Posts — WeirdSTL

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HISTORICAL 📌

The Gravois Wine Garden That Became a Convent, Then a Parking Lot

October 13, 2026

By 1865, a German immigrant named Phillip Bamberger was running a picnic ground and wine garden on Gravois Road, at what is now Gravois and Bamberger avenues in Tower Grove South. It lasted a couple of decades. After that, Adolphus Busch bought the land and gave it to a Catholic order of nuns, who ran a home there for girls and women until 1969. Today the site is the parking lot of Gravois Plaza, a strip mall with an Aldi, which is not what Busch had in mind.

The St. Louis Doctor Who Kept His Daughter in a Cave

HISTORICAL

The St. Louis Doctor Who Kept His Daughter in a Cave

October 12, 2026

In 1840, a doctor named Joseph Nash McDowell founded a medical school in St. Louis that required every student to dissect a human body, at a time when the only reliable way to get one was a shovel. The neighbors, many of them German immigrants, did not love it. In 1849, a rumor that he had taken a missing woman for dissection brought hundreds of people to his door. That was not the strangest thing about him. The strangest thing was in a cave near Hannibal, Missouri, in a copper cylinder full of alcohol: his fourteen-year-old daughter.

The Lemp Mansion Ghosts, Ranked by How Much Anyone Can Prove

HISTORICAL 📌

The Lemp Mansion Ghosts, Ranked by How Much Anyone Can Prove

October 12, 2026

Since 1975, when Dick Pointer’s family bought a run-down boarding house at 3322 DeMenil Place and turned it into a restaurant and inn, the Lemp Mansion has sold something more reliable than beer: ghosts. Guests report a child’s face in the attic window, a woman who smells like lavender, and a man peering over the stalls in the women’s restroom. In September 2026, the Pointers listed the house for $3.9 million, with another $2.8 million for the stables. The caretakers are retiring. The restaurant, inn and ghost tours are scheduled to keep running through December 2027, and after that the ghosts are somebody else’s problem.

Mound 72: The Burial Mound Across the River With 270 People in It

HISTORICAL 📌

Mound 72: The Burial Mound Across the River With 270 People in It

October 12, 2026

Roughly a thousand years ago, at Cahokia, a city across the river from present-day St. Louis, someone buried about 270 people in and around a low ridge-top mound. When archaeologists opened it in the late 1960s, they found more than fifty young women laid in two layers separated by matting, four men missing their heads and hands, and, in the middle of it all, one man placed on a bed of roughly 10,000 shell beads arranged in the shape of a falcon. The mound is called Mound 72. It sits in what is now Collinsville, Illinois, and the argument over what happened there has not stopped.

HISTORICAL

Elsa Lemp Died Twelve Days After Remarrying Her Husband. A Documentary Says the Paperwork Doesn't Add Up.

October 12, 2026

On March 19 or 20, 1920, Elsa Lemp Wright died of a gunshot wound at 13 Hortense Place in St. Louis, less than two weeks after remarrying the husband she had divorced the year before. The coroner’s report gives one date and other documents give the other. The official ruling was suicide. A group of St. Louis filmmakers has spent years arguing that the record looks more like a murder investigation that someone cleaned up, and they have a list of reasons.

HISTORICAL 📌

Alton's Confederate Prison Lost 1,500 Men and Kept One Wall

October 12, 2026

In 1862, the Union reopened Illinois’s first state penitentiary, in Alton, as a prison for Confederate soldiers. Over the next three years about 11,700 people passed through it, including Confederate soldiers, Union deserters, accused guerrillas and civilians, several of them women. No fewer than 1,500 died, mostly of disease. A monument in town lists 1,534 Confederate names. The prison itself is gone. What remains is the outer corner of one wall.

CURRENT

There Is a River Under Forest Park and Nobody Talks About It

August 22, 2026

Last August, a camera crew went underground beneath Forest Park and found something most St. Louisans have walked over their entire lives without knowing about. More than thirty feet below the ground in Forest Park sits a system of tunnels that are part of the River Des Peres, where over four miles of its nearly ten-mile path sit beneath the city. You are walking above a river right now and you don’t know it. That’s the whole story, really. Everything else is just details.

