Preliminary Investigation -

West County Mall, East Parking Lot - 4/25/2008

Location: Near the intersection of Manchester Road and Highway 270. The area in question is the east parking lot in the center of the mall. The original West County Mall was torn down shortly after the year 2000 and developer Westfield rebuilt the mall and it reopened in 2002.

Conditions: Temperature was 78 degrees. The moon is currently in a waning gibbous phase, 76 percent of full. Solar X-ray was normal and the geomagnetic field was quiet.

Equipment Used: Canon 10D DSLR.

Personal Experiences: None noted.

Results and Analysis: Visible photography did not reveal anything out of the ordinary.

The Story: In February of 2008 the following post caught our attention on the Paranormal Task Force's forum:

"In August 2000, a woman, who was a teacher, was murdered on the east parking lot of the West County Mall in STL County. Police speculate it was a carjacking or robbery gone wrong. Police recently charged a man with the crime. Shortly after that incident, the mall was completely torn down and rebuilt (unrelated to the murder). The current east parking lot next to the old cemetery is about where the 2000 crime occurred.

A friend of mine worked as a mall security guard there for a year when construction was completed and the new mall re-opened. After the mall re-opened, he said they would receive calls from emergency call boxes in the parking lot of witnesses reporting a woman in the lot asking for help. Security would always respond to the reported location and was never able to find the woman needing help. He said they would briefly question the witnesses that called security to get the story of what happened. He said the reports of this woman needing help would always be after dark.

What’s really strange is when they responded on numerous occasions to reports of a woman asking for help, it would always occur in the same general location (on the east parking between the food court entrance and the old cemetery), the numerous witnesses on different nights all told the same story of what happened to them (they would be driving through the lot when a woman would flag them down and claim she needed help), and their description of this woman would always be the same (white female with long brown hair and wearing a long, light colored dress). Security would check the whole east lot area. They were never able to locate this woman after any reported incident. I do know the teacher that was murdered there did have brown hair but I do not know what she was wearing that unfortunate day. Does anyone know or have other info about these incidents?"

Upon investigating the news reports, the history of this event is accurate.

From the St. Louis Post Dispatch: "Joyce Belrose, 57, a fourth-grade teacher, was shot Aug. 29, 2000, next to her new Chevrolet Blazer after buying school supplies at the West County Center. Police surmised at the time that she had died in an attempted carjacking."

However, none of the news reports could verify the exact location of where the murder happened. One detail from the post is confirmable: if the haunting claims report a woman with long brown hair, then that would correspond to Ms. Belrose.

The following map shows the property location and based on the description given, the most likely location for the haunting is outlined in orange.

Actual photography of the area appears as follows:

This is a view south of the east parking lot as seen from the parking structure that is at the north east end of the mall. The fence on the left hand side of the image separates the parking lot from the cemetery.

This is the view north from the southern-most point of the east parking lot. The parking structure the previous photo was taken from can be seen in the very background. Again, in the right hand side of the image, you can see the boundary between the mall and the cemetery.

This image (albeit a little blurry) shows the call boxes that are indicated in the report. This would presumably be where witnesses to the apparition would call in to security to report a woman in distress. This is located in the dead center of the parking lot, on the far eastern edge with the cemetery in the background.

The report of activity in the area states that all the activity has been reported after dark, so further follow up during that time of the evening would be required for a more in-depth investigation.

Update from 10/29/2008 - We were recently contacted by the gentleman who was the head of security during the time of the murder and the subsequent demolition of the old mall. He related to us that he was not aware of any calls from the call boxes that were similar to the calls mentioned in the report. It may be that this story is more urban legend than fact.