AMERICAN GHOSTS
Newlyweds move into a house with a secret, violent past rooted in American trauma. The untold story of one of the only purported cases of a supernatural entity being responsible for murder.
BY Jaq Evans
THE HOUSE AT 6304 BERYL ROAD stank of charred wood. Broken glass still littered the lawn, ash drifting like unseasonal snow. Even days after the fire and from the safety of his car, the young man outside couldn’t suppress a shudder. Two people died in that blaze.
He hadn’t meant to stop here. It was perverse, worse than rubber-necking, as though he and his nice, clean car were mocking the scorched bones of the house. But, amateur psychic that he was, he couldn’t bring himself to leave. Not yet. Although he did roll up his windows, despite the Virginia heat. Woodsmoke wasn’t the only smell. A far more acrid stench radiated from the house, one that took him a minute to place. Once he did, his stomach turned. It was burnt hair.
And there was something else on that breeze, too, not an odor but a feeling—an undulating pulse, greedy and alien, that pressed against his car like a dark sea. That sensation told him the unexplained blaze was no accident. There was something very wrong with this place.
He wasn’t the only one who thought an evil presence caused the fire on Beryl Road, and soon the house would go down in history. In one of the first and only cases on public record, a ghost was blamed for murder.
IT WAS A COOL but pleasant afternoon in March of 1981 when Esperanza and Gary Belofsky moved into the new place. Their friend Bruce was already there, unloading boxes into the first of three bedrooms. Epi’s parents, Cuban immigrants who’d brought her and her siblings to America when she was six, were unconvinced that a single man they knew from school was the right choice of housemate for newlyweds. Gary’s family was just happy he was staying out of trouble.
Caveats aside, the Belofksys were excited to start their new life. They’d been married for almost a year, but the house on Beryl Road was the first real step towards their future together. If an extra source of income was necessary to make that possible, so be it.
Epi, twenty-five and arch with sleek dark hair she wore long, loved the space and the chance to strike out on her own. Gary, a twenty-nine-year-old furniture salesman known for his musical talent and silver tongue, would do whatever it took to keep her happy. His first marriage had ended when he was only twenty-four—granted, that wedding was a mistake made shortly after he was arrested for drugs in Boston—and he was committed to making this one stick.
Their first weeks in Alexandria were close to perfect. The housemates spent their time unpacking and decorating, sharing dinners, and playing music in their new living room. They seemed to have been struck by a communal bout of clumsiness, dishes slipping off countertops and glasses breaking in the sink, but there was nothing unusual about broken dishes after a night of too much wine. Epi wasn’t sleeping well either, her dreams dark and confusing, but that too seemed normal. New homes always brought unfamiliar shadows and creaks.
She and Gary joked with Bruce, wondering if they perhaps had a household ghost. Bruce, a self-professed skeptic, found this irritating. Which is perhaps why, when a neighbor approached him in the yard towards the end of March, he kept the ensuing conversation to himself.
“You know about the history of this place, right?”
Bruce did not.
“A woman killed herself here about eight years back. She hung herself in the basement right before Halloween.”
The neighbor relayed this information with voyeuristic glee, and Bruce saw no need to play into neighborhood gossip. Besides, he didn’t want to encourage the Belofskys. If more dishes broke in the new house than usual, that was just bad luck.
Except it wasn’t just the dishware. As weeks turned into months, the trio began to notice more odd things about the house. Unexplained smells from the kitchen sink, like smoke infused with rotting flesh. Sounds at night, from the walls. From the basement. They chalked it up to moldy pipes and rats, or raccoons trying to get at the trash. Trapped by the fact that he’d already chosen to lie, Bruce continued to keep his silence about their new home’s past.
While all three tried to ignore the uncanny aspects of the house, the Belofksys’ days grew stranger. Dishes broke around them far more often than around Bruce. Sometimes when Epi got home from work to find Gary in the kitchen with his guitar, her stomach tightened with an unease she couldn’t place. Nobody else was in the house, but it felt like there were eyes on her, and especially on her husband.
