If you’re a bit of a true crime buff, you know that there are lots of ways that murders can be solved: DNA evidence linking the perpetrator to the crime scene, surveillance footage revealing someone’s whereabouts, or witness testimonies have all been used in innumerable cases to pin down criminals.
But only once in history has a judge used a message from beyond the grave to charge a man with murder.
I know, I know. You want to know this story. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you.
As I’m telling this story, keep in mind, this happened a heck of a long time ago when recordkeeping probably wasn’t exactly what it is nowadays and we didn’t have great things like Instagram and blogs to document literally every second of our lives, so some of the details on this are a bit dicey, but I’m going to do my best from quite a few different sources to put together the most complete story I can for y’all.
So….
The woman pictured above, who is now known mostly as “The Greenbrier Ghost”, was actually named Zona Heaster Shue. She was a young woman living in Greenbrier County, West Virginia.
In 1895, when Zona was 23 years old (and still simply Zona Heaster), she met a man named Edward Shue (who apparently also sometimes went by Trout. Questionable, but okay). Edward Shue was new to town and apparently had a reputation for being a bit of a drifter. He drifted into town and started working for the local blacksmith, Crookshanks.
No, not him. James Crookshanks.
Zona met Edward shortly after he moved to town and girlfriend fell hard. You know how it goes. The problem was, Zona’s mom, Mary Jane, absolutely hated Edward. There isn’t much record of exactly why she hated Edward from the get go, but I have to assume it’s something along the lines of she thought he was a dirty-rotten-no-good-scoundrel who wasn’t good enough for her daughter. Unfortunately, this was one of those “mama knows best” cases where the daughter just didn’t listen. (I can’t tell you how many times I didn’t listen to my mom and she ended up being right.)
Zona went against her mother’s wishes and married Edward after just a couple of months of knowing him, thinking that everything would be fine. And they were…for a little while.
Unfortunately, by January of 1897, just a little over a year since meeting Edward, Zona was dead.
Zona was found dead in her home by a little neighbor boy who would come over to the house to help out with chores. When he got into the home he found her body lying at the bottom of the stairs and he immediately ran back home to get his mom to help. The boy’s mom called the local doctor, George Knapp, who was conveniently also the local coroner (as it often was in small towns back in those days). After stopping at his house to get his mom to call for help, the little boy continued running all the way down to the blacksmith’s shop to tell Edward what had happened, and Edward rushed home.
Edward, however, beat the doctor there, and by the time Dr. Knapp arrived, Edward had moved Zona’s body to the bedroom, laid her on the bed, and changed her freaking clothes.
I mean, what? Can you even imagine this happening in today’s and age? Any of you who watch even a little of true crime or even the news would know that this is a major red flag. I mean the biggest, reddest flag of all flags, right?
But wait, it gets better. Guess what he dressed her in?
A high-necked dress and a veil.
Yeah.
I know.
Edward Shue stayed in the room the entire time Dr. Knapp examined his wife body, and he was holding her head and crying over her the entire time, leaving Dr. Knapp unable to really examine her head/neck area. There are even some reports that he tried to and Shue absolutely lost it, becoming somewhat violent, which was enough to deter Knapp from pushing the issue further. Again, I know this was a different time, but this seems like such a massive oversight, or even negligence. I say again—can you even imagine this happening in modern times? The outrage would be off the charts.
So the doctor eventually determined that her cause of death was “everlasting faint”, which just…what?
So she just fainted forever? Yeah, seems legit.
I’m telling you, guys, I really am glad that medicine has come such a long way because what the actual hell is that diagnosis. Some sources I’ve seen say that this was the term used for “heart attack” back then, but that only raises more questions, such as
1. What the actual hell?
2. Why would she have a heart attack at such a young age when she was reportedly not in poor health?
3. Why would you call it “everlasting faint?” And of course,
4. What the actual hell?
So, since it was a pretty small community, word spread very quickly about Zona’s death. Knapp sent someone to tell her parents what happened, and Zona’s mom was reported to have just about the most appropriate goddammit-I-told-you-that-guy-was-bad-news reaction when she uttered the words,
“The devil has killed her.”
Even at the funeral, Edward Shue was super shady, always hovering around Zona’s body and never letting anyone be alone with her to say their goodbyes privately. He reportedly also was spotted placing a pillow on one side of her neck in the coffin and a rolled up sheet on the other side. Which is super weird for a lot of reasons, but of course the main thing is that he seemed super concerned about her neck/head area for reasons unknown. Even when they were moving her coffin to the cemetery, people thought it looked like her neck or head were kind of loose and shifting around strangely, but nothing further was done about it.
So, eventually, Zona was buried in the cemetery…but she was far from being laid to rest.
This is where things start to get spoopy.
It’s rumored that Zona’s mom, Mary Jane, removed the rolled up sheet that Edward had put in the coffin before Zona was buried (because of course she did, I mean why wouldn’t you? That’s such a weird thing to stick in there and there was no reason to bury her with it). Reportedly, when she tried to give it back to Edward, he wouldn’t take it. Mary Jane thought it smelled weird, so she tried to wash it, and when she did, the water in the wash basin turned totally red. The sheet turned pink, the water cleared, and she could never get the sheet clean of this pink color.
