The Greenbrier Ghost: Zona Heaster Shue, 1897

Greenbrier County, West Virginia, in the winter of 1897. Zona Heaster Shue was in her early twenties and only a few months married. Her husband was the blacksmith Edward Stribbling Erasmus "Trout" Shue. He had been married twice before. One marriage ended in divorce amid accusations of cruelty, while his second wife died within a year in unclear circumstances.

January 23, 1897. A young boy sent to the house on chores found Zona dead, lying stretched out perfectly straight with feet together. Dr. George W. Knapp, the local doctor and coroner, made only a brief examination, but Shue interrupted it and the examination stopped. The body was dressed with a high stiff collar, and the death was recorded as natural. The next day Zona was buried in what is now Soule Chapel Methodist Cemetery.

Her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, later told a courtroom what came next. "It was just after I went to bed, and I wanted her to come and talk to me, and she did." Zona came "four times, and four nights," appearing at her bedside, by one account in the dress she died in.

She spoke. She told her mother that "he was mad that she didn't have no meat cooked for supper." On the second night she said that "her neck was squeezed off at the first joint." And as she left, her mother testified, "she turned her head completely around and looked at me like she wanted me to know all about it." Heaster insisted she had been "as wide awake as I ever was," and she told her neighbors.

After Heaster took her suspicions to the prosecutor, John Alfred Preston, the case was reopened. On February 22, 1897, the body was exhumed and examined in a local schoolhouse, in an autopsy of about three hours. The findings were stark. "The neck was dislocated between the first and second vertebrae." The windpipe had been crushed, and on the throat were the marks of fingers.

Shue stood trial in the Greenbrier Circuit Court at Lewisburg that summer, before Judge J. M. McWhorter. Preston questioned Heaster on the facts alone. It was the defence that raised the ghost, pressing her to call it a dream. She would not. "I am not going to say that; for I am not going to lie."

After one hour and ten minutes, the jury found Shue guilty of murder in the first degree. The jury recommended mercy, and the sentence was life imprisonment. A mob formed to take Shue from jail. A deputy sheriff dispersed it. Shue died in the state penitentiary at Moundsville on March 13, 1900.

The prosecution never mentioned the ghost, and the conviction rested on the autopsy and circumstantial evidence. In 1999 the writer Katie Letcher Lyle suggested Heaster invented the visits to force an investigation, appealing to the superstitions of her neighbors and writing, "As it turned out, she didn't need the ghost story." Later retellings added a bright light and an icy cold room, details absent from the 1897 testimony. Arabeth Balasko of the Greenbrier Historical Society found the written record full of contradictions. Brian Dunning revisited the case on Skeptoid in 2019.

Near Sam Black Church, beside US-60, a state historical marker still tells the story. It calls this the "Only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer." Visitors leave pebbles and flowers at the grave. Zona's story lives on in books, plays, a musical, an opera and an episode of Drunk History.