Spring crept on towards summer, sunlight stretching out over the lawn, and Epi did her best not to worry. She and Gary weren’t religious; their marriage had been a simple civil ceremony. But she remembered the old stories from her family back in Cuba, of in-between places and the dark things that slept there. Mysterious deities called orichá. Unevolved spirits who attached themselves to vulnerable people.
One morning in early May, Epi woke before her husband and Bruce. She made her way to the kitchen, already tasting that first sip of coffee, and swallowed a scream. A pretty, auburn-haired woman sat at the kitchen table, holding a mug with both hands.
“Hi, Epi,” she said. Epi couldn’t speak. The air curdled around her as the woman eyed her up and down with dark, unimpressed eyes. “You may think your life is perfect, but when you’re at work, I’m here with your husband.” Fear contorted Epi’s vision. The walls behind the woman seemed to breathe, shadows deepening around the room. The farthest corner was black as tar, but in that darkness, something shifted.
Rage warred with terror, and Epi broke her paralysis. She rushed forward but hands closed around her arm, yanking her backwards, out of time.
Epi jolted, thrashing, and Gary caught her before she fell out of bed. It was several pounding heartbeats before their bedroom came into focus and she realized it had been a dream. The woman and her knowing smile, the spidery movement in the shadows—none of it was real.
Epi laughed it off in the fragile light of dawn, but that nightmare marked a turning point. As May slipped into June, the air now humid and noisy with flies, the incidents on Beryl Road grew from the occasional oddity to what Epi described as “heavy duty activity.” Inexplicable knocking and footsteps kept the trio up at night. Glasses broke every week. And there was the smoke. Its stench invaded the kitchen when nothing was lit, setting off the alarm for no reason they could find.
Something was changing in the house, an energy growing bolder with time. One day Epi found her car unlocked, moved from its normal spot and positioned to block the driveway, grill aimed squarely at the house as if waiting to crash through the wall. She confronted Gary, then Bruce; both swore up and down they were innocent.
That settled things for Bruce. Although he remained skeptical of real supernatural activity, there was too much he couldn’t explain. Finally, three months after learning the grisly history of their new home, Bruce told Epi and Gary about the woman who’d hanged herself below the kitchen.
MARY AND RAYMOND CONLON disagreed about the house. He found it homey, the extra bedrooms full of potential—maybe for an office someday, or for art, even if not for children. By 46, Mary accepted she’d never have a family to fill those rooms, and so she felt small on Beryl Road. The unnecessary space mocked her in the grey, quiet hours before dawn.
On quiet Sunday mornings like this one she’d wake in the dark, creep into the kitchen on sock feet, wary of making too much noise. Of drawing attention. Then she would make coffee, watch the windows melt from charcoal to ash, and wish she were nowhere at all.
The previous spring, shortly after they moved in, Ray told her not to blame the house for her depression. He was right, of course. Things were difficult for Mary before she and Ray met, and they would continue to be difficult no matter where they lived. But those other bedrooms nagged at Mary. She worried he regretted marrying her, a woman seven years his senior, who would never give him children and whose mind sank into such dark places. He’d said nothing of the kind, but the dread kept her up at night. The house seemed to revel in her fear.
Outside, the lawn was frosted with dew. A snatch of song played through Mary’s head on repeat, just barely out of reach. She sipped her coffee, holding the bitter flavor on her tongue. It was a hymn, she knew that much, one more ghost from her Catholic upbringing. Let all mortal flesh keep silence…
Noise from the master bedroom knocked the tune from her mind, and Mary rose. She preferred to keep the basement heater off until it dropped below freezing, but Ray liked warmth.
That awful hymn came back as she padded downstairs and across the concrete floor. Mary hadn’t been to a service in months. Nobody knew the sin she’d tried and failed to commit earlier that summer, but everyone could tell how bad things were between her and Ray. He was cheating on her. Mary had no evidence but she was certain of it, just like she was certain their church friends were all whispering about it behind her back, judging her for living with an adulterer.
Above her, the floor creaked as Ray headed for the coffee pot. Mary buried a sneeze in her elbow, staring up at the ceiling. The house was a 1950s construct, with an angled rack of empty space between the first floor and the basement rafters. Dust sifted down from those shadows in waves. An image entered her mind, abrupt and vivid: her feet, swaying gently over the floor. You could throw a rope over one of those rafters, easy. Climb onto the heater with a noose around your neck and crack your spine with a single step.