HISTORICAL

The Machine That Pressed St. Louis Into Shape

June 4, 2026

Thomas Stearns Eliot is the quintessential voice of twentieth-century literary despair, the high-minded modernist poet who gave us “The Waste Land.” But his ethereal, transatlantic literary life was not funded by old aristocratic money. It was paid for by the terrifying, steam-powered compression of St. Louis dirt. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, eventually ran the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, an industrial behemoth that took the ancient, artisanal process of brickmaking and replaced it with a machine that simply crushed the earth into submission.

The 1904 Olympic Marathon Was a 26-Mile Medical Emergency

HISTORICAL

The 1904 Olympic Marathon Was a 26-Mile Medical Emergency

June 4, 2026

In August 1904, the St. Louis Olympics hosted a marathon so catastrophic it nearly got the event permanently banned from international competition. Thirty-two men ran into a 90-degree dirt bowl with exactly one water stop. The winner was fueled by rat poison, the runner-up hitched a ride in a car, and a South African competitor was chased a mile off course by feral dogs. It was less a test of athletic endurance than a rolling, 26.2-mile medical emergency.

HISTORICAL

Before Your Pocket, Mobile Calls Began in a St. Louis Car

June 4, 2026

In the sweltering St. Louis summer of 1946, while the city’s population was still adjusting to a world without war, AT&T’s Bell System and Southwestern Bell quietly launched a communications revolution. On June 17, St. Louis became the unexpected birthplace of America’s first commercial Mobile Telephone Service (MTS). This wasn’t just a phone in a car; it was a vehicular status symbol, a hefty declaration that your time was so valuable, you couldn’t even wait for a landline. The privilege came at an astronomical cost, with a $30 monthly subscription (roughly $512 to $534 in today’s money) plus 30 to 40 cents per call, translating to about $5.35 to $7.13 a pop today.

The Billionaire’s Backyard: The Unlikely History of Grant’s Farm

HISTORICAL 📌

The Billionaire’s Backyard: The Unlikely History of Grant’s Farm

May 1, 2026

The Billionaire’s Backyard: The Unlikely History of Grant’s Farm If you want a glimpse into the specific brand of Gilded Age surrealism that defines St. Louis, you don’t go to a museum. You go to a tram station in Grantwood Village. Welcome to Grant’s Farm, a place that started as the private deer park of the Busch family and somehow morphed into a public animal reserve that feels less like a zoo and more like a fever dream of mid-century corporate whimsy.

HISTORICAL 📌

The Ax Murders of Saxtown

April 22, 2026

The Ax Murders of Saxtown: A Community Consumed by Suspicion In the mid-19th century, Saxtown, Illinois, was little more than a quiet, tight-knit hamlet of German immigrant farmers tucked just south of Millstadt. It was the kind of place where doors were left unlocked and neighbors were family. But in 1874, that world was irrevocably shattered by a crime so gruesome it gripped the American consciousness and birthed a mystery that refuses to rest.

The Field Off Rock Road Where St. Louis Gangsters Practiced Shooting

HISTORICAL 📌

The Field Off Rock Road Where St. Louis Gangsters Practiced Shooting

April 19, 2026

Gangsters once used a field off St. Charles Rock Road to practice shooting from moving cars. Not in Chicago. Not in some Warner Bros. fever dream. Here. In St. Louis County, near Pennsylvania Avenue, at a place later remembered as the old Maxwelton Race Track. St. Louis does love a property with range. The historical match is surprisingly strong. A St. Louis Magazine piece on the old Maxwelton Race Track places it at St. Charles Rock Road and Pennsylvania Avenue and notes that it later became a hangout for “Dinty” Colbeck of Egan’s Rats. The article also says the place was still remembered in the 1940s as a ruined landmark that boys explored, which helps explain how this kind of story lingered in local memory long after the gunfire stopped.

