ST. LOUIS · STRANGE AND OVERLOOKED
January 20, 2025
William Peter Blatty didn’t invent the possession story that became The Exorcist. He read about it in a Washington Post article in 1949, and the real events happened not in Georgetown but in a modest ranch house in the St. Louis suburb of Bel-Nor.
Read more ›December 1, 2024
It was never officially called Zombie Road. The name just spread, the way dread spreads, and eventually became the only name anyone used for the two-mile stretch of crumbling asphalt winding through the Meramec River bluffs west of the city.
Read more ›November 10, 2024
Four suicides in three decades. A fortune dissolved overnight. A brewery sealed shut like a tomb. The Lemp family story is St. Louis’s most operatic tragedy, and the mansion at 3322 DeMenil Place still carries every note of it.
Read more ›October 15, 2024
The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition gave the world the hot dog bun, iced tea, and — depending on which of seven claimants you believe — the ice cream cone. The truth is stranger and more contested than the official story.
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