Mary stood with one hand on the heater knob, her gaze fixed upwards, for several long breaths. The shadows breathed with her. Then she went upstairs to fix her husband his breakfast. One week later, she took a length of gardening rope into the basement. She did not come out.
BRUCE’S REVELATION ABOUT Mary Conlon changed everything. Epi connected her nightmare and the dead woman at once.
Her parents’ warnings came back to her too: tales of the orichá Babalú-Ayé, the deity of healing, who walked hand in hand with death. Scarred by disease that melted lesions into its skin, Babalú-Ayé hid its leperous face beneath its own long hair and—according to some—would turn on people if it felt laughed at or ignored. It could bestow madness or seizures or smallpox. It could drag you into death. Or it could simply watch as a malevolent spirit entered through your dreams and took possession of your body.
Gary, concerned for his wife and battling his own fear, took it out on Bruce. While Epi sat in their bedroom with the covers pulled protectively high, the men shouted long into the night. But in the morning, that anger dissipated. They agreed on one thing: they were not alone on Beryl Road. Whatever else was here, the housemates needed to face it together.
As the one to whom Mary had revealed herself most directly, Epi took it upon herself to learn what she could about the ghost. She was stonewalled by officials who cited the Privacy Act. There were whispers, though, among the first responders to Mary’s death. Firefighters called to the scene remembered Raymond Conlon standing shellshocked in the unusually “immaculate” house. She’s in the basement, was all he would say. County firefighter Wallace Dean led the way, and what he found below the kitchen would haunt him for years.
“We went down the stairs and turned right and saw nothing. Then I turned left and there she was,” he said. “Maybe it was the angle at which she was hanging, but … it gave me an eerie, funny, strange type of feeling.”
In addition to pounding the pavement through official channels, Epi also went to the neighbors, as Bruce had. She was able to confirm that Mary’s death by hanging came after a failed suicide attempt eight weeks prior—and that, according to local opinion, she’d been “terribly disturbed.”
Unexpectedly, this knowledge inspired sympathy instead of fear. The neighbors told Epi how volatile Mary had seemed, how unstable her marriage. Ray had stayed in the house after her death, and, less than three years later, married a woman ten years Mary’s junior. Epi was sensitive about the fact that Gary had been married once before. She could only imagine how painful it must have been for Mary to linger unseen while Ray built his new life with someone else, noting that she could “identify with the kind of intensity she felt.”
With this greater understanding of Mary’s story came a different perspective on her spirit. She caused no real injuries, and as Epi later noted, “You have to kind of convince yourself that she can’t overpower you and she’s not very harmful.” Slowly but surely, the Belofskys grew accustomed to living in a haunted house—and even to enjoy it. “You can live here,” Epi told the spirit, as though welcoming a guest, “but please don’t break anything.” Sure enough, the mysterious occurrences grew less threatening and more like pranks: balloons popping simultaneously at a dinner party, hairpins scattering onto the floor by themselves. “I guess she grew to like us,” Epi commented.
While Epi and Gary began to grow accustomed to their otherworldly housemate, their living one remained unconvinced. Bruce still felt the rift caused by his lie of omission about Mary Conlon. He also couldn’t find it in himself to believe as wholeheartedly as the Belofskys. Had he really seen a stack of Epi’s perm papers float into the air, or was he just drunk at the time? Perhaps he should have kept quiet about Mary’s death after all—but it was too late. As far as Epi and Gary were concerned, all the strange things that happened in the house were now firmly the fault of the ghost.
Having decided their case was a haunting, in June of 1981 the Belofskys reached out to the American Institute of Parapsychology. They were directed to Dr. James McClenon, a Vietnam veteran turned graduate student studying sociology and parapsychology. Still early in what would become a lifelong career of paranormal research, he jumped at the opportunity to observe the ghost.
