SUICIDES AND SPIRITS OF THE LEMP MANSION: Inside America’s Most Infamous Haunted House
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calm the chaos. Switch to ShipStation today. Start a free trial at ShipStation.com slash audio. That's ShipStation.com slash audio. The Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, Missouri, long regarded as one of the most haunted houses in America. The historic mansion was once home to the Lemp family, creators of an American brewing empire that was unlike any other for many years.

The Lemp family came to prominence in the mid-1800s as one of the premier brewing families of St. Louis. For years, they were seen as the fiercest rival of Anheuser-Busch and the first makers of lager beer in America. But today, they are largely forgotten, remembered more for the house they once built than for the beer they once brewed. That house stands as a fitting memorial to decadence, wealth,

tragedy, and suicide. Perhaps for this reason, there is a sadness that hangs over the place, and an eerie feeling that has remained from its days of disrepair and abandonment. It has since been restored into a restaurant and inn, but the sorrow seems to remain. By day, the mansion is a bustling restaurant filled with people and activity.

But at night, after everyone is gone and the doors have been locked tight, something walks the halls of the Lemp mansion. Are the ghosts here the restless spirits of the Lemp family? Still unable to find rest? Quite possibly, for this unusual family was as haunted as their house is purported to be today.

They were once one of the leading families in St. Louis, but all of that would change and their eccentricities would eventually be their ruin.

Welcome, Weirdos! I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.

Coming up in this episode: The Lemp family of St. Louis were rich, powerful, influential and were living a celebrity lifestyle thanks to the lager-beer empire that they had built there. But the family was anything but happy. The tragedy and depression of the family was like a curse, taking them out one by one. And it appears their spirits are still residing in the extremely haunted mansion they left behind.

Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness.

The story of the Lemp Brewing Empire began in 1836 when Johann Adam Lemp came to America from Germany. He had learned the brewer's trade as a young man, and when he came to St. Louis after spending two years in Cincinnati, he opened a small store and began selling dry goods, vinegar, and his own brand of beer. He soon closed the store and turned his attentions to a small factory that made strictly vinegar and beer.

It's believed that during this period, Lemp introduced St. Louis to the first "Lager Beer," a crisp, clean brew that required a few months of storage in a cool place to obtain its unique flavor. This new beer was a great change from the English-type ales that had previously been popular, and the lighter beer soon became a regional favorite.

Business prospered, and by 1845 the popularity of the new beverage was enough to allow Lemp to discontinue vinegar production and concentrate on beer alone. His company expanded rapidly thanks to the demand for the new beer, and Lemp soon found that his factory was too small to handle both the production of the beer and the storage needed for the lagering process.

He found a solution in a limestone cave that was just south of the city limits at the time. The cave had been recently discovered, and its proximity to the Mississippi River would make it possible to cut ice during the winter and keep the cave cold all year round. Lemp purchased a lot over the entrance to the cave and then began excavating and enlarging it to make room for the wooden casks needed to store the beer.

The remodeling was completed in 1845 and caused a stir in the city. Other brewers were looking for ways to model their brews after the Lemp lager beer, and soon these companies also began using the natural caves under the city to store beer and to open drinking establishments. The Lemp's own saloon added greatly to the early growth of the company. It was one of the largest around and served only Lemp beer and no hard liquor,

This policy served two purposes, in that it added to the beer sales and also created a wholesome atmosphere for families, as beer was considered a healthy drink, especially to the growing numbers of German immigrants to the city. The Lemp Western Brewing Company continued to grow during the 1840s, and by the 1850s was one of the largest in the city.

Adam Lemp died on August 25th, 1862, a very wealthy and distinguished man. The Western Brewery then came under the leadership of William Lemp, Adam's son, and it then entered its period of greatest prominence. William Lemp had been born in Germany in 1836, just before his parents came to America. He was educated at St. Louis University, and after graduation, he joined his father at Western Brewery.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted in the 3rd Regiment of the United States Reserve Corps. Soon after leaving the military in 1861, he married Julia Fichert. The couple would have nine children together: Anna, William Jr., Louis, Charles, Frederick, Hilda, Edwin, Elsa, and an infant that died at birth in 1862. After the death of Adam Lemp, William began a major expansion of the Western brewery.

He purchased a five-block area around the storage house on Cherokee Street, which was located above the Lagering Caves. There he began the construction of a new brewery, and by the 1870s the Lemp factory was the largest in the entire city. By 1876, it was producing 61,000 barrels of beer each year. A bottling plant was added the following year, and artificial refrigeration was added to the plant in 1878.

This would be the first year that the brewery's production would reach over 100,000 barrels. By the middle 1890s, the Lemp Brewery was known all over America. They had earlier introduced the popular Falstaff beer, which is still brewed by another company today, although the familiar logo once had the name Lemp emblazoned across it.

This beer became a favorite across the country, and Lemp was the first brewery to establish coast-to-coast and then international distribution of its beer. The brewery had grown to the point that it employed over 700 men, and as many as 100 horses were needed to pull the delivery wagons in St. Louis alone. It was ranked as the eighth largest in the country, and construction and renovation continued on a daily basis.

The entire complex was designed in an Italian Renaissance style, with arched windows, brick cornices, and eventually grew to cover five city blocks. In addition to William Lemp's financial success, he was also popular among the citizens of St. Louis. He was on the boards of several organizations, including a planning committee for the 1904 World's Fair,

His family life was happy, and his children were either involved in the business or successful in their own right. During the time of the Lemp Brewery's greatest success, William Lemp purchased a home for his family a short distance away from the brewery complex. The house was built by Jacob Fikert, Julia Lemp's father, in 1868. In 1876, Lemp purchased it for use as a residence and as an auxiliary brewery office.

Although already an impressive structure, Lemp immediately began renovating and expanding it, turning it into a showplace of the period. The mansion boasted 33 rooms, elegant artwork, hand-crafted wood decor, ornately painted ceilings, large, beautiful bathrooms and even an elevator that replaced the main staircase in 1904.

The house was also fitted with three room-sized walk-in vaults where paintings, jewelry and other valuables were stored. It was a unique and wondrous place - one fitting for the first family of St. Louis Brewing - and the mansion was as impressive underground as it was above. A tunnel exited the basement of the house and entered into a portion of the cave that Adam Lemp had discovered for his beer-loggering years before.

Traveling along a quarried shaft, the Lemp's could journey beneath the street, all the way to the brewery. The advent of mechanical refrigeration also made it possible to use parts of the cave for things other than business, as will be evident later in this account. Ironically, in the midst of all of this happiness and success, the Lemp family troubles truly began.

The first death in the family was that of Frederick Lemp, William Sr.'s favorite son and the heir apparent to the Lemp empire. He'd been groomed for years to take over the family business and was known as the most ambitious and hardworking of the Lemp children. In 1898, Frederick married Irene Verdon and the couple was reportedly very happy. Frederick was prominent in social circles and was regarded as a friendly and popular fellow.

In spite of this, he spent countless hours at the brewery, working hard to improve the company's future. It's possible that he may have literally worked himself to death. In 1901, Frederick's health began to fail, and so he decided to take some time off in October of that year and temporarily moved to Pasadena, California. He hoped that a change of climate might be beneficial to him.

The young man's health began to greatly improve, and following a post-Thanksgiving visit, William returned to St. Louis with hopes that his son would be returned to him soon. Unfortunately, that never happened. On December 12, Frederick suffered a sudden relapse, and he died at the age of only 28. His death was brought about by heart failure due to complications from other diseases.

Frederick's death was devastating to his parents, especially to his father. Brewery Secretary Henry Vollkamp later wrote that when news came of the young man's death, "William Lemp broke down utterly and cried like a child. He took it so seriously that we feared it would completely shatter his health and looked for the worst to happen." Lemp's friends and co-workers said that he was never the same again after Frederick's death.

