The Lemp Mansion is for sale, but its ghost tours carry on

For half a century, one family has looked after the Lemp Mansion, the Victorian brewery owners’ house in St. Louis that many people call one of the most haunted buildings in America. Now that family is ready to step back. In early September the mansion and the neighboring Lemp Stables went on the market, and this month, as the house hosts its busiest season of ghost hunts and Halloween parties, the question for fans is what a new owner will do with it.

What is for sale

St. Louis Public Radio and KMOV reported the listing on September 3, 2026. The mansion is listed at $3.9 million and the stables, on Cherokee Street, at $2.8 million, through Fusion Business Brokers. Brokers Brian Besse and Kim Wright told St. Louis Magazine that the two can be bought separately or together, that this is the first time the property has been for sale in 51 years, and that the price includes everything inside the mansion, down to “entire rooms of antiques.” The owners, siblings Patty and Paul Pointer, are in their 60s and 70s, and St. Louis Public Radio reported that they are selling because the family is nearing retirement and want a buyer who will care for the house as they have.

The building is a working business, not a museum. It runs as a restaurant, an inn with overnight rooms and an events venue for weddings and dinner theater, and it is famous locally for its Sunday fried-chicken dinners. St. Louis Public Radio reported that events will continue through December 2027, and the brokers told St. Louis Magazine that existing bookings will be honored.

Halloween as usual

For now, October looks like it always does. The mansion’s own listings show its Lemp Experience ghost hunts every Thursday this month, at $44 per person, with a short lesson in ghost-hunting tools followed by an hour searching three floors. The Halloween Bash, with bands on three stages and a costume contest, is set for Saturday, October 31.

St. Louis Magazine sent a writer on the mansion’s evening tour, and his review, published on October 15, is a useful reality check. Collin Preciado described a guide in an undertaker’s top hat, guests choosing from infrared cameras, EMF meters and dowsing rods – which he said were never really explained – and stories of non-family ghosts, including a shy girl the guide called Cora, whose presence was “confirmed” when an EMF meter blinked near a child. Preciado wrote that he could find no evidence that anyone outside the Lemp family had died in the house.

The history behind the legend

The real story is about a brewing dynasty. According to St. Louis Magazine, Johann Adam Lemp founded the Western Brewery in 1840, his son William J. Lemp built it into the largest brewery in the city, and the family business carried the Lemp name from 1870. The house dates from the early 1860s; William, who moved the brewery to Cherokee Street, made it the family home next door. Prohibition ended the business, and in the 1970s the house was restored and became a restaurant and inn, St. Louis Public Radio reported.

The family’s private tragedies are the source of the ghost stories. William’s son Frederick died suddenly in 1901. William Lemp Sr. died by suicide in 1904, his son William Jr. in 1922 and another son, Charles, in 1949; St. Louis Magazine notes that a sister’s death two years before William Jr.’s did not happen at the mansion. These were real people, and their deaths are better remembered as one family’s losses than as a “curse.” Edwin Lemp, the last of the family to live in the house, died in 1970 at the age of 90.

If someone walks in there, whatever they see is coming with it.

Broker Kim Wright, to St. Louis Magazine, September 2026

Why it feels haunted

The Lemp Mansion’s reputation grew after it reopened to the public. It has appeared on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures and Paranormal State, St. Louis Magazine notes, and ghost tourism is now part of its business. None of those programs produced anything a scientist would accept as evidence of a ghost. The tools on the tours mostly measure ordinary things: EMF meters respond to wiring, appliances and phones, and a creaky staircase in a 160-year-old house makes plenty of noise on its own. It is also a building where visitors arrive already knowing about the deaths, and expectation shapes what people notice in the dark.

That does not make the tours worthless. For many visitors, they are the most memorable way to hear about the Lemps, and the family story deserves to be told. For whoever buys the house next, the challenge will be keeping both the ghost lore and the real history – an immigrant family’s brewery that rose and fell with the city – alive.