HISTORICAL

The Washington University Physicist Who Walked Into The Exorcist Story

April 13, 2026

Before the priests took over, a Washington University physicist apparently walked into the room and tried to explain the whole thing with electromagnetism. This is one of those details that makes the St. Louis exorcism story feel less like horror and more like the city accidentally hosting a very strange committee meeting. First the family. Then the clergy. Then, naturally, a scientist. St. Louis likes to give every mystery a chance to become administrative.

CURRENT

Wind Phones and the Next Strange Thing St. Louis Cemeteries Could Do Right

April 10, 2026

A wind phone is a disconnected telephone placed in a quiet public space so grieving people can say what they still need to say to the dead. Which sounds either absurd or deeply humane, depending on whether you have ever had unfinished business with someone who is no longer available for callbacks. The idea began in Japan, where Itaru Sasaki created the original wind phone in 2010 after losing his cousin. After the 2011 tsunami, the installation became a place for mourners to speak into grief without pretending grief needed to make sense. Since then, versions have appeared in cemeteries, churches, parks, and memorial gardens across the United States and elsewhere. The line goes nowhere. That is the point.

The St. Louis Quack Who Ended Up on the Jack the Ripper Suspect List

HISTORICAL

The St. Louis Quack Who Ended Up on the Jack the Ripper Suspect List

April 10, 2026

A man died in St. Louis in 1903 under an assumed name, leaving behind a fortune, a trail of legal trouble, and the faint smell of patent medicine. Years later, one retired Scotland Yard official would say he had been a “very likely” suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders. St. Louis does this sometimes. It lets a person drift in, go strange, and become someone else’s nightmare. His name was Francis Tumblety, though he also used aliases like Frank Townsend. He was an Irish-born American quack doctor who made money selling “Indian Herb” remedies, which is the kind of phrase that tells you almost everything you need to know about nineteenth-century medical ethics. He spent years reinventing himself in public and in print.

HISTORICAL 📌

The St. Louis Psychic Rescued From a Dumpster

April 10, 2026

A forgotten St. Louis psychic came back from the dead because someone went dumpster diving in Lafayette Square. That is not a metaphor. In 2016, artist Lew Blink recovered family papers, reel-to-reel tapes, and assorted historical debris from a dumpster outside 2323 Lafayette Avenue. What emerged from the mess was the afterlife of Carrie Seib, a local spiritualist and channeler whose living room had once hosted meetings of the Independent Church of Truth. From the 1930s into the 1960s, Seib gave talks there that were recorded by her son, George. Then time did what time does, and the archive nearly got hauled away with the furniture.

HISTORICAL

The Real St. Louis Exorcism and the House That Won't Stop Being a Landmark

April 10, 2026

St. Louis’ most famous horror story is technically a real-estate story. The case that inspired The Exorcist involved a teenage boy in 1949, a cluster of reported paranormal incidents, and a sequence of religious interventions that eventually linked Maryland and St. Louis. By the time the story reached popular culture, names had changed, details had been fictionalized, and Hollywood had done what Hollywood does. But one physical remnant of the saga still pulls attention: the Bel-Nor house associated with the St. Louis portion of the case.

The Old Courthouse Reopens, Still Looking Better Than the Country It Helped Reveal

CURRENT 📌

The Old Courthouse Reopens, Still Looking Better Than the Country It Helped Reveal

April 10, 2026

The Old Courthouse reopened on May 3, 2025 after extensive renovation, which means one of downtown St. Louis’ most elegant buildings is once again available for the public to walk into and feel complicated inside. The restoration added the sort of things nineteenth-century buildings eventually need if we expect actual humans to use them: an elevator, updated HVAC, fire suppression, accessibility improvements, restored architectural details, and new exhibits. In other words, the Old Courthouse now has air conditioning, which is perhaps the single most radical modernization any Missouri landmark can receive.

