The obituaries read like a dynasty under a curse. William J. Lemp Sr. shot himself in his office on a February morning in 1904, apparently consumed by grief over the death of his closest friend and son Frederick the year before. His daughter Elsa — the wealthiest heiress in St. Louis — shot herself in 1920. His son William Jr. shot himself in the same office as his father in 1922, reportedly leaving no note and having given away most of his possessions in the weeks prior. His son Charles shot himself in the mansion’s basement in 1949, first shooting his dog so it wouldn’t be left alone.

The Lemps were once the royalty of St. Louis. Their Western Brewery, founded by Johann Adam Lemp in the 1840s, grew into an industrial empire that stretched beneath the city — literally. The family excavated a vast network of limestone caves under Cherokee Street, using the natural 60-degree temperature for lager fermentation decades before mechanical refrigeration existed. At their peak they employed over 700 workers and produced a million barrels a year.

Then Prohibition arrived in 1919 and William Jr. — rather than convert the brewery to other uses as competitors did — simply closed it. He sold off equipment at pennies on the dollar. The caves were sealed. The brewery sat empty until it was sold for $588,500 in 1922, a fraction of its estimated value. William Jr. did not live to see the sale finalized.

The mansion on DeMenil Place, a 33-room Italianate behemoth, passed through several hands before becoming a restaurant and inn in the 1970s. It regularly appears on lists of America’s most haunted buildings. Staff and guests report a Ziegfield-era party that can be heard faintly through the walls on certain nights, the muffled brass of an orchestra that hasn’t played in a century. The basement bar — built over the old cave entrance — is where Charles died. You can rent the room he died in. People do.

What made the Lemps break? Historians offer various theories: genetic predisposition, the trauma of Prohibition’s sudden erasure of everything they’d built, a family culture that prized stoic self-reliance to a pathological degree. William Jr. was said to have been “the type of man who kept his own counsel.” Charles had reportedly become entirely reclusive by his final years, living alone in the vast mansion with only his dog.

The cave network still exists beneath Cherokee Street. Portions have been rediscovered, explored by urban historians and thrill-seekers alike. The brewery building still stands, repurposed multiple times over. But the mansion on DeMenil is where the grief concentrated, and where it apparently remains.