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.

The haunting started before the Pointers, if you believe the stories. After Charles Lemp shot himself in the house in 1949, it became a boarding house, and tenants reportedly complained of knocks and footsteps. Then they left. Workers renovating the place in the 1970s told similar stories: vanishing tools, strange sounds, the feeling of being watched. Life magazine reportedly named it one of the ten most haunted places in America in 1980. In 2010, the Atlantic Paranormal Society investigated for Ghost Hunters.

The cast is large, and every ghost has a room.

Charles gets the bedroom named for him. Guests report items moving, a medicine cabinet that opens on its own, a knife that vanished for good, and cigar smoke outside the door. Lillian Lemp, the “Lavender Lady,” who divorced William Jr. in a very public trial, turns up as the smell of lavender near her portrait. William Jr. is blamed for a cold corner where his desk stood and for a “nosy and cranky” presence in the old office. He is also blamed for the man in the women’s restroom, on the theory that he liked women. This is the sort of thing ghost stories do to dead men. The basement, built over the old cave entrance, is called the Gates of Hell.

The attic is where the legend gets uncomfortable. The most famous Lemp ghost is the “Monkey-Faced Boy,” said to be William Jr.’s illegitimate son, born with Down syndrome and kept in the attic until he died at thirty. Visitors report a small face in the windows, toys moved overnight, and a voice saying “help me.” The story is repeated everywhere, and the evidence for it is hard to find. If he existed, he was reduced to a nickname about his face. If he didn’t, someone invented a disabled child and locked him in an attic for the entertainment of paying guests.

The Elsa Lemp Suite is reportedly haunted by terminally ill children, a holdover from years when the house supposedly took in overflow patients from a pediatric hospital. Elsa Lemp didn’t die there. She shot herself in 1920 at her own home on Hortense Place, about seven miles away, twelve days after remarrying her ex-husband. The house has named a suite for a woman who died across town and filled it with children she never met.

The author Colin Dickey, who toured the mansion for Ghostland, suggests the family’s deaths “might have been entirely a matter of brain chemistry, attributable to nothing other than a lack of timely medical intervention.” He also notes that the terrifying experience “always happens on some other tour, some other time.”

Stephen Walker has written the standard history of the family, Lemp: The Haunting History. He started where everyone does. “I came for the ghosts,” he told St. Louis Magazine, “and I stayed for the history.” These days he says he tries to present the Lemps “as real human beings with flaws with less of the ghost aspect.”

The ghosts are the part people pay for. The people are the part that happened.