Over the next few months the affable young scientist became a household regular, quickly befriending Epi and Gary and even winning over their more skeptical housemate. Yet despite his eagerness, Dr. McClenon experienced none of Mary’s antics himself. While he determined a rate of two or more supernatural experiences per month, according to Bruce and the Belofskys, he was also careful to note that the housemates “reframed [anomalous experiences], attributing the unusual episodes to Mary.”
This fit with Dr. McClenon’s overarching theory of the paranormal—that “spirits are not always as they seem, but often point to a need for therapy.” Yet as the parapsychologist reflected when interviewed for this story, he also found Gary and Epi to be charming, friendly, and “very happily married.” If unaddressed psychological issues were manifesting as paranormal events, he saw no evidence of those issues either.
The Belofskys weren’t troubled by this uncertainty. They believed Mary didn’t appreciate being studied, a supernatural version of the observer effect in physics. After Dr. McClenon’s first visit, dishes rattled in the sink, breaking for the first time in weeks. Black smoke trickled up through the drain. Unsettled, excited, and fully invested in the supernatural explanation for their experiences, the Belofksys jumped at his next suggestion: they would conduct a seance.
That July was on the cool side for Virginia, temperatures hovering near 80 degrees, but the house took on heat and held it like an oven. The Belofskys opened the windows before sitting down with Bruce and Dr. McClenon at the kitchen table, their reluctant housemate having agreed—despite his ongoing skepticism—to urge the ghost towards the light.
Epi recalled her dream of the pretty, auburn-haired woman sitting at this very table. It had seemed like a threat at first, but now she saw the nightmare as a cry for attention. Gary felt the same: Mary posed no real danger to them, but something was keeping her in the house. Her spirit was still tormented by the same emotions that had led to her suicide. She needed help, not fear.
The seance began in fits and starts, nobody quite sure what to expect. Wine, candles, and a little pot set the mood, and gradually the room quieted as the four of them concentrated on Mary and her death. Her body in the basement.
Epi thought of the evolved spirits her Cuban grandparents talked about, which could serve as guides or helpers if they chose. She’d begun to consider Mary this way, almost like a protector, but it was obvious the ghost was unhappy. Evolved or not, she deserved peace.
Soon, with Dr. McClenon’s guidance, Gary, Epi, and even Bruce found themselves focusing on a powerful image of soft, soothing light, a doorway through which Mary might walk. The ghost herself made no appearance that night, but sure enough, after the seance there came a lull. In his next followup, Dr. McClenon recorded a dramatic decrease in inexplicable events after July.
While it seemed they had failed to send Mary into the light, Epi and Gary were convinced they’d helped ease her torment. How else could you explain fewer glasses breaking, or the lack of smoke rising from the kitchen sink? Bruce had a different answer: perhaps the ghost had never existed in the first place, and now they’d collectively convinced themselves she was quieting down. Of course there would be fewer incidents.
Either way, the rift between Bruce and the Belofskys grew after their seance. In August of 1981, barely nine months after moving in, Bruce left Epi and Gary on Beryl Road.
The Belofksys took another housemate that fall, a woman named Cindy. Like Bruce, she used a pseudonym in interviews. Unlike Bruce, she believed in ghosts—and she wasn’t fond of the Belofskys’ household spirit. Mary was certainly less present now, but not gone. She enjoyed teasing Gary and startling Cindy, who claimed to see a phantom woman in her bedroom window more than once. When Cindy first described this vision to the Belofskys, Epi laughed: she hadn’t described Mary to her new housemate, yet the phantom was a perfect match for the redhead Epi had dreamed about months before. Cindy was less amused. Not long after, she followed Bruce’s example and moved out.
Despite their difficulty holding onto housemates, the Belofskys were used to Mary’s interference. They even took it public. On October 30th, 1981, local reporter Rose Marie Donovan profiled the house for The Alexandria Journal in a piece titled “Local Places Where Things Go Bump in the Night,” in which Epi and Cindy described Mary as a more-or-less friendly presence. The article was a fluff piece, designed to give the neighbors a chill or two for Halloween. Its followup, less than one year later, would not be so lighthearted.