It was obvious to all of them that he was not coping well and he began to slowly withdraw from the world. He was rarely seen in public and chose to walk to the brewery each day by using the cave system beneath the house. Before his son's death, Lemp had taken pleasure in personally paying the men each week. He also would join the workers in any department and work alongside them in their daily activities or go among them and discuss any problems or questions they had.

After Frederick died, these practices ceased almost completely. On January 1st, 1904, William Lemp suffered another crushing blow with the death of his closest friend, Frederick Pabst. This tragedy changed Lemp even more, and soon he became indifferent to the details of running the brewery.

Although he still came to the office each day, he paid little attention to the work, and those who knew him said that he now seemed nervous and unsettled, and his physical and mental health were both beginning to decline. On February 13, 1904, his suffering became unbearable. When Lemp awoke that morning, he ate breakfast and mentioned to one of the servants that he was not feeling well,

He finished eating, excused himself, and went back upstairs to his bedroom. Around 9:30 a.m., he shot himself in the head with a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. There was no one else in the house at the time of the shooting except for the servants

A servant girl, upon hearing the sound of the gunshot, ran to the door, but she found it locked. She immediately ran to the brewery office, about a half block away, and summoned sons William Jr. and Edwin. They hurried back to the house and broke down the bedroom door. Inside, they found their father lying on the bed in a pool of blood. The revolver was still gripped in his right hand, and there was a gaping and bloody wound at his right temple.

At that point, Lemp was still breathing, but unconscious. One of the boys telephoned the family physician, Dr. Henry J. Harnish, and he came at once. He and three other doctors examined William, but there was nothing they could do. William died just as his wife returned home from a shopping trip downtown. No suicide note was ever found.

As tragic as the suicide of their father was, the Lemp family was only on the cusp of a downhill slope of horror and death, eventually resulting in an extremely haunted Lemp mansion and possibly the caves underneath, as we will discover when Weird Darkness returns.

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Monsters, myths, mysteries, mirth and more every Monday with Mind of Marlar. I like alliteration, can you tell? You can find a list of where you can subscribe to the podcast at WeirdDarkness.com under the menu tab for podcasts. Immediately after the shooting, the house was closed to everyone but relatives, and brewery employees were posted to intercept callers and newspaper men at the front gate.

Funeral arrangements were immediately made and services took place the next day in the mansion's south parlor. The brewery was closed for the day, and employees came to pay their respects before the private service was held. After the service, a cordage of 40 carriages traveled to Bellefontaine Cemetery, although Lemp's wife Julia and daughters Elsa and Hilda were too grief-stricken to go to the burial ground.

Eight men who had worked for Lemp for more than 30 years served as pallbearers, and honorary pallbearers included many notable St. Louis residents, including Adolphus Bush, the owner of the Anheuser-Busch brewery, who had liked and respected his principal competitor. William was placed inside the family mausoleum next to his beloved son, Frederick. Lemp's tragic death came at a terrible time as far as the company was concerned.

In the wake of his burial, all of St. Louis was preparing for the opening of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, perhaps the greatest event to ever come to the city. Not only had William been elected to the fair's board of directors, but the brewery was also involved in beer sales and displays for the event.

William Jr. took his father's place and became active with the Agriculture Committee and was supervising the William J. Lemp Brewing Company's display in Agriculture Hall, where brewers and distillers from around the world assembled to show off their products. In November 1904, William Lemp Jr. took over as the new president of the William J. Lemp Brewing Company.

He inherited the family business, and with it, a great fortune. He filled the house with servants, built country houses and spent huge sums on carriages, clothing and art. In 1899, Will had married Lillian Handlin, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer. Lillian was nicknamed the "Lavender Lady" because of her fondness for dressing in that color. She was soon spending the Lemp fortune as quickly as her husband was,

While Will enjoyed showing off his trophy wife, he eventually grew tired of her and filed for divorce in 1906. Their divorce and the court proceedings around it created a scandal that titillated all of St. Louis. When it was all over, the "Lavender Lady" went into seclusion and retired from the public eye. But Will's troubles were just beginning that year.

The Lemp Brewery was facing a much-altered St. Louis beer market in 1906 when nine of the large area breweries combined to form the Independent Breweries Company. The formation of this company left only Lemp, Anheuser-Busch, the Lewis-Obert Brewing Company, and a handful of small neighborhood breweries as the only independent beer makers in St. Louis.

Of even more concern was the expanding temperance movement in America. The growing clamor of those speaking out against alcohol was beginning to be heard in all corners of the country. It looked as though the heyday of brewing was coming to an end. The year 1906 also marked the death of Will's mother. It was discovered that she had cancer the previous year, and by March 1906, her condition had deteriorated to the point that she was in constant pain.

She died in her home a short time later. Her funeral was held in the mansion, and she was laid to rest in the mausoleum at Bellefontaine Cemetery. In 1911, the last major improvements were made to the Lemp Brewery when giant grain elevators were erected on the south side of the complex. That same year, the Lemp Mansion ceased being a private residence, and it was converted and remodeled into the new offices of the brewing company.

Like most of its competitors, the Lemp Brewery limped along through the next few years and through World War I. According to numerous accounts, though, Lemp was in far worse shape than many of the other companies. Will had allowed the company's equipment to deteriorate, and by not keeping abreast of industry innovations, much of the brewing facilities had become outmoded. And to make matters worse, prohibition was coming.

American brewers were stunned by the passing of an amendment that made the production, sales and consumption of alcohol illegal, and by the Volstead Act which made prohibition enforceable by law. This seemed to signal the real death of the Lemp Brewery. As the individual family members were quite wealthy aside from the profits from the company, there was little incentive to keep it afloat.

Will gave up on the idea that Congress would suddenly repeal Prohibition and he closed the Lemp plant down without notice. His employees learned of the closing when they came to work one day and found the doors shut and the gates locked. Will decided to simply liquidate the assets of the plant and auction off the buildings. He sold the famous Lemp Falstaff logo to brewer Joseph Greisteich for the sum of $25,000.

Greisteek purchased the recognizable Falstaff name and shield with the idea that eventually the government would see prohibition for the folly that it was and beer would be back. Lemp no longer shared the other man's enthusiasm, however, and in 1922 he sold the brewery buildings to the International Shoe Company for just $588,000, a small fraction of its estimated worth of $7 million in the years before prohibition.

Sadly, virtually all of the Lemp Company records were thrown out when the shoe company moved into the complex. With Prohibition finally destroying the brewery, the 1920s looked to be a dismal decade for the Lemp family. As bad as it first seemed, things almost immediately became worse with the suicide of Elsa Lemp Wright in 1920. She became the second member of the family to take her own life.

Elsa was born in 1883 and was the youngest child in the Lemp family. With the death of her mother in 1906, she became the wealthiest unmarried woman in the city after inheriting her portion of her father's estate. In 1910, she became even richer when she married Thomas Wright, the president of the Moore Jones Brass and Metal Company. They moved into a home in Hortense Place in St. Louis' Central West End,

During the years between 1910 and 1918, their marriage was reportedly an unhappy and stormy one. They separated in December 1918, and in February 1919, Elsa filed for divorce. Unlike the sensational divorce of her brother, Elsa's legal battle was kept quiet, and the details of the divorce were not revealed. It was granted in less than an hour, and the reasons were cited as "general indignities."

By March 8, 1920, though, Elsa and Thomas had reconciled, and the two were remarried in New York City. They returned home to St. Louis and found their house filled with flowers and cards from friends and well-wishers. The night of March 19 was a restless one for Elsa. She suffered from frequent bouts of indigestion and nausea, and her ailments caused periods of severe depression. She was awake for most of this night and slept very little.

When her husband awoke the next morning, Ilse told him that she was feeling better, but she wanted to remain in bed. Wright agreed that this was the best thing for her and he went into the bathroom and turned on the water in the tub. He then returned to the bedroom for a change of underwear, retrieved it from the closet, and went back into the bathroom. Moments after he closed the door, he heard a sharp cracking sound over the noise of the running water.