The Old Courthouse and the Last Slave Auction on Its Steps

HISTORICAL 📌

The Old Courthouse and the Last Slave Auction on Its Steps

April 10, 2026

The Old Courthouse is one of those St. Louis buildings that can make tourists feel patriotic right up until they learn what happened on the steps. Before it became the place people associate with Dred and Harriet Scott’s freedom suit, it was also a site where enslaved people were sold under court order. Probate law, debt, estate settlement, bankruptcy — bureaucracy supplied the paperwork, and the courthouse supplied the stage. Human beings were appraised, advertised, displayed, and sold in the middle of downtown. St. Louis managed to make atrocity look administrative, which may be the bleakest talent a city can develop.

The Night the River Set St. Louis on Fire

HISTORICAL

The Night the River Set St. Louis on Fire

April 10, 2026

St. Louis once managed to set itself on fire with a steamboat. Not metaphorically. A literal boat drifted down the Mississippi in flames and turned the riverfront into a civic nightmare. On the night of May 17, 1849, the steamer White Cloud caught fire at the levee. Its moorings burned through, and the boat floated downstream like a malicious lantern, igniting other steamers as it went. Twenty-three steamboats were eventually lost. Then the fire jumped ashore and started eating the city block by block. It tore through the levee, crossed streets, and gutted a large section of downtown while volunteer fire crews tried to keep up with hand engines and exhaustion.

The Neighborhood the City Erased

HISTORICAL 📌

The Neighborhood the City Erased

April 10, 2026

Where Downtown West and Midtown now sit, there used to be a city within the city. Mill Creek Valley had been there for 200 years — German immigrants first, then Black families who arrived during the Great Migration and built something remarkable: 43 churches, hundreds of businesses, two YWCAs, schools, hospitals, nightclubs where Scott Joplin played. Josephine Baker grew up there. The poet Walt Whitman stayed there when he visited his brother.

CURRENT 📌

The Lake in Benton Park Is Leaking Into the Underworld

April 10, 2026

Benton Park Lake has been losing water into sinkholes, which is exactly the sort of sentence that makes St. Louis feel less like a city and more like a cautionary geology exhibit. The problem drew wider attention in 2024 and 2025 as the lake’s water level visibly dropped and sinkholes opened nearby. By July 2025, the Missouri Department of Conservation had issued an emergency fish salvage order because the water loss had become severe enough to threaten the fish population. The official explanation was plain: sinkholes close to the lake were siphoning water away. The unofficial explanation is that the ground under St. Louis continues to behave like it has secrets.

The Duel That Gave Bloody Island Its Name

HISTORICAL

The Duel That Gave Bloody Island Its Name

April 10, 2026

Before St. Louis became famous for politely asking people where they went to high school, it was famous for solving arguments by shooting lawyers on a sandbar. Bloody Island got its name the hard way. In 1817, Thomas Hart Benton and Charles Lucas took a political insult into the sort of sunrise ritual that passes for gentlemanly behavior only if everyone involved has lost perspective. They fought on a disputed island in the Mississippi that sat outside convenient legal jurisdiction, which is exactly the kind of loophole early St. Louis would find charming. Benton shot Lucas through the throat. Lucas survived. That should have been enough drama for one city.

The 1904 World's Fair and the X-Ray Future

HISTORICAL

The 1904 World's Fair and the X-Ray Future

April 10, 2026

The 1904 World’s Fair sold St. Louis as the future, which is funny now because much of it looked like plaster, boosterism, and imperial delusion. But some of the future was real. One of the stranger attractions involved visitors lining up to peer into a technology that could see through flesh. X-rays had only been discovered a few years earlier, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition treated them the way a city treats any new machine that feels halfway between science and sorcery: by putting it on display and daring people to be amazed. The fair was built to flatter American modernity. It sprawled across Forest Park and Washington University’s campus, pulled in millions of visitors, and presented technology not just as useful but theatrical.

Mullanphy Emigrant Home, or How St. Louis Once Tried to Welcome Strangers

HISTORICAL 📌

Mullanphy Emigrant Home, or How St. Louis Once Tried to Welcome Strangers

April 10, 2026

St. Louis once had a building specifically meant to shelter poor immigrants passing through town on their way west. It is hard not to read that sentence now and feel the ghost of a better civic instinct. The Mullanphy Emigrant Home was funded through the estate of Bryan Mullanphy, who left a significant bequest to aid emigrants of all nationalities and religions. The home opened in 1867 at the north edge of what is now Old North St. Louis. It offered temporary lodging to people arriving in a city that was, at the time, both opportunity and ordeal. Before St. Louis perfected its talent for neglecting old buildings, it briefly built one around an ethic of welcome.

