The Greenbrier Ghost

Elva Zona Heaster met Edward Stribbling Shue, a blacksmith who had recently come to Greenbrier County, in October 1896, and they married soon afterwards. On January 23, 1897, barely two months later, she was found dead in their log home. Before the doctor arrived her husband had washed and dressed the body himself – a task usually left to the women of the family – and at the wake he kept close watch over her, propping her head with pillows and a scarf wrapped around her neck. The coroner’s jury put her death down to natural causes – heart disease, by one account – and she was buried.

Zona’s mother, Mary Jane Heaster, never trusted her son-in-law. In the weeks after the funeral she told people that her daughter’s spirit had come to her bedside four times, in the dress she had died in, to tell her that Edward had flown into a rage and broken her neck with his hands. She went to the county prosecutor, John Alfred Preston, and persuaded him to reopen the case.

In February 1897 the body was exhumed and examined. The autopsy found that Zona’s neck had been broken, her windpipe crushed, and that there were finger marks on her throat. Shue was arrested and tried at the Greenbrier County Courthouse in Lewisburg. The trial opened on June 22, 1897. Prosecutor Preston kept to the physical evidence, but Shue’s lawyer, hoping to make Mrs. Heaster look unreliable, questioned her at length about the ghost on cross-examination; she would not waver, and her account entered the trial record. On July 8, 1897, the jury found Shue guilty of murder; he was sentenced to life and died in the state penitentiary at Moundsville in March 1900.

A state historical marker near the Sam Black Church exit of Interstate 64 now calls it the “only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped to convict a murderer.” Zona lies a few miles away beneath a stone reading “Greenbrier Ghost, 1876–1897.” Historian Katie Letcher Lyle, author of The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives, has suggested that her mother may have invented the visitations to force the authorities to look again – a reading that makes Mary Jane Heaster the true hero of the story either way.

Mary Jane Heaster’s sworn account of four nighttime visits by her daughter’s spirit, which described how Zona was killed. There are few modern ghost claims attached to the places themselves; the story’s power lies in its role in a real murder trial.

The Shue cabin (still standing, on private land, about four miles from the marker), Zona’s grave in a small cemetery a few miles from the marker, the Greenbrier County Courthouse in Lewisburg, and the roadside historical marker near the Sam Black Church exit of I-64.

One of West Virginia’s best-known stories, the Greenbrier Ghost has inspired books by Katie Letcher Lyle and Dennis Deitz, Sharyn McCrumb’s 2017 novel The Unquiet Grave, plays, a musical, an opera and a 2019 episode of Drunk History. The roadside marker is one of the most photographed in the state.