Thinking that it was Elsa trying to get his attention, Wright opened the door and called to his wife. When she didn't answer, he walked into the bedroom and found her on the bed. Her eyes were open, and she seemed to be looking at him. When Wright got closer, he saw a revolver on the bed next to her. Elsa tried to speak but couldn't, and a few moments later she took a last, shuddering breath and died. No note or letter was ever found

Anne Wright could give no reason as to why she would have killed herself. He was not even aware that she owned a gun. The only other persons present that morning were members of the household staff. None of them heard the shot, and none of them saw any sign that Elsa intended to end her life. They quickly summoned Dr. M. B. Clopton and Samuel Fordyce, a family friend,

Strangely, the police were not notified of Elsa's death for more than two hours, and even then, the news came indirectly through Samuel Fordyce. Wright became highly agitated under the scrutiny of the police investigation that followed. His only excuse for not contacting the authorities was that he was bewildered and did not know what to do.

And while the mysterious circumstances around Elsa's death have had some suggesting there was more to the story than was told, her brothers seemed to find little out of the ordinary about her demise. Will and Edwin rushed to the house as soon as they heard about the shooting. When Will arrived and was told what had happened, he only had one comment to make. "That's the Lemp family for you," he said. Will himself would soon face depression and death.

At first, he seemed bothered and erratic by the end of the Lemp's brewing dynasty and the sale of the factory to the International Shoe Company. He shunned public life and kept to himself, complaining often of ill health and headaches. But on December 29, 1922, he surprised everyone. On that morning, Lemp Secretary Henry Vollkamp arrived at the Lemp Brewery offices around 9 a.m.,

When he came in the front door, he found Will already in his office. The two of them were joined shortly after by Olivia Berchek, a stenographer for the brewery and Lemp's personal secretary. Vollkamp later recalled that Lemp's face was flushed that morning, and that when he entered his employer's office, he had an elbow on the desk and was resting his forehead on his hand. He asked Lemp how he was feeling, and Will replied that he felt quite bad.

"I think you're looking better today than you did yesterday," Vollkamp noted in an effort to cheer up the other man. "You may think so," Will replied, "but I am feeling worse." Vollkamp then left and went to his own office on the second floor of the converted mansion. Moments after this exchange, Ms. Sperchak telephoned Will's second wife, Ellie, about instructions for the day's mail, and as she was speaking to her, Lemp picked up the other line and spoke to his wife himself.

The secretary recalled that he spoke very quietly and she did not hear what turned out to be his last words to his wife. After Lemp finished the conversation, Berchak asked him a question about some copying that she was doing from a blueprint. He first told her that what she had was fine and then he changed his mind and suggested that she go down to the basement and speak to the brewery's architect, Mr. Norton. While she was on her way downstairs, she heard a loud noise.

Because there were men working in the basement, she thought nothing of it, assuming that someone had dropped something. But when she came back upstairs, she found Will lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Another employee had also been working upstairs, and when he heard the same loud noise that Ms. Birchack later reported, he recognized it as a gunshot. He ran downstairs to find Will lying on the floor. He called for help, and men from the office across the hall came and put a pillow under Will's head.

Apparently, just after speaking to Ms. Berchek, Lemp had shot himself in the heart with a .38-caliber revolver. He had unbuttoned his vest and fired the gun through his shirt. When discovered, Lemp was still breathing, but he died by the time a doctor could arrive.

Captain William Doyle, the lead police investigator on the scene, searched Lemp's pockets and desk for a suicide note, but as with his father and his sister before him, Will left no indication as to why he had ended his life. Oddly, Lemp seemed to have no intention of killing himself despite being depressed.

After the sale of the brewery, he had discussed selling off the rest of the assets, like land parcels and saloon locations, and planned to then just take it easy. Not long after that announcement, he had even put his estate in Webster Groves up for sale, stating that he planned to travel in Europe for a while.

A week before his death, he had dined with his friend August A. Bush, who said that Lemp seemed cheerful at the time and that he gave no indication that he was worrying about business or anything else. He was a fine fellow, Bush added, and it's hard to believe that he has taken his own life. The funeral of William Lemp Jr. was held on December 31st at the Lemp Mansion.

The offices were used as the setting for the services for sentimental reasons, staff members said. He was interred in the family mausoleum at Bellefontaine Cemetery, in the crypt just above that of his sister Elsa. With William Jr. gone, and his brothers involved with their own endeavors, it seemed that the days of the Lemp Empire had come to an end at last. The two brothers, still in St. Louis, had left the family enterprise long before it had closed down.

Charles worked in banking and finance, and Edwin had entered a life in seclusion at his estate in Kirkwood in 1911. The fortune they had amassed was more than enough to keep the surviving members of the family comfortable through the Great Depression and beyond. But the days of Lemp tragedy were not yet over. In 1933, Prohibition was officially repealed and almost immediately beer was once again being brewed in St. Louis.

The future was bright once more for many of the local companies, but dark days were still ahead for the remaining members of the Lemp family. By the late 1920s, only Charles and Edwin Lemp were left in the immediate family. Throughout his life, Charles was never much involved with the Lemp brewery. His interests had been elsewhere, and when the family home was renovated into offices, he made his residence at the Racquet Club in St. Louis.

His work had mostly been in the banking and financial industries, and he sometimes dabbled in politics as well. In 1929, Charles moved back to the Lemp mansion, and the house became a private residence once more.

Despite his very visible business and political life, Charles remained a mysterious figure who became even odder and more reclusive with age. He remained a lifelong bachelor and lived alone in his old rambling house with only his two servants, Albert and Lena Bittner, for company. By the age of 77, he was arthritic and quite ill. Legend has it that he was deathly afraid of germs and wore gloves to avoid any contact with bacteria,

He had grown quite bitter and eccentric and had developed a morbid attachment to the Lemp family home. Due to the history of the place, his brother Edwin often encouraged him to move out, but Charles refused. Finally, when he could stand no more of life, he became the fourth member of the Lemp family to commit suicide. On May 10, 1949, Alfred Bittner went to the kitchen and prepared breakfast for Charles as he normally did.

He then placed the breakfast tray on the desk in the office next to the Lemp's bedroom, as he had been doing for years. Bittner later recalled that the door to the bedroom was closed and he did not look inside. At about 8 a.m., Bittner returned to the office to remove the tray and found it to be untouched. Concerned, he opened the bedroom door to see if Charles was awake and discovered that he was dead from a bullet wound to the head.

When the police arrived, they found Lemp still in bed and lightly holding a .38-caliber Army Colt revolver in his right hand. He was the only one in the family who had left a suicide note behind. He had dated the letter May 9th and had written, "In case I'm found dead, blame it on no one but me," and then signed it at the bottom. Oddly, Charles had made detailed funeral arrangements for himself long before his death.

He would be the only member of the family not interred at the mausoleum at Bellefontaine Cemetery, and while this might be unusual, it was nearly as strange as the rest of the instructions that he left behind.

In a letter that was received at a South St. Louis funeral home in 1941, Lemp ordered that upon his death, his body should be immediately taken to the Missouri crematory. His ashes were then to be placed in a wicker box and buried on his farm. He also ordered that his body not be bathed, changed, or clothed, and that no services were to be held for him and no death notice published, no matter what any surviving members of his family might want.

On May 11, 1949, Edwin Lemp picked up his brother's remains at the funeral home and took them to the farm to be buried. And while these instructions were certainly odd, they were not the most enduring mystery about this arrangement. After all of these years, there is no record of where Charles Lemp's farm was located. The Lemp family, which had once been so large and prosperous, had now been almost utterly destroyed in a span of less than a century.