HISTORICAL

How Dogtown Got Its Name, and Why the Best Story Probably Isn't True

April 10, 2026

Every St. Louis neighborhood wants a good origin story. Dogtown has several. Naturally, the most dramatic one is also the least convincing. The legend most outsiders hear is that the name came from dog-eating rituals by Igorot people brought to the 1904 World’s Fair and displayed in what was, to put it plainly, a human zoo. It is the kind of story that sticks because it is lurid, ugly, and easy to retell. It also appears to be wrong, or at least much too neat. Researchers and local historians have pointed to references showing the name Dogtown was in use by the late nineteenth century, before the fair opened. That makes the famous explanation less history than civic campfire tale.

Chouteau's Pond, the Lake St. Louis Turned Into an Open Sewer

HISTORICAL

Chouteau's Pond, the Lake St. Louis Turned Into an Open Sewer

April 10, 2026

St. Louis used to have a pond so foul that draining it counted as public health policy. Chouteau’s Pond began innocently enough in 1766, when a dam on Mill Creek created a millpond west of the original village. For a while it was useful, even pleasant. There were fish. There was a mill. There was water where water was supposed to be. But the city grew around it in the deeply St. Louis way of assuming the landscape would absorb every bad idea indefinitely.

HISTORICAL

Cherokee Cave and the Tourist Attraction Buried by the Highway

April 10, 2026

St. Louis once charged people a dollar to walk through an underground wonderland featuring prehistoric animal bones, odd rock formations, lagering rooms, and names like the Black Dahlia and the Dragon’s Den. Then it buried the whole thing under Interstate 55, because of course it did. Cherokee Cave was part of the cave system beneath south St. Louis that had already served breweries, bootleggers, and local legend long before it became an attraction. In 1950, entrepreneur Lee Hess opened part of it to the public. Visitors descended beneath the city streets for a guided tour through a place that sounded equal parts geology lesson, carnival pitch, and fever dream. Newspaper accounts promised streams, waterfalls, strange formations, and the remains of peccaries — prehistoric “skunk pigs,” which is not a phrase any respectable cave should be able to offer.

Bellefontaine Cemetery, Still the City's Best Gothic Day Trip

CURRENT 📌

Bellefontaine Cemetery, Still the City's Best Gothic Day Trip

April 10, 2026

Bellefontaine Cemetery keeps getting rediscovered by people who seem mildly shocked that one of the best places to walk in St. Louis is also full of the dead. That reaction is fair, but historically uninformed. Bellefontaine was designed in the rural cemetery tradition, which treated burial grounds not just as storage for mortality, but as landscapes of beauty, reflection, horticulture, and status. In other words, it was always meant to be visited. The strange part is not that people now treat it as a destination. The strange part is that we briefly forgot.

CURRENT

The Race That Was Decided by One Vote

April 9, 2026

Last Tuesday, April 7, 2026, St. Louis held its municipal elections. Most of them were decided by comfortable margins. One of them was not. Downtown St. Louis will be represented by Chris Kyle, who defeated incumbent Bill Otto for a seat on the Board of Aldermen by a single vote. One vote. In a city of 300,000 people. In a race that will determine who represents the people who live and work in the shadow of the Arch, who walk past the Old Courthouse where slaves were once sold on the steps, who sit in the restaurants and bars of what used to be a railroad terminal and before that was a frontier.

CURRENT

Six Flags Is Gone. The Internet Has Opinions About What Comes Next.

April 9, 2026

Six Flags St. Louis opened in 1971 as Six Flags Over Mid-America. It has been a summer institution in this region for 55 years. In March 2026, Six Flags Entertainment Corporation sold it — along with six other parks — to a real estate investment trust called EPR Properties for $342 million. A Florida-based company called Enchanted Parks will operate it starting next season. The new name: Mid-America by Enchanted Parks.

