America's Best Online reports that investigators in the old Bottle Works basements — where the cave system once chilled Lemp lager — tell of shadow figures, cold spots and echoes of the tragedies in those stone rooms. The St. Louis Paranormal Research Society, which runs the brewery tours, frames its own claims carefully on its site: it refuses, it says, to "claim everything is haunted," and states that its paranormal claims are "backed by actual proof and are rooted in St. Louis history." Both framings are the sources' own; no paranormal claim is asserted as fact here.
Hountix lists 5 places in St Louis, MO. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
The Lemp Mansion's own homepage is brief and to the point: "The historic home of Beer Barons," at 3322 DeMenil Pl., St. Louis, MO 63118, operating today as a restaurant, inn, museum and event venue, with a "Ghost Hunt! Search for Paranormal Activity in The Lemp Mansion!" among its headline offers, alongside its World Famous Sunday Chicken Dinner and mystery dinners. The history behind that one line is supplied by America's Best Online's Lemp history, cited in full in the city story above: the mansion William J. Lemp bought near his brewery, piped into the lagering caves, and the house in which, that history records, three members of the family later died by suicide between 1904 and 1949.
Today the mansion is owned by the Pointer family, who bought it in 1977, per America's Best Online. Its signature haunted product, per the same source, is the Spirits with the Spirits Tour — about 90 minutes, $44 on Wednesday nights in its tour table, handing guests ghost-hunting gear while guides share the family history and first-hand accounts of unexplained events. The mansion also hosts murder-mystery dinners, an escape room, overnight stays in the haunted rooms, a paranormal package called The Lemp Experience, and a Halloween party. One time-sensitive fact from the same source: the Pointer family has put the mansion up for sale after nearly 50 years, but it will keep running its restaurant, inn and tours through December 31, 2027 — so, the source notes, this Halloween season goes on as planned, and prices and schedules should be checked on the mansion's site before going.
The reported haunting is attributed, as the city story records it: the Lavender Lady believed to be Lillian Handlan Lemp, lavender perfume claimed in empty rooms, a dog heard barking where Charles Lemp lived alone with his Doberman, and the attic-child legend that historians have found no records to support. The mansion's own collected homepage publishes the ghost hunt but no narrative lore of its own; the narrative above is America's Best Online's, and is labelled as such.
*Website: http://www.lempmansion.com/*