Only Edwin Lemp remained, and he had long avoided the life that had turned so tragic for the rest of the family. He was known as a quiet, reclusive man who had walked away from the Lemp Brewery in 1913 to live a peaceful life on his secluded estate in Kirkwood. Here he communed with nature and became an excellent gourmet cook and animal lover. He collected fine art and entertained his intimate friends.

Edwin managed to escape the family curse. But as he grew older, he became more eccentric and developed a terrible fear of being alone. He never spoke about his family or their tragic lives, but it must have preyed on him all the same. His fears caused him to simply entertain more and to keep a companion with him at his estate almost all the time. His most loyal friend and companion was John Bopp, the caretaker of the estate for the last 30 years of Edwin's life.

His loyalty to his employer was absolute, and it's believed that Bopp was never away from the estate more than a few days at a time. He never discussed any of Lemp's personal thoughts or habits and remained faithful to Edwin even after his friend's death. Edwin passed away quietly of natural causes at age 90 in 1970. The last order that John Bopp carried out for him must have been the worst.

According to Edwin's wishes, he burned all of the paintings that Lemp had collected throughout his life, as well as priceless Lemp family papers and artifacts. These irreplaceable pieces of history vanished in the smoke of a blazing bonfire and, like the Lemp empire, were lost forever. The Lemp family line died out with Edwin, and while none of them remain today, it's almost certain that some of them are still around.

After the death of Charles Lemp, the grand family mansion was sold and turned into a boarding house. Shortly after that, it fell on hard times and began to deteriorate, along with the nearby neighborhood. In later years, stories began to emerge that residents of the boarding house often complained of ghostly knocks and phantom footsteps in the house.

As these tales spread, it became increasingly hard to find tenants to occupy the rooms, and because of this the old Lemp mansion was rarely filled. One strange account from the days following Charles' death was told by a young woman who decided to sneak into the house with some friends one day in 1949. The house was vacant at the time, and the group managed to get into the front door, and they started up the main staircase to the second floor.

They climbed the steps to the first landing and then prepared to go up the last set of stairs to the upper level. Just as they reached the landing, they looked up and saw a filmy apparition coming down the steps toward them. The young girl later described it as an almost human-shaped puff of smoke. The group took one look at it and ran.

When she told this story for the first time in the late 1990s, the woman, who was quite elderly by this time, stated that she had never been back to the mansion since. The decline of the house continued until 1975, when Dick Poynter and his family purchased it. The Poynters began remodeling and renovating the place, working for many years to turn it into a restaurant and an inn. But the Poynters were soon to find out that they were not alone in the house.

The bulk of the remodeling was done in the 1970s, and during this time workers reported that ghostly events were occurring in the house. Almost all of the workers confessed that they believed the place was haunted and told a feeling as though they were being watched. They spoke of strange sounds and complained of tools that vanished and then returned in different places from where they'd been left.

At one point in the renovations, a painter was brought in to work on the ceilings. He stayed overnight in the house while he completed the job. One day he was in his room and ran downstairs to tell one of the pointers that he had heard the sound of horses' hooves on the cobblestone outside his window. Dick Pointer convinced the painter that he was mistaken. There were no horses and no cobblestones outside the house. In time, the man finished the ceilings and left.

but the story stayed on Poynter's mind. Later that year, he noticed that some of the grass in the yard had turned brown. He dug underneath it and found that beneath the top level of soil was a layer of cobblestones. During the Lemp's residency in the house, that portion of the yard had been a drive to the carriage house. Later in the restoration, another artist was brought in to restore the painted ceiling in one of the front dining rooms. It had been covered over with paper years before,

While he was lying on his back on the scaffolding, he felt a sensation of what he believed was a spirit moving past him. It frightened him so badly that he left the house without his brushes and tools and refused to return and get them. A few months after this event, an elderly man came into the restaurant and told one of the staff members that he had once been a driver for the Lemp family.

He explained that the ceiling in the dining room had been papered over because William Lemp hated the design that had been painted on it. The staff members, upon hearing this story, noted that the artist had gotten the distinct impression that the spirit he encountered had been angry. Was it perhaps because he was restoring the unwanted ceiling? During the restorations, Dick Poynter lived alone in the house and became quite an expert on the ghostly manifestations.

One night he was lying in bed reading when he heard a door slam loudly in another part of the house. No one else was supposed to be in the house and he was sure that he had locked all the doors. Fearing that someone might have broken in, he got his dog, a large Doberman named Shadow, and decided to take a look around. The dog was spooked by this time and having also heard the sound, she and her ears turned up, listening for anything else.

They searched the entire house and found no one there. Every door had been locked, just as Poynter had left them. He reported that the same thing happened again about a month later, but again, nothing was found.

After the restaurant opened, staff members began to report their own odd experiences. Glasses were seen to lift off the bar and fly through the air. Sounds were often heard that had no explanation and some even glimpsed actual apparitions that appeared and vanished at will.

In addition, many customers and visitors to the house reported some pretty weird incidents. It was said that doors locked and unlocked on their own, the piano in the bar played by itself, voices and sounds came from nowhere and even the spirit of the Lavender Lady, Lillian Hanlon, was spotted on occasion. Late one evening, Dick was bartending after most of the customers had departed and the water in a pitcher began swirling around of its own volition.

Pointer was sure that he was just seeing things, but all of the customers who remained that night swore they saw the same thing. Then one night, in August 1981, Dick and an employee were startled to hear the piano start playing a few notes by itself. There was no one around it at the time, and in fact no one else in the entire building. The piano has continued to be the source of eerie occurrences as the years have passed.

No matter where the piano has been placed in the house, whether in the main hallway upstairs or in one of the guest rooms, its keys have reportedly tinkled without the touch of human hands. And while the ghostly atmosphere of the place has admittedly attracted a number of patrons, it has also caused the owners to lose a number of valuable employees. One of them was a former waitress named Bonnie Strayhorn who encountered an unusual customer while working one day.

The restaurant had not yet opened for business when she saw a dark-haired man seated at one of the tables in the rear dining room. She was surprised that someone had come so early, but she went over to ask if he'd like a cup of coffee. He simply sat there and did not answer. Bonnie frowned and looked away for a moment. When she looked back just moments later, the man was gone. She has continued to maintain that the man could not have left the room in the brief seconds when she was not looking at him,

After that incident, she left the Lemp mansion and went to work in a non-haunted location. In addition to customers, the house has also attracted ghost hunters from around the country. Many of them are attracted by the publicity that's been achieved by the house as a haunted location

The mansion has appeared in scores of magazines, newspaper articles, books and television shows over the years. But it first gained notoriety back in the 1970s when it was investigated by the "Haunt Hunters." These two St. Louis men, Phil Goodwilling and Gordon Hohner, actively researched ghost stories and sightings in the area, and during that period they conducted a class on ghosts at St. Louis University.

They promised their students that they would take them to a real haunted place and decided that the Lemp Mansion fit the bill. In October 1979, they brought the class to the house and invited along a local television crew to film the event. Goodwilling and Hohner divided the students up into small groups and gave them all writing planchettes to try and connect the spirits.

The devices, like the small rolling platforms that come with Ouija boards, were used to spell out messages from the ghosts. The students were divided into groups of four. One of the groups asked, "Is there an unseen presence that wishes to communicate?" "Yes," came the answer, scrawled on a large piece of paper as the planchette with its pencil tip moved across the surface. The students asked another question, "Will you identify yourself?" The planchette scratched out a reply,

"Charles Lemp." Goodwilling later noted that the students who received this message were the most skeptical in the class. He also noted that no one in the room that night, with the exception of Dick Poynter, had any idea that Charles had committed suicide. At that time, the history of the house had not been widely publicized. After the name was revealed, the spirit added that he had taken his own life. When asked why he did this, the spirit replied in three words: "Help. Death.

It might also be added that by the time this séance was over, the four students were no longer the most skeptical in the class. In November, the haunt hunters returned to the house, bringing along a camera crew from the popular show of the era, Real People. Goodwilling and Hohner participated in a séance with two other persons, neither of whom had any knowledge about the past history of the mansion.

