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While it might seem strange to us today, with the towering edifices of Barnes-Jewish Hospital anchoring the eastern end of Forest Park, hospitals in St. Louis were not always gargantuan complexes with thousands of employees. Many of our hospitals were housed in former mansions, helping the indigent and the poor in once exclusive neighborhoods that had seen better days. I was intrigued to learn, for example, that the now-demolished northern neighbor of the Lemp Mansion on DeMenil Place was once a small hospital. And when Stefene Russell, former SLM culture editor, told me the story of Anna Rethwilm, a wealthy and presumably well-intentioned widow who was charged in 1909 with practicing medicine without a license in her Central West End mansion, I knew I had to investigate.

Rethwilm’s long journey to infamy—and the christening of her residence as “The House of Mystery”—began innocently enough, with a visit to Germany. While there, she fell under the influence of the Kneipp Treatment, the creation of a 19th-century Bavarian Roman Catholic priest named Sebastian Kneipp. Father Kneipp believed in a five-pronged approach to health. Three of those prongs—healthy eating, regular exercise, and “mindfulness”—would not attract suspicion, even from doctors today. But he also urged phytotherapy, the use of herbs as medicine (which, though it’s gained a degree of mainstream acceptance, can be dicey) and hydrotherapy, which included ice-cold baths to cure a panoply of illnesses. In particular, he believed that tuberculosis could be cured with icewater baths, which was clearly pseudoscience. Reviewing his regimens, I decided they had more in common with 16th and 17th-century Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation asceticism than with modern western medicine. His theories also clung to the ancient Greeks’ long-disproven theory of the Four Humors. (He did, however, develop a recipe for Kneippbrød, a whole-wheat bread that remains the most popular bread in Norway.)

When Rethwilm returned from her Kneipp-obsessed trip to Germany, she found a calling “helping” people by using her giant mansion at 4957 Forest Park Avenue as a sort of amateur Kneipp Treatment hospital. Her elderly husband, whose fortune came from clothing retail, passed away in 1906. Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps reveal that the stately Romanesque Revival stone-fronted mansion sat in isolation, with several empty lots between it and its closet neighbor to the east. To the north, an alley separated it from the Frisco Railroad Employees’ Hospital on Laclede Avenue.

Rethwilm’s mansion was, in short, rather isolated. At least, until June of 1909, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch began reporting on strange occurrences there. The article revealed that neighbors had several years dubbed the place the “House of Mystery.” The screams and groans had grown to such a cacophony that one neighbor told the Post-Dispatch that he and his family had moved to get away from these disturbing sounds, which came at all times of night. Rethwilm had purchased a parrot as an attempt at subterfuge, hoping that her neighbors would confuse the screams with the squawks of a tropical bird. Her gambit failed, and St. Louis Department of Health launched an investigation.

What that investigation found was shocking. Over the course of several years, seven men and women had died in the mansion, their bodies all removed in the middle of the night. Though a palisade fence blocked the view of the backyard, neighbors could still spot well-dressed men and women in bare feet, their trousers and dresses hiked up to their ankles as they walked around in the high grass. At other times, these patients could be seen sawing wood or doing other manual labor. Dr. G. Alexander Jordan of the St. Louis Department of Health received an anonymous communication stating that two of the deaths that occurred on the property were suicides—and at least two others were deaths by violence. The letter gave names and dates. Death certificates for those who died in the mansion-turned-hospital were not regularly filed with the city.

When questioned by a reporter, Rethwilm took a cavalier attitude toward the deaths that occurred at her house. When asked about the teenage girl who’d died after jumping into the well in the backyard, she laughed and could not remember the girl’s name. Pressed as to the reason why the undertaker always came at night to retrieve bodies, she insisted it was merely because they had all died at night, and furthermore, she did not want “to disturb the neighbors.” She openly admitted to offering the “Kneipp Treatment” to people who had begun to live at her house, but she stressed that she received no payment from any of her tenants.

Rethwilm was not successful in her attempts to convince the doctors of the Department of Health that all was well. She was arrested with practicing medicine without a license. While there were suspicions that the seven deaths in the house were related to failed attempts at psychiatric treatments, city doctors were unable to prove additional charges. Bars on the windows were to keep burglars out, not to keep patients in, Rethwilm insisted. She called herself a mere philanthropist, opening her home to people with various ailments. (She also claimed to be the victim of an extortion attempt by a former employee.) Regardless, the days of the house functioning as an amateur hospital had come to an end.

Three weeks after her arrest, Rethwilm appeared before the Court of Criminal Correction, where she was convicted of “holding herself out as a physician.” She was fined $50 and let go, walking out of the old Four Courts on Clark Street the same day. To give you a sense of the fine in proportion to her wealth, the House of Mystery was valued at $45,000 at the time. Forcing her “tenants” to walk barefoot in the grass was not attempting to practice medicine without a license, she insisted to a Post reporter after the proceedings. Likewise, “Kneipp Bread” had been served free, Rethwilm remarked, so again, she had not been prescribing medicine.

The matter seems to have died there.

Rethwilm had returned to polite society by 1912, when a Post article reported that she, along with other neighbors, was protesting the licensing of a saloon around the corner at Euclid and Laclede. The article stated that she was still living in the same address, 4957 Forest Park. The protest came too late; the liquor license had already been approved. Within a few years, Rethwilm would be gone from her House of Mystery, and in 1917, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church would open on the site of her former residence.

She died in San Francisco in 1933 and is buried in Saints Peter and Paul Cemetery next to her husband. One wonders what he would have thought of the goings-on after his death. At least, the story shows, the St. Louis Department of Health was already making sure, in 1909, that professional, science-based psychiatry prevailed over pseudoscience.