Now I don’t know what all this means or if Mary Jane thought that there were literal bloodstains on the sheets, but whether or not she did, she definitely interpreted this as a sign that something was up here and that Zona had indeed not died of any sort of natural causes. Of course, she’d already been super suspicious as it was, but this moment seemed to have just put her right over the edge. She began to pray for more signs or for some type of communication telling her she was right or telling her what had really happened.
And about a month after Zona’s funeral, Mary Jane’s prayers were answered.
Legend has it that Zona came to visit her mother at night while she was sleeping, first appearing as a bright light and then developing into a more solid apparition. Zona’s ghost told her mom that she was right, and that Edward was a cruel, horrible man who had been abusive and Zona had just kept in on the downlow. She told her mom that Edward came home and found that Zona hadn’t made any meat for dinner, and flew into a rage and attacked her.
She told her mom that Edward had broken her neck, and supposedly, Ghost Zona then turned her head all the way around backwards to prove it.
Which is pretty horrifying.
Feel like she probably could have just…told her and that would have been sufficient. Then again, if I were a ghost I’m sure I’d also be prone to dramatics as well. I mean, if you have the opportunity to be that scary, you might as well take advantage of it, right?
Bolstered by a new sense of conviction after getting confirmation from her daughter’s ghost, Mary Jane was now more determined than ever to seek justice. She visited the local prosecutor, John Alfred Preston, and reportedly spent hours trying to convince him that something wasn’t right. I imagine nowadays if you went to someone with the story that a ghost told you the solution to their own murder, you’d be laughed out of the room, but she was determined enough and pushed Preston enough that he eventually gave in.
Granted, this might not have been entirely because of the ghost story—as previously mentioned, a lot of people thought that Zona had looked weird and that Edward had acted really weird at the funeral, so things were already shady AF, to say the least. With enough pressure from the community, it’s possible he would have given in at some point…but the ghost of Zona herself may just have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak.
He started by reaching out to and interviewing some of the people involved with the case, and it was Dr. Knapp’s testimony that really got things rolling. Once Preston found out that Dr. Knapp had kind of half-assed his examination not done a full and thorough examination of Zona, largely due to Edward’s strange behavior, Preston decided maybe it was best to take another look and he ordered an exhumation of Zona’s body in order to perform a proper autopsy.
And wouldn’t you know it, the autopsy revealed that she’d been murdered.
The autopsy—which lasted three days—showed that her neck was broken, her windpipe was completely “mashed” (these are words from the actual report), and there were marks from fingers on her neck showing that she had been choked. Her neck was completely dislocated between the first and second vertebrae and the ligaments were torn and ruptured.
Doesn’t sound much like an everlasting faint to me, Doc.
Edward Shue was arrested and charged with the murder of Zona. While he was in jail waiting for his trial, he spent a lot of time bragging that he wouldn’t be convicted because there wasn’t enough evidence against him, and seemed very confident in his belief that he’d get away with it.
But Shue had another thing coming.
At his trial, his shady past had some light shed on it. As it turns out, Edward had been married twice before, and his second wife had died under mysterious circumstances.
Doesn’t seem so mysterious now, though.
When Mary Jane Heaster, the star witness in this case, was questioned by the prosecutor, he didn’t really bring up that she was visited by the ghost of her daughter—but the defense did.
For her part, though, Mary Jane never wavered in her testimony, always told the stories of her daughter’s ghostly visits the same way, and was very confident in her beliefs that Zona had helped her from the afterlife. The judge allowed it, and a lot of people actually believed Mary Jane. Eventually, the jury found Edward Shue guilty of murder and he was sentenced to life in prison.
This went down in history as the only time a ghost’s testimony was allowed in court and actually solved her own murder. The West Virginia Department of Culture and History even erected a historical plaque in Greenbrier County detailing the story.
So what really went on here? Was Mary Jane really visited by the ghost of her daughter, or did she just dream it because she was thinking about it so much? Would the murder have been solved eventually without the help of Zona from beyond the grave? Sure, most of the community believed Mary Jane’s story, but she also had the physical evidence from the extensive autopsy to back her up. Then again, without the visits from the ghost pushing her forward, would she have been able to convince Preston to re-question the doctor and then exhume the body?
This is a really interesting case for a lot of reasons. I’d love to know if this would have ever gotten solved without the ghost stories from Zona’s mom. I’d also love to know how this would go if this were attempted in modern times. I definitely think a secondhand testimony from a ghost flies a little better in a time when “everlasting faint” is considered a legitimate cause of death, but I’m still curious.
This story of the ghost who solved her own murder has long been one of my favorite ghost stories, and it helps that justice was actually served in the end. What do you all think? Do you believe Mary Jane? Do you think this would have been solved without the ghost’s help? What’s your favorite ghost story? Let me know in the comments! You know I’d love to talk. <3