They once again made contact with a spirit who identified himself as Charles Lemp, and he was asked again why he had committed suicide. The spirit reportedly used a derogatory term and then added, Damn Roosevelt. Apparently, the Lemps had not been fond of the politics practiced by Franklin D. Roosevelt during their time. The seance continued with the next question from the group. Is there a message for someone in this house?

The answer came: yes. Yes. Edwin. Money. The group then asked if there was anything they could do to free the spirit from being trapped in the house. "Yes, yes," the ghost replied. Unfortunately, they were unsuccessful in finding out what they could do to help. Goodwilling felt that if the spirit was actually Charles Lemp, then he might have stayed behind in the house because of his suicide.

He might have had a message for his brother, Edwin Lemp, whom he tried to contact during the seance. He may have even believed that Edwin was still alive and, based on the conversation, was trying to pass along a message about money. Could this be what caused Charles Lemp's ghost to remain behind? Most important, perhaps, though, is the question of whether the Lemp mansion still remains haunted today.

Many will tell you that it does, although the current owners accept this as just part of the house's unusual ambience. One of the current owners, Paul Poynter, helps to maintain the place as a popular eating and lodging establishment. He accepts the ghosts as just another part of this unique mansion. "People come here expecting to experience weird things," he said, "and fortunately for us, they are rarely disappointed."

Up next, paranormal author and investigator Troy Taylor tells us about some of his numerous visits and overnight stays at Lemp Mansion, and he was not disappointed. They've been here for thousands of years, making their presence known in the shadows. They might be seen by a lonely motorist on a deserted road late at night, or by a frightened and confused husband in the bedroom he's sharing with his wife.

Perhaps the most disconcerting part of this phenomenon boils down to this question: has the government been aware of their presence all along and is covertly working with them towards some secret end? In the audiobook, Runs of Disclosure, what once was fringe is now reality. While listening, you'll meet regular people just like you who have encountered something beyond their ability to explain.

You'll also hear from people of great faith and deep religious belief who continue to have these strange and deeply unsettling encounters. Author L.A. Marzulli explores these ongoing incidents to discover the answers to these questions: Who are they? What do they want? And why are they here? Can you handle the truth? Listen to this audiobook if you dare!

Rungs of Disclosure – Following the Trail of Extraterrestrials and the End Times by L.A. Marzulli Narrated by Darren Marlar Hear a free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com The following is a first-hand account from Troy Taylor, the author of this piece.

I first heard about the Lent Mansion and its hauntings back in the early 1990s when the first wildly skewed stories about the ghosts began to appear in what few ghost books were available in those days. At my first opportunity, I traveled to St. Louis to see the house and a couple years later, I spent the night there for the first time. Even then, it was an amazing house, although the bed and breakfast service was in its early stages.

I stayed there on a scorching June night with a few friends, and aside from a couple of struggling window units, there were no cooling systems in place. The house was stifling until about 2am when it finally started to cool down. On the bright side, we had the entire house to ourselves, and Paul Poynter gave us permission to roam anywhere we wanted to,

We took him up on it and scoured all the mansion from top to bottom in search of not only ghosts, but an entrance to the legendary caverns that were supposed to exist under the house. The book that I had read, which featured the Lemp Mansion, had been badly out of date and stated that the caves were accessible from the mansion.

Later, when I started researching the house for my own writings about the Lemp family, I'd find out the cave entrance had been closed for many years. I never gave up on the idea of getting into the cave, however, and eventually my persistence paid off. My first stay in the Lemp mansion was largely uneventful, although there was one incident that occurred that I've never been able to explain.

At some point, around 3 a.m., we heard someone on the main staircase that leads from the front foyer to the second floor. We were sitting in the hallway at the top of the stairs, talking quietly, when we heard what sounded like heavy footsteps. One of my friends got up and walked over to see if someone, perhaps one of the staff members, had returned to the mansion. She called the rest of us over when she noticed that although we all could still hear someone walking, there was no one on the staircase.

All of us witnessed this eerie phenomenon, which continued for several minutes and went up and down the stairs several times. While it was occurring, I went down the stairs to see if I could sense anyone going past me, or if there was a temperature change or some sort of movement. I never felt a thing, but there was no denying that we could hear someone walking. The footsteps continued for a few minutes and then stopped.

We looked under the steps, up and down them, and even tried measuring and jumping on them. We were unable to duplicate the sounds that we heard. It sounded exactly like someone wearing heavy boots walking back and forth, and if there were anything else, I can't begin to imagine what it was. I visited the mansion a number of other times as the years went by, but it would be until 2003 when I would spend another night there.

This time, however, I did not spend the night inside the house but under it, in the famous caverns that had originally been used by the Lemp's to lager their beer. A reporter for the Missouri Republican newspaper once wrote that Lemp's cave had three separate chambers and that each one of them contained large casks that were capable of holding 20 to 30 barrels of beer.

The loggering cellars were opened for use in 1845, but Lemp soon expanded them to store more than 3,000 barrels of beer at one time. The beer cellars had been created by simply clearing out the natural, underground river channels that had been carved from the limestone. They were divided off by the construction of masonry and brick walls into artificial rooms.

During the early period of the brewery's history, Lemp was still brewing the beer near the downtown riverfront and taking it by wagon to the cave for the laundering period. After the death of Adam Lemp, his son William would construct a new brewery above the cave.

Around 1850, just about the time that the Lemp Brewery was just beginning to grow, fur trader Henry Chattillon built a home on a piece of property that adjoined Lemp's property at the crest of Arsenal Hill on 13th Street. In 1856, Dr. Nicholas de Mennel purchased the house and land and he began enlarging and expanding the farmhouse a few years later.

He added several rooms to the house and a magnificent portico that faced eastward and looked out over his large garden and the Mississippi River. The Greek Revival Mansion became a favorite landmark for river pilots rounding a landmark known as Chatillon's Bend. In 1865, de Mennel leased the southwest corner of the property to the Minnehaha Brewery and they built a small, two-story frame brewery on the site.

For several years, de Mennel had been using a cave that was located beneath his house as a place to store perishable goods, and he also leased a portion of this cave to Charles Fritchell and Louis Zepp, the owners of the brewery. Like Adam Lemp, they planned to use the caverns as a place to lager beer, and over the course of the next year they made a number of improvements to the cave. Unfortunately, the brewery went out of business in 1867, and de Mennel acquired the buildings.

During the years of these operations, both the Lemp's and the Minnehaha Brewery were using different parts of the same cave. A wall had been constructed between the two businesses, but the Lemp's had little to fear from this short-lived competition.

It's also believed that they must have been on good terms with Dr. Dementel. When the Lemp family renovated their home just down the street from the Dementel Mansion, an arrangement was made to run three pipelines through Dementel's cave, furnishing the Lemp Mansion with hot and cold water and beer from the brewery complex down the street.

The Lamps continued to use the cave until artificial refrigeration was installed at the factory. After that, the cave no longer played a role in beer production, so it was turned into a private playground for the Lamp family. A tunnel exited the basement of the house and entered into the portion of the cave that Adam Lamp had discovered for his beer-loggering years before. Traveling along a quarried shaft, the Lamps could journey beneath the street, all the way to the brewery.

One large chamber was converted into a natural auditorium and theatre, with scenery constructed of plaster and wire. Crude floodlights were used to illuminate the scene, and the Lems were believed to have hired actors on the theatre and vaudeville circuits of the day to come into the cave for private performances. This section of the cave was accessible by way of a spiral staircase that once ascended to Cherokee Street.

This entrance is sealed today and the spiral stairs were cut away to prevent anyone from entering the cave. East of the theater was another innovation of the Lemp family. Just below the intersection of Cherokee and Dementel Streets was a large concrete-lined pool that had been a reservoir back in the days of underground loggering. In the years that followed, the Lemps converted it into a wading pool by using hot water that was piped in from the brewery's boiler house located a short distance away.

