The Greenbrier Ghost

What is on the record

In the winter of 1897, in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, a young woman was found dead. She lay at the foot of the stairs in her house. Her name was Elva Zona Heaster Shue. She had been married a few months to a blacksmith. He had come into the county not long before. He gave his name, at one time or another, as Edward, Erastus and Erasmus Shue. A local doctor looked at the body only briefly. The husband held his wife's head the whole time and would not let go of it. The doctor, embarrassed, did not press. The death was written down as natural.

Her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, did not accept it. Some weeks after the funeral she went to the local prosecutor, John Alfred Preston. She told him that her daughter had come back. Four nights running, she said, Zona had stood in her room. She had told of the marriage and told of the killing. And she had turned her head all the way round, to show how her neck had been broken.

Preston did what his job asks with a story like that. He checked whether any part of it could be tested. He and the doctor had the body dug up.

What was found when anyone looked

The autopsy was carried out on 22 February 1897. It recorded that the neck was broken and the windpipe mashed. On the throat were the marks of fingers, which showed she had been choked. The neck was dislocated between the first and second vertebrae. Those are the two bones at the top of the spine.

That is the part of this case that is not a ghost story. A woman written off as a natural death had been strangled, and her neck broken. It took her mother, who would not let it go, for anyone to look.

Edward Shue was tried between 22 June and 11 July 1897. He was found guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. He died there.

What the sign gets wrong

Here is the part that almost no one repeats. The ghost played no part in the case against him. The prosecution never brought it up. The state built its case on the autopsy, on the husband's behaviour, and on his history. The mother's vision appears in the trial record only because the defence raised it. They hoped to make the jury doubt her. She was asked about it when the defence questioned her. She did not back down. It did her no harm with the jury. The man was convicted on the medical evidence.

The state historical marker was put up long after. It says this is the only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer. The transcript says the ghost was never offered as testimony at all.

What is left

Two things, and they pull two ways.

The first is this. A mother said her dead daughter told her she had been murdered. A doctor then cut open the body and found a broken neck and finger marks on the throat. Just as she had said. Maybe she dreamed it. Maybe she worked it out and could not say so out loud in 1897. Maybe she was told. Any way it was, the fact stands. She was right when the county coroner was wrong.

The second is this. The story as it is always told, and as the state of West Virginia has cast in metal beside a road, is not what went on in the courtroom. The ghost did not convict anyone. A woman who would not be told to go home did.