After Cindy left that winter, Gary and Epi invested in a few new housemates: two men around their age, Joe Badans and Evans Davies, and two dogs. With the place now full of noises and paws, the supernatural occurrences slowed even further—and it was just as well, because with two more young people living there, 6304 Beryl Road turned into a party house.
Epi and Gary weren’t convinced Mary was gone, but that spring, their focus on her waned. After months of organizing their lives around the spirit, whether out of fear or in their attempts to help her move on, the Belofskys drifted back towards their own interests. Gary found more time for his music. Epi finally began to make friends in their not-so-new neighborhood.
When Dr. McClenon followed up with the couple in April 1982, he learned that since Christmas there had been nothing worse than a few more broken glasses and the odd fire alarm. Mary had found her peace after all, the Belofskys thought. Life would go on as though their house had never been haunted.
But Mary Conlon’s death wasn’t the first trauma at 6304 Beryl Road, and it would not be the last.
A YEAR BEFORE MARY TIED her noose to a basement rafter, Lieutenant Colonel William Jordan lay in his bed at 6304 Beryl Road and tried not to panic. Disorientation was normal after a seizure, but something about this house made his confusion worse. Shadows were deeper than they should be. Sometimes he thought he saw movement in the dark, or heard impossible sounds—gunfire, blaring alarms.
Stairs creaked with the return of his wife, Virginia. The wooden floors amplified noise, and Will’s head throbbed at the pounding footsteps from below: their three living children playing tag. He couldn’t tell them to stop. He felt guilty enough at how little time they spent together. Only dinners and church, these days.
Ginny slipped into the master bedroom with a glass of water, a washcloth over one arm. “You’ll take it easy tonight, right?”
“I need to reply to Colonel Stoner tomorrow.”
She didn’t like that, her slight frown betraying her, but neither would she argue. She’d stood by him through two tours in Vietnam and a decade of grand mal epilepsy. And of course, she’d also been there the day he signed a liability waiver for the U.S. Army and changed their lives forever.
It happened twelve years before, during his time in the Advanced Infantry class at Fort Benning. They were still living in Florida then. He’d been allowed to go home and visit Ginny and the babies for Christmas 1959, and had returned that January with renewed enthusiasm for his burgeoning career—just in time to receive an offer from the Chemical Warfare division: participate in a simple experiment right there on the base, and help America stand up to the looming threat that was Soviet Russia.
Back then, nobody knew the codename MK-Ultra. Will, like so many others, was sold on an idea rather than details. The U.S. Army wanted to learn how mind-altering substances would affect American soldiers if used against them, and how, in turn, they might weaponize hallucinogens in order to develop a mind control program for enemy agents. Thirty volunteers at Fort Benning were told they would receive a single dose of LSD-25, and would then be observed and questioned under its influence before returning to duty a mere twelve to fourteen hours later.
By this point, LSD had existed legally for around twenty years but was still a relative unknown as far as the scientific community (military-funded or otherwise) went. Ken Kesey wouldn’t begin hosting his LSD-fueled parties for another year or two, and acid hadn’t yet been adopted as a defining element of hippie counterculture. Will, a Christian and father of three, was aware of its reputation for psychedelic experiences, and also of the fact that this might be his only chance to give it a go: a good trip for a good cause.
The reality was somewhat different.
“It is a complete personality disintegration,” Will told Senator Edward Kennedy in 1977, during the infamous MK-Ultra trials. “In some instances a person becomes almost like a schizophrenic paranoid, without any ability to control his own actions, his emotions, his thoughts.” During those twelve hours, Will experienced a loss of self that would never entirely leave his thoughts.
But it wasn’t only the nightmarish trip that drove Will to write letter after letter to Army generals all the way up to the Chief of Staff. A year after the experiment, he developed grand mal epilepsy. Then his wife’s miscarriages began.
There is no concrete link between LSD and late-onset seizure disorders, and the impact of hallucinogens on fertility is possible but not extensively studied. None of that mattered to Will, particularly as so little was known at the time of his experience. All he knew was that he’d entered a realm of total psychological decompensation, then he’d lost control of his body, and now it seemed like his wife was being punished right along with him.