After Prohibition, the caves were abandoned and the entrances sealed shut. However, this was not the end for the Minnehaha portion of the cave. In November 1946, a pharmaceutical manufacturer named Lee Hess bought not only the Minnehaha portion of the cave, but the old Demento Mansion and grounds as well. He set to work developing the cave as a tourist attraction. He erected a museum building and parking lot to serve what he dubbed Cherokee Cave.

The cave became a popular tourist attraction, but some still tell stories about Hess and his strange obsession with the cavern. He nearly lost his entire fortune trying to develop it, and only two rooms of the sprawling Dementel House were used during his time there. He and his wife shared one room, and Albert Hoffman, who managed the cave, lived in the other. In April 1950, Cherokee Cave was opened to the public, and it was a popular attraction for more than ten years.

Visitors to the cave were able to stroll along on a tour that took them to Cherokee Lake and the Petrified Falls and, of course, to the famed Spaghetti Room, where slender cave formations hung down from the ceiling like strands of pasta. The cave remained open until 1960. In 1961, it was purchased by the Missouri Highway Department to clear the way for Interstate 55.

Haas battled to the end of his life to keep the state from destroying the Den Mill Mansion and he eventually succeeded, although the cave museum and entrance could not be saved. The building and the entrance that Haas had created were demolished in 1964. Today, the only remainder of this unique place is a short street near Broadway and Cherokee Street in St. Louis called Cave Street. The Dementel Mansion became a historic site and museum.

For years after the interstate tore through this historic portion of the city, it was believed that Cherokee Cave had been filled in and completely destroyed. It was later discovered that this was wrong and that portions of the cave still exist today. While not accessible to the public, the mystery of the place still remains alive. Cave researchers and spelunkers have toured these passages in recent years, but the last documented visits took place in the middle 1960s.

During the visit, accounts told of the labyrinth of rooms that were constructed by the Lamps and revealed the remains of broken and rotted wooden casks where beer was once aged in the cellars. Visitors passed through oversized doorways and into rooms lined with brick and stone. The waiting pool remained as well, now filthy and covered with mud. The theatre still existed, although it was hard to imagine audiences who might have assembled here to watch a performance.

When the theater was built, the Lamps tore out the natural formations of the cave and replaced them with artificial cave formations made from plaster and wood. Tinted in odd colors, they formed the backdrop for the stage. And while many can attest to the hauntings that occur in the Lamp Mansion, once accessible from the cave, there are others who insist that the cave is haunted too.

Stories have been told about strange sounds and shapes that have been seen and heard down there and cannot be explained away as the weird but natural environment of a cave. In recent times, the brewery above the cave has occasionally been the site of a haunted house attraction that has been staged by the current owners of the Lemp Mansion restaurant. While a standard attraction of that type in some cases, the customers sometimes got a little more than they bargained for.

On at least one occasion, the attraction was reportedly closed down after a staff member spotted someone in an off-limits area that led down to the cave entrances. The customers were stopped at the door while employees tried to track down this wandering visitor and escort him out. However, after a thorough search, there was no one found. The trespasser had completely vanished.

On other occasions, apparitions had been seen and one staff member who entered the cave itself claimed to hear the sound of someone with hard-soled shoes walking behind him in some of the abandoned passageways. Unnerved, he began walking faster, only to have the mysterious footsteps keep pace with him. Suddenly, perhaps thinking that it was only his imagination or an echo of the cave playing tricks on him, he stopped abruptly, fully expecting the tapping of the shoes to stop as well.

but they continued on for several more steps before stopping. Now feeling quite frightened, he turned and illuminated the passage behind him with his flashlight, but there was no one there. Needless to say, he immediately left the cave. And the stories have continued to be told over the past few years.

Lemp mansion owner Paul Poynter told me a few years ago that he hoped to possibly reopen the caves someday and perhaps start a cave museum in the old brewery buildings that would highlight the natural history that still exists under the city. Forays into the caves for research purposes have added to the haunted lore of the place, but unfortunately it was unlikely that I would ever get to experience this for myself.

After discovering that the cave was no longer accessible from the house, I gave up on the idea of ever seeing it. The Lemp Caverns and legendary Cherokee Cave were now closed and forgotten, perhaps for all time. I finally resigned myself to the fact that it was a place that I would never get to see. At least, that's what I thought at the time.

In March 2003, I received an invitation from some acquaintances, as well as my friend Luke Nalaborski and Paul Poynter, to come along on an excursion into one place in St. Louis that I never imagined I would get to see, the Lemp Caverns and Cherokee Cave. Paul had offered a private tour of the caverns, and I immediately said that I would come.

On a chilly night in early March, we assembled at the nearby Lemp Mansion and then followed Paul as he led us to one of the rear entrances to the brewery buildings, now the only access into the caves. We entered one of the buildings and first had the rare treat of touring the brewery building itself, even riding one of the original elevators to the top floor and going out on the roof for an incredible view of South St. Louis.

The warehouse buildings of the brewery are utterly massive, with huge open floors that once held the brewing and packaging machinery and storage casks for the beer. In later times, after artificial refrigeration, the beer had been stored in various locations in the building. As we descended to the lower areas of the brewery, we would literally go back in time to the earliest days of the company, when beer had to be stored in low, cool areas to lager.

Staircases and elevators took us lower into the brewery until we finally entered areas that were underground. Here, we found massive rooms with curved archways, detailed stone and brickwork, and ponderous ceilings that had been built with individual arched sections to add extra support for the gigantic stone buildings overhead.

When the brewery was open, the foundations would have had to support incredible weight in machinery, men, and the huge casks of beer. In each section that we explored as we went deeper underground, we found remnants of the brewery and the heyday of the Lemp Empire.

In the upper sections we found only occasional worn-away emblems in the shape of the famous Lemp shield, which later became the Falstaff logo. Original light fixtures, hidden designs in doors and glass fixtures, but little else

As we descended deeper underground, however, the remains of the brewery became more noticeable, and some locations they appeared almost untouched, as though the last people to walk there before we did had been the men who received a paycheck from the Lemp Brewery each week. Leaving the gigantic, arched rooms behind, we descended once again, this time through a smaller doorway,

We traveled along more passages and then went down a long, curved staircase to what would be considered the sub-basement of the brewery. This was at the same level as the first portion of the cave.

It was through this level that the Lamps would ascend to the brewery as they walked to work on many mornings, using the cave to travel from the mansion to their offices. It was here that William Lamp had walked as he began his descent into the depression and madness that would later claim his life. Our flashlights illuminated this area of the complex, which seemed well on its way to being reclaimed by the cave from which it had been carved.

The floors were covered with mud, moss and algae in some places, and water dripped constantly from the walls and the ceilings. The brick was slowly crumbling beneath decades of dampness. It was this area of the brewery, the actual cave, where Adam Lemp had stored the first lager beer in St. Louis. There are several chambers that had been created here with high, curved ceilings, and it was inside these chambers where the original casks were placed.

Ice was cut from the river during the winter months and then placed in the chambers to keep the beer cool. As it melted, the water would drain off into the sides of the chambers and into the water that flowed through the cave itself. On the sides of these long rooms, the cave water was visible and while extremely clear, it left behind mineral deposits on the stone floor, making it plain that it was not fit to drink.

We then left the finished areas of the cave, with its stone floor and brick-lined walls, and entered a passageway that would take us into the wild areas of the cave that remained. To reach this section, we passed through a long, rugged corridor that was so damp and filled with moisture that many of the photographs we took that night were so fogged that it was impossible to make out details.

This was before I started using a digital camera and several of my own photographs were lost, but by continuing to clean my lens throughout the evening, I was able to take some of the first photos of the caverns that had been captured in years.

