Utah: home to salt flats, national parks, and snowy mountains. Oh, and a gravestone belonging to a ‘Victim of the Beast 666’.
That’s not how you want to go, is it?
Located in the Salt Lake City cemetery, the gravestone belongs to a woman named Lilly E. Gray, who was born in 1881.
She lived until her 70s before passing away in 1958, after which a gravestone was created to mark her place of rest. A pretty normal procedure when someone dies, right?
But Lilly Gray’s gravestone is definitely not normal.
Rather than bearing any fond words about the woman Lilly was, telling visitors whether she was a mother, a friend or a wife, the gravestone instead appears to feature a chilling detail about how Lilly met her end.
Under her birth and death dates, the gravestone reads: “Victim of the Beast 666.”
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The stone doesn’t offer any further information, leaving visitors to the grave wondering: was Lilly possessed by the devil himself? Was she somehow pulled into the depths of hell?
Like many visitors to the grave over the years, we’re desperate to know the truth.
UNILAD reached out to the Utah Historical Society to try and get some more information about the grave, and found that Lilly was married to a man named Elmer L. Gray, who had been sentenced to spend time in Utah State Prison for ‘burglary of the second degree’.
Mike Ellerbeck, the owner of Salt Lake Monument, the company which made the gravestone, has previously told Fox 13 News it was Elmer who ordered the inscription for Lilly.
Records show that Elmer submitted an application for termination or parole from the Board of Pardons while he was behind bars, and it was in that document that he made a curious claim about what happened to his wife.
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The claim doesn’t mention the devil, but could the inscription on the gravestone suggest Elmer was branding these alleged kidnappers as a ‘beast’?
Well, here’s where things get even more curious.
UNILAD obtained a death certificate for Lilly, and in that document it’s indicated that she died of natural causes – more specifically, ‘pulmonary embolus’, which likely refers to what we know today as a pulmonary embolism.
If Lilly died from a blood clot in her lungs, then why would Elmer claim she was a ‘Victim of the Beast 666’?
Ellerbeck presented one theory as he claimed Elmer believed the government was ‘the beast’. In his application to the Board of Pardons, Elmer claimed he himself was a victim of ‘democrat kidnappers and their friends’ who were holding him ‘kidnapped’.
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Unfortunately, that’s a question we might never be able to answer. But the notion that ‘the beast’ is a political nickname is definitely preferable to the idea that the devil himself is wandering around out there, choosing humans to become the next ‘Victim of the Beast 666’.