HISTORICAL 📌

The Gold Room: A Ballroom Nobody Was Supposed to Find

April 8, 2026

Somewhere in the upper floors of the old Hotel Jefferson, behind walls that went up in the 1950s, there is a ballroom that nobody touched for seven decades. The Hotel Jefferson opened in 1904 — one day before the World’s Fair — and was immediately considered the finest hotel in St. Louis. The Democratic National Convention was held there that year, and again in 1916. A 1928 expansion added the Gold Room: a two-story jazz age ballroom with mirrored plaster walls, undulating balconies, a crystal chandelier, and a stage backed by a floating swan sculpture. Sergei Rachmaninoff performed there in 1930. Judy Garland. President Truman. The Veiled Prophet debutante dinners, annually, until they stopped.

The Man Who Painted America's Barns

HISTORICAL

The Man Who Painted America's Barns

April 5, 2026

Before there were billboards, there were barns. Lester Dill bought Meramec Caverns in 1933 and immediately set about promoting it with an approach that was either brilliant or slightly unhinged, depending on your tolerance for audacity. He would drive out into the countryside and find a farmer. He’d come with a pocket watch, a box of chocolates, and lifetime passes to the cave. The deal: let me paint your barn, and I’ll paint the whole thing for free. You just have to let me put our name on it.

HISTORICAL

The Gentle Giant of Alton

April 3, 2026

He was born a normal size. Eight pounds, six ounces. Perfectly ordinary. Six months later, he weighed thirty pounds. By the time he was eight years old, he was taller than his father. His great size and continued growth were due to hypertrophy of his pituitary gland, which resulted in an abnormally high level of human growth hormone. There was no treatment. There was no ceiling. He just kept going.

HISTORICAL

"New York" Was Here

April 1, 2026

In 1980, a film crew drove through the streets of downtown St. Louis and saw exactly what they’d been looking for: ruin. A large portion of Escape From New York was filmed in East St. Louis after a fire had destroyed a large number of buildings. The area looked so bad the art department didn’t think they needed to add anything to simulate a ghetto area of a New York City of the future.

HISTORICAL 📌

The Jewel of New York Is a Hotel Lobby in Downtown St. Louis

March 25, 2026

In 1964, Life magazine called the Spanish Pavilion the jewel of the New York World’s Fair. Inside there was a 780-seat theater, three restaurants, and exhibition halls filled with masterpieces of Spanish art including paintings by El Greco, Goya, Velázquez, and Picasso. Solid walnut-wood ceiling blocks from the Pyrenees and authentic Spanish tile floors were special interior design features. In one exhibition gallery, sunlight shined through blue stained glass inlays in the concrete wall. Spain was the second most popular pavilion at the entire fair, behind only the Vatican.

The St. Louis Tornado of 2025 Came for the Vacancies

CURRENT

The St. Louis Tornado of 2025 Came for the Vacancies

March 12, 2026

On May 16, 2025, an EF3 tornado tore through north St. Louis in minutes. It left behind a particular kind of wreckage that said something uncomfortable about the city it hit. Of the more than 1,000 homes damaged to the point of needing demolition, an estimated 500 to 600 were known to be vacant — some long before the tornado touched down. An even higher number, around 1,407 that the city inspected for tornado damage, were believed to be either definitely or likely vacant.

CURRENT

The Monkeys of North St. Louis — A Mystery the City Eventually Stopped Trying to Solve

January 21, 2026

In January, St. Louis briefly became a city where monkeys were loose in the streets. Or were they. The St. Louis City Health Department first received reports of four monkeys on the loose near O’Fallon Park in north St. Louis on January 8. They were spotted on Redbud Avenue. Animal control officers searched Thursday and Friday but did not find them. The zoo helped identify the species: vervet monkeys, native to sub-Saharan Africa, known for their grayish-green fur and black faces. Intelligent. Unpredictable. Somewhere in north city.