This long passageway, which led deeper into the cave, was littered with fallen stone, mud and refuse from the old days of the brewery. Above our heads were metal brackets and chains that had once been part of a conveyor belt system for transporting ice into the logger vaults. A motor from the conveyor belt is still resting on the side of the path through the passage. At the end of it, a metal ladder dangled from the ceiling and led upwards into a narrow, shadowy hole.

During the early days of the brewery, this had been a shaft that was used to dump ice down into the cave. It was loaded onto cars on the conveyor belt and then mechanically moved to the laundering areas. This hole was sealed off many years ago, and the metal ladder has fallen into disrepair. Our first area of exploration took us to the left of the passage, and we traveled down a wide tunnel toward what was once the Lemp's Theater.

The old theater is literally in ruins today. An archway at the back which led to another chamber was one of the few remaining architectural pieces, as the scenery that had been created for the theater now lay in heaping piles on the floor. It has long since been destroyed, but some of the garish colors that had been painted on the plaster and stone can still be seen.

Overhead, an old electric light bar remained that once illuminated the small stage. Its bulbs have long since been shattered. I couldn't help but wonder as I stood looking around the room that was shrouded in a heavy mist just how much privacy the lamps must have craved. I couldn't imagine huddling down here, far underground in this damp and dark chamber, just so I could attend private performances of popular programs.

And how much do the limps offer to get the actors to put on these command performances? The theater remains an eerie and downright spooky place. I would not be surprised to learn that the ghosts of these actors still linger here, still walking a stage that vanished long ago. The theater marked the end of the passage, and so we turned back in the direction we had come from and once more ended up beneath the ice chute to the surface.

Just beyond this is the famed swimming pool of the Lemp family. The pool was actually just a wading pool, and it was only used for this purpose after electric refrigeration was installed in the brewery. Before this, it was a reservoir for runoff from the melting ice. To visit the site today, you can still see the smooth walls of the reservoir, but over the years it has been heavily clogged with falls of rock from the cave's ceiling and by copious amounts of mud and clay.

It bears little resemblance to any sort of wading pool now, and it was certainly not inviting enough for me to want to consider rolling up my pants legs and walking in. The pool is still filled with approximately two feet of water, and is a habitat for the blind white fish that dwell in caves. The animals are fairly rare, but they can be found in the old Lemp Caverns. Once we traveled past the reservoir, we entered the actual passages of Cherokee Cave.

Here, the natural contours of the cave had been opened up and the floor had been artificially smoothed and fitted with curbs on each side of the path to keep the majority of the water away. These improvements, along with the remains of electrical wiring and light boxes, had been left behind when Lee Hess had been forced to abandon the cave back in 1961. They were just a few of the signs of the commercial cave that we would find in the passages ahead.

As the trip progressed, the commercial aspects of the cave became more and more obvious. At one point we reached a ravine that cut across the path and had to use a metal ladder to climb down and cross to stone steps on the other side. An alternate route opened to the right and we descended another flight of steps, which were fitted with metal handrails that had been installed nearly 50 years before.

We discovered more signs of the commercial Cherokee Cave in stripped-down electric lines and carefully constructed walkways. It was this passage that had originally connected the cave and brewery to the Lemp Mansion. The entrance from the house has long since been sealed off and is no longer accessible, but I looked forward to seeing it anyway. However, as we began to get nearer to the house, the water that now covered the floor grew deeper.

To make matters worse, Paul began to get very concerned about the quality of air in this passageway. This had been a problem with some of the cave exploration that's been done in recent years. On one occasion, one member of a group of spelunkers had to be carried out of the cave after passing out. We tried checking the air with a flame from a lighter and we watched as the flame grew weaker and weaker as we progressed along the passage. Eventually it flickered and went out and we had to turn back.

I was the last to return, feeling a great sense of loss for the now-forgotten cave. I wondered if the others had the same sense of the history that we were privileged enough to be experiencing, walking where very few had walked in nearly half a century. This was, I realized, a haunted place, but whether by ghosts or by time I was unable to say.

"One final passage awaited us and led us deeper into the cave. Or, if we had visited Cherokee Cave when it was in business, it would have led us out of the cave. This was the original shaft that had been opened by Lee Hess and would have ended at the visitor center and parking lot if they had not been demolished in the early 1960s."

The passage made a sharp right turn, although ahead of us was a man-made basin that had been built to catch runoff from a small spring that flowed from the cave wall. A trickle of water was still running into the basin even now. We turned into this last passageway, but only traveled for a short distance before coming to what had been dubbed "Cherokee Lake" by Lee Hess. A stone bridge had been built across the lake decades ago, but the path on the opposite side of it ended abruptly at a stone wall.

This wall had been placed here by the Missouri Department of Transportation during the construction of Interstate 55. When they had razed the visitor center to build the highway, the cave had also been sealed off, bringing to an end an element of St. Louis' mysterious and colorful history. Our return journey back through the labyrinth of cave passages, doorways, staircases, loggering chambers, and brewery corridors took us much less time to complete than it had been when we were descending.

I was surprised to discover that we had actually been underground for several hours. I remember walking back down the corridor where the conveyor belt system had been, which led from the cave to the lagering caverns, and looking back into the darkness and mist behind us. I'm not sure what I expected to see or hear, the sound of other, more ethereal explorers following behind us, or perhaps the specters of the LEMPs themselves, still trudging to the brewery after all these years.

I don't know for sure, but I know that I expected something. I wish that I could tell you that I had some ghostly experience while exploring these haunted caverns, but unfortunately I cannot. The ghosts were certainly there though, at least in a figurative sense, because no one can come there and not feel the very tangible spirit of the past. It was an experience that I may never be able to repeat, and one that I will certainly never forget.

My next overnight stay at the Lemp mansion was arranged on February 13th, 2004, the 100th anniversary of the suicide of William Lemp. This momentous occasion was attended by a number of investigators and we gathered at the house in preparation for what we believed would be an active night.

Among those present that night were several investigators from the American Ghost Society, who had stayed at the house before and nearly all of us had previously experienced unexplained activity while there, but the activity that we would experience that night had nothing to do with ghosts. After dinner that evening, the group met at the house and established a base of operations in one of the rooms on the second floor,

We were anticipating a great night because I knew there had been strange happenings in the house in recent months. I heard from several people who stayed in the house during the fall months, and they all spoke of the usual phantom footsteps, disembodied voices, and items that disappeared and moved about, but there was one strange incident that I knew about that I could actually vouch for."

In August 2003, I had invited my friend Leslie Rule, a fellow ghostwriter and the daughter of crime author Ann Rule, to come to Alton, Illinois, and speak at an event that I was hosting there.

She'd wanted to stay somewhere haunted while in the area, and I helped her to make arrangements to stay at the Lemp Mansion for several nights. She was very excited at the prospect until she called to make reservations and was told by co-owner Patty Poynter that she would have the mansion all to herself during her stay. Leslie was not enthused about sleeping in a haunted house alone, and she asked me if I might know of anyone who would consider staying with her.

I suggested that she contact my friend, Anita Daituko, and the two of them, they planned an overnight at the mansion. Anita and her 22-year-old daughter Amy picked up Leslie at the airport and all of us met for dinner. Anita and Amy had stopped by the mansion before dinner, picked up the keys and had turned on the lights in their rooms. As a test, Amy explained. Since the lights in the empty house had a reputation for turning themselves off and on, she wanted to see what would happen.

When we all went back to the house after dinner and found that some of the lights were no longer on, though, she nervously dismissed this as somebody playing a joke on them. I wouldn't find out how scared Amy was about staying in the house until after I talked to her and Anita a few days later. Leslie later told me that the young woman was very tentative about exploring the house with her and that it took some urging to get her into some of the creepier parts like the dark and ominous attic.

