Forever Indebted: Hauntings and Debt
The best ghost stories are typically made by a compelling history. A ghost isn’t that exciting unless there is a macabre reason that they feel the obsessive need to remain. While often these stories are tales of love gone wrong or other natural disasters, sometimes money, debt, and bankruptcy are known to play a role.
With Halloween approaching, it can be interesting and fun to look at how money troubles, debt, and bankruptcy find their way into several well-known tales of hauntings. Following are three prominent haunting that prove that debt does live beyond the grave.
Lemp Mansion – The Lemp Mansion is the one-time residence of the family that founded the Lemp Brewery dynasty, one of the first and largest St. Louis brewhouses in the 19th Century. Lemp beer became a staple around the world. Over the next century, a chain of suicides, a mysterious death and other events ensued in the house. Once Prohibition hit, the business headed to bankruptcy. After restoration, visitors have reported strange sounds, locking and unlocking doors, candles lighting on their own, a beer glass flying off the bar, and figures appearing and disappearing. Among them is a lady dressed in lavender, allegedly one of the departed Lemps still walking about the home. Did we mention the legend that persists of a “monkey-faced boy” who was kept in the attic for a time? No. Well, you can see there’s more to the story.