After a decade of doctors and ineffective cures on top of active duty, Will committed himself to demanding justice for himself and his fellow volunteers. He wanted official recognition of what the U.S. Army had done, and a medical followup for participants. This campaign drove him and his family out of Florida and up to Alexandria, Virginia, in order to be closer to the commanding officers Will believed might help him. Unfortunately, their time on Beryl Road was corrupted by a growing despair.
“In your closing remarks,” he wrote to Colonel John Stoner, Jr. that October, “you stated that you hoped your reply had been of help to me. It has been of help, sir. It has helped me understand that there is a clear and apparent conflict between my own moral and ethical values and those of the Army.”
Meanwhile, the seizures were getting worse. They triggered a return to that paralyzed, terrifying place where he couldn’t control his thoughts, where horrible images dashed through his mind and played with the shadows near his bed. The walls themselves seemed to watch him, moving closer and away as if breathing. Whispers mocked him from the dark.
Will didn’t always know where the flashbacks came from—his deployment? The LSD?—but it also took longer to recover from each episode. Every letter returned unread or brushed off with a polite dismissal stole a little more of his energy, forcing his wife to work that much harder to keep their home peaceful and relatively happy. The days flowed into one another in a tide that began to feel darker, thicker, and impossible to rise above.
As spring turned into summer, and summer into fall, Will’s choice became clear to him. He could either stay on Beryl Road and lose his family and maybe his mind, or he could retire from service and continue to fight for acknowledgement from a calmer, more familiar place. In winter of 1972, the Jordans packed their bags and departed for Florida.
It would take ten years for anyone to wonder what they might have left behind.
In some ancient cultures, it was believed that “the falling sickness” was far worse than a neurological disease. It was instead a signal of demonic interference. A tablet found in Iraq from almost 2,700 years ago depicts a horned figure leering below a representation of the reputed cure for “bennu,” or what we call epilepsy. The weathered clay warns of madness inflicted on the innocent and sinful alike, both physical and mental, brought on by the lunar cycle—or by ingesting certain drugs.
Once that evil landed on your shoulder, you became its carrier. Darkness grew inside you until your death… unless the demon found another attractive host. A person, usually. Or a place.
Almost three thousand years later, Judeo-Christian religions and their offshoots share a common thread with some LSD users as well as MK-Ultra theorists who believe the drug creates a window to another, stranger, dimension: there are forces just beyond this world that wish us harm.
Sometimes we let them in.
ANOTHER SWELTERING VIRGINIA SUMMER. Nights were pleasant and filled with fireflies, but unless a thunderstorm rolled through to break the heat, the days were sticky and long.
It had been months since any odd smells, or even a broken glass. At twenty-nine and twenty-six respectively, Gary and Epi had moved on with their lives. Down the road might come children, but for now they spent their days drinking, smoking, and playing with the dogs. They’d even found a litter of kittens that summer, adopting them all on sight.
Yet the peace was not complete. The fire alarm continued to sound for no reason. One day Epi fell down the stairs, and though she wasn’t badly injured, she swore a rug had been pulled from under her feet. Perhaps this fall was in her mind when, despite her youth and good health, Epi surprised her friends by making out a will.
Two weeks later, toward the end of June, the Belofskys went out to dinner and left their new housemates alone. Both men were in their rooms, the dogs asleep in the living room, when a noise shattered the calm. Joe would later describe it as “loud as a bullhorn,” and Evans thought it was like “a bull or an elephant in a tin can factory.” The two men waited with the dogs until Epi and Gary returned, unsure of how alarmed they should actually be. The Belofskys laughed it off.
As if the spirit was angry at their dismissal, the next day, smoke spooled up from the kitchen sink. The previous fall, Gary had stopped trying to find natural reasons for these kinds of anomalies. Now he went down to the basement to check, peering around the shadowy room where Mary hung for hours on that long-ago Sunday morning. He found nothing amiss.
A week after the bullhorn and the phantom smoke, Epi was in the shower when the bathroom door creaked open. She called for one dog, then the other, assuming one of them had nosed its way into the room. No dog snuffled past the shower curtain. Epi reached across the small room and pushed the door closed, but she was barely back under the spray when the hinges squealed a second time.