To make matters worse, their flashlight batteries unexpectedly went out while they were in the attic, unsettling Amy even further. But perhaps Amy had a good reason to be unsettled. A number of women who have worked in the house and have stayed the night there have had encounters with a female spirit or have heard someone calling their names. Some believe this spirit may be that of Elsa Lemp, who, while she did not die in the house, spent a large part of her life there,

They were her happiest times and perhaps she has returned here, seeking peace after her death. Regardless of who this lovely spirit may be, many women have encountered her, including Amy. A few days after her nerve-wracking stay, Amy told me that she had been trying to go to sleep next to her mother in the lavender suite on the second floor and was having trouble dosing off.

After tossing and turning for a while, she turned over and was terrified to see a woman in a long dress standing next to the bed. The woman looked very real, but there was no way that she could have gotten into the room through a locked door. Before Amy could do or say anything, the woman leaned toward her, placed a finger to her lips, and made a shushing motion, as if to tell Amy to be quiet and to go to sleep. The woman then simply vanished.

Needless to say, Amy did not sleep for the rest of the night. I recalled this incident while unpacking my things for our anniversary overnight at the mansion. Since the house had been so active in the preceding months, it seemed likely that we were going to be in for an exciting night. What better time to be at the house than on the night when the first limp suicide occurred?

We spent the first few hours of the night exploring the house while I recounted the history of the brewery and told of the series of tragic events that had befallen the family. After a time, we split up into groups and began investigating and photographing the house. I wandered between the floors, checking in with the various groups, and had just gone down into the basement when I heard a loud gasp from one of the rooms in the back of the house.

I went back to see what was going on, and I was told by one of the investigators that they had heard someone walking around. They were startled by the footsteps, which explained the loud gasp, and they went to find the source of the sounds. We were standing there talking when suddenly a dark shadow loomed up against the window,

As it turned out, what we thought might be a ghost was actually just a late arrival to the house. The shadow was my friend Dave Goodwin, an author and police officer who'd been working a late shift and was just then arriving for the anniversary overnight. I let Dave into the house, and the night continued with more photos and experimentation with equipment. The evening took a bad turn when the night's only activity began at about 1.30 a.m.

One of the investigators happened to glance out the window of one of the downstairs dining rooms and noticed that the trunk of a car in the parking lot was standing open. After alerting everyone, Dave and I went straight outside and saw someone running away. We soon learned that several of the cars parked in the lot had been broken into, and bags, purses, and personal items had been stolen. One of the cars belonged to two young men who brought dozens of pieces of paranormal investigation equipment with them,

They had so much stuff that they left several cases in their car. They also had a laptop computer and several other expensive items. The laptop was left untouched, but the thieves had made off with their cases of ghost detection devices. One can only imagine what went through their minds when they opened the cases and saw the bizarre and largely useless to most people items inside.

After calling the police and sorting out what was missing, the evening was largely a bust. With only a couple of hours left to investigate, we made the most of it by either continuing with the investigations or catching a short nap. As it ended up, some of the stolen items were later recovered, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief that nothing more valuable had been taken. It made for a memorable night, but it was definitely not the one we had in mind.

The next overnight that I hosted to the Lemp mansion was in May of that same year. It was a few days after the May 10th anniversary of Charles Lemp's suicide, but based on the way that the last anniversary overnight turned out, I decided not to mention it to anyone. I was once again joined at the house by a number of investigators, as well as my friends Dave Goodwin, Darren Deist, Rex Murray, and Amanda Schmidt.

We all enjoyed the tour and working with the various groups as they began their investigations. At one point a strange event occurred that I was lucky enough to actually witness for myself. Up next, the team shakes things up a bit by bringing in a Ouija board and they get a reaction, but nothing close to what they were expecting.

One of the standard things that we do at the Lemp Mansion is bring along a Ouija board and give people a chance to work with it in the house. Without going into the pros and cons of using a Ouija board, you may have noticed that such devices have been involved with investigations of the house since the haunt-hunters days of the 1970s. I always bring along a board and make it available for people to use if they choose to, just to make it interesting.

I tracked down and purchased an antique board that was made in 1915. I figured that if we were going to use a Ouija board in the Lemp Mansion, we might as well use one that came from the era when the place was in its heyday. On this night, I put the Ouija board on a small table in the unfinished portion of the attic, which has since been remodeled into guest rooms, and placed some chairs around it to make it easier to use.

The attic was quite a mess at that time. There were pieces of wood and old doors stacked around, and the air was thick with years of dust and grime. Previous visitors to the attic had left items behind, including a number of small candles that apparently had been set up for a séance of some sort. The candles had burned down to the wick, leaving small foil holders scattered all over the attic's main room. Throughout the evening, the separate groups took turns using the board during the time they were assigned to that section of the house.

Nothing out of the ordinary took place as the evening went by, but people were intrigued with the idea of experimenting with the antique Ouija board. Just after midnight, I went up to the attic where Rex, Amanda, Darren and Dave were trying out the board. I sat down in one of the chairs and watched as Darren and Amanda tried to coax messages from any spirit who might be hanging around by using the planchette. For the next 20 minutes or so, they had absolutely no luck.

Their fingers were placed lightly on the planchette and they asked question after question, waiting to see if it would move, but nothing happened. Nothing at all. Finally, after another five minutes or so of frustration, Darren let out a sigh and suggested that someone else might want to give the board a try. Almost as soon as he spoke, all of us present heard the sound of something sliding across the floor.

No one had been standing near it, but somehow one of the little candle holders had moved across the floor under its own power. The candle holder slid about ten feet from one side of the room to the other, passing directly beneath Darren's chair. The room was now so quiet you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. "What was that?" someone asked. We quickly deduced that it had been one of the candle holders, but we were unable to figure out just how it had moved.

We spent the next hour or so waiting to see if anything else would happen, but nothing else occurred. I've never been able to come up with an explanation for how the candle holder moved, other than to say that perhaps it was one of the spirits in the house. Were they trying to make themselves known to us and couldn't do it in any other way? Since that time I have visited and stayed the night at the Lent Mansion on many other occasions.

On one visit, soon after the incident with the candle holder, I was photographing another session with the Ouija board in the attic. Three young men who had joined me that night were using the board while one of their fathers and I were standing in the doorway watching. As I photographed them, I noticed something very odd on the viewing screen of my camera. There was a fourth person in the room, standing behind them. The photo showed a blur of movement as this person moved past the table.

I immediately showed the photo to the man standing next to me, and he agreed that no one else had been in the room. During another evening, I was joined by my friend John Winterbauer, who handles many events for my ghost tour companies. Everyone in our group had left for the night, around 4:30 a.m., and John and I were going through the house, straightening chairs and making sure that everything was in order.

The restaurant staff always left the dining rooms set up for the next day when they left at night, and occasionally our guests would move chairs or table items during the investigations. We had just finished the front dining room - Will Lemp's former office - when we heard the sound of breaking glass in the sunroom in the back of the house. Fearing that perhaps a glass had been left too close to the edge of a table and had fallen and broken on the tile floor, we went back to take a look. I turned on the lights, and we both looked around.

But there was nothing to see. Nothing moved. No broken glass, nothing at all. We had no idea where the sound could have come from. But wherever glass had shattered, it had not been in our world. As Paul Poynter once said, those who come to this house are rarely ever disappointed. And I would have to agree.

While not all of my stays at this old house have been eventful ones, at least when it comes to ghosts, I have to admit that the vivid sense of history that I have experienced when I'm here more than makes up for the lack of anything supernatural. If you're a ghost hunter or a history buff, then I encourage you to visit the mansion of the once-mighty Lemp family. Their empire may have crumbled long ago, but there is much to see here among the ruins of yesteryear.

Thanks for listening! If you like the show, please, share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do! All stories used in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the authors, stories, and sources I used in the episode description as well as on the website. Suicides and Spirits – The Lemp Mansion Hauntings is by Troy Taylor from his book Haunting of America.

Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Matthew 6, verse 34. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. And a final thought. You are what you do, not what you say you will do. Carl Jung. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

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