This time Epi got out of the shower altogether, glancing into the hall. Nobody was there. She closed the door again, ensuring the latch engaged, and returned to her shower. When the bathroom door opened a third time, Epi was certain: the ghost was back.
She was annoyed, but not truly scared. When her friend Lorraine Maslow visited later that afternoon and asked how things were going, Epi waved a hand. “Mary’s kicking up again.”
Except the nerves wouldn’t leave her. This didn’t feel like Mary’s old playfulness. The door opening over and over while she was naked, vulnerable—that felt almost mocking. Meant to humiliate and scare.
That night, she and Gary took their housemates up on an invitation to a party, all four of them in search of distraction. The Belofskys stumbled home well after midnight. Exhausted and tipsy, they gathered the dogs into their room and collapsed into bed around three. An hour later, after all four living occupants of 6304 Beryl Road were fast asleep, a spark flared in the kitchen. It took only moments to catch.
Joe and Evans woke first. Already flames were roaring out of the kitchen, fed by the massive pocket of air created by the house’s cathedral ceiling. First Joe, then Evans, escaped through their respective windows as the fire raced down the hall and up the stairs towards the master bedroom. By the time the men made it out, the entire house was aflame.
Huddled in her bedroom, the dogs whining at the smoke, Epi called the Emergency Operations Center while Gary fought his way downstairs. Fire inspector Kenneth Long took the call and immediately dispatched two trucks. It was already too late.
From the front lawn, Joe and Evans watched in horror as flames danced behind every open window, smoke billowing from the house like wicked breath. No one burst through the front door or jumped from the fourth floor window. By the time the fire investigators arrived, 6304 Beryl Road was a blazing tomb.
EPI AND GARY BELOFSKY DIED on Sunday June 28th, 1982. Epi’s asphyxiated body was found in the master bedroom. Gary made it downstairs and halfway across the living room before the fire consumed him.
“I can’t understand why they didn’t get out,” Bruce said later. “Everything seems to be so funny and so mangled.”
When first responders arrived on the scene, one fire official heard two neighbors talking about “Mary.” The name would have sent a chill up the spine of his fellow veteran firefighter, shift commander Dan Bickham, who was battling the flames. Nine years earlier, Bickham had responded to another emergency call at this house, also before dawn on a Sunday. He was too late to save Mary Conlon either.
“There’s just a lot of coincidences with this whole thing,” Bickham admitted. “It kind of makes you wonder.” He wasn’t even supposed to be working the day of the fire that killed Epi and Gary, but he’d switched shifts at the last minute.
Officially, the blaze was declared an accident—but one thing firefighters did confirm was that it started in the kitchen, “directly over the basement area where Conlon hanged herself.”
Newspapers around the world blared with headlines like that put out by United Press International, “Ghost Suspected as Cause of Fire that Killed 2 People.” The newlyweds took their places as a rarity in paranormal circles, one of the few cases in history in which a person’s death has been publicly attributed to supernatural activity.
But as the amateur psychic sat outside the smoldering ruins of 6304 Beryl Road and reflected on the people who’d died there, it wasn’t Mary’s spirit he sensed. That ghost couldn’t generate the darkness that welled from the house like oil. When Rose Marie Donovan spoke with him about his experience, he described it as best he could: “waves of evil.”
Mary Conlon may have haunted that house, and it was her name published in the papers, but some believe she was not the true threat on Beryl Road. She was its first taste of blood.
Will Jordan’s secret history of suffering began with a dip into madness. His time in Virginia was its apex. The house became a flytrap for anger, grief, isolation—and perhaps for whatever entity used his pain as a gateway into this world.
After leaving Beryl Road, Will found happiness in Florida. In 1973, he received a more substantive response to his letters. In 1974, the Army finally delivered his long-awaited medical followup. Though inconclusive, this gave him some closure: at the very least, he had been heard. Will passed away peacefully in 2013, at the age of 84.
When reporters reached out to Dr. McClenon after the fire that killed Epi and Gary Belofsky, he kept his comments brief. Almost forty years later, he stands by them.
“I will tell you, you will never know. As long as you live, you will never know.”
