The Greenbrier Ghost
Photo Credits: Atlas Obscura
Over fall break, I did what anyone would do—I took a drive over to West Virginia with my significant other to climb aboard the Potomac Eagle Scenic Railroad. To my utter surprise, we were the only people under sixty on this journey. But West Virginia is wild and wonderful, and this article isn’t about trains, though it was the original impetus for our travel. No, this is a ghost story. Specifically, a ghost story about Elva Zona Heaster Shue, a woman who was murdered in 1897.
This plaque stands near Smoot, West Virginia, in Greenbrier County. It is one of the best things I have ever stumbled upon. I resolved to write this article immediately upon seeing it. Just imagine being the defense attorney in that case, valiantly arguing that spectral testimony should be inadmissible under FRCP Rule 602, which requires “personal knowledge” only for the judge to rule that the witness had transcended personhood entirely. Imagine arguing that the prosecution’s key witness lacks standing, only for the Court to disagree, noting that “she’s currently standing right behind you.” Just imagine that the jury was initially unconvinced of your client’s guilt due to the circumstantial evidence—until the courtroom temperature dropped twenty degrees.
Tough day in court when your opposing counsel is the paranormal.
Here’s a (partial) literal list of jokes I made for the rest of this piece:
The record shows that when asked to “produce the witness,” the prosecution dimmed the lights.
Imagine explaining to your client: “We’d appeal, but she’s haunting the appellate court now.”
The defense strategy was “ignore the ghost,” which worked right up until it didn’t.
Hard to impeach a witness who can walk through walls.
The defense attorney attempted to object, but the ghost sustained herself.
The defense raised a motion in limine to exclude spectral evidence. The judge denied it, noting “the spirit of justice demands otherwise.”
The cross-examination was brief: The ghost declined to answer, citing Fifth Dimension privileges.
Modern scholars cite the case for two enduring principles of West Virginia law: (1) Hearsay is permissible if the speaker materializes through the wall, and (2) if your defense strategy loses to a ghost, it’s time to go to business school.
But while I was gleefully attempting to write one long bad joke of an article, I realized I should actually do some light reading on Zona’s story. This in turn developed into a bit of a deep dive, and—properly chastised by my findings—I present the rest of this ghost story sans puns and with the appropriate gravity.
* * *
In the winter of 1897, in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, a young woman named Elva “Zona” Heaster Shue was found dead at home. Her husband, Edward Stribbling Trout Shue—a man whose name already suggested moral instability—declared that she had “fallen into a faint.” The local coroner, perhaps wishing to avoid paperwork,[1] agreed. Zona was buried quickly, and life went on for everyone. Everyone except for Zona’s mother.
A few weeks later, Zona’s mother, Mary Jane Heaster, reported a series of nocturnal visitations from her daughter’s ghost—not the gauzy, sentimental kind, but the stern Dickensian variety that arrives with evidence. Over four nights, the spirit appeared and recited a remarkably detailed affidavit: Her husband had broken her neck in anger. It was a classic deposition—except for the part where the witness was incorporeal.
Mary Jane took the story to the local prosecutor, John Alfred Preston, who, showing more procedural rigor than one might expect of rural Appalachia in the 1890s, ordered the body exhumed. The autopsy revealed a fractured vertebra and crushed windpipe.[2] The ghost, it seemed, had told the truth.
The trial began on June 22, 1897, and the prosecution’s case in chief relied primarily on the physical evidence: the broken neck, the crushed windpipe, and Shue’s recalcitrance and odd behavior when the coroner first arrived. Yet the most memorable testimony came from Mary Jane. On the direct examination, Preston focused on the known facts of the case, skirting Mary Jane’s recounting of her daughter’s alleged visits from beyond the grave almost entirely. On cross-examination, however, Shue’s attorney pounced on the subject, subjecting Mary Jane to a long and pointed cross-examination in hopes of exposing hysteria or contradiction. But Mary Jane never faltered. Her answers were measured, consistent, and unnervingly certain. And since the defense introduced the topic, the judge found it difficult to instruct the jury to disregard the ghostly testimony. Mary Jane’s visions were subsequently admitted to the official record, and, after a brief deliberation, Edward Shue was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
No appellate court was ever called upon to clarify the evidentiary status of spectral declarations. Nevertheless, the case entered American folklore as “the only known instance in which the testimony of a ghost helped secure a conviction.”
* * *
In law, a witness is presumed to be someone living—capable of perception, recollection, and oath. Yet in Greenbrier County, justice hinged on a dead woman’s insistence on being heard, and a living woman’s willingness to speak for her. Mary Jane Heaster’s composure under cross-examination made her more than a grieving mother; she became a vessel for testimony that would have otherwise been buried.
Her credibility poses an enduring question: Why did that jury believe her? Perhaps because she spoke plainly, without embellishment. Perhaps because the evidence—her daughter’s broken neck—made her faith impossible to dismiss. Or perhaps, in a community small enough to feel its own complicity, the jurors recognized the story’s deeper truth: that violence in the home is often invisible until someone, living or dead, refuses to keep its secrets.
The Greenbrier case was, at its heart, a story of domestic violence in a world without that vocabulary. The law of 1897 offered few protections for women, and fewer still for wives. Zona’s ghost supplied the outrage the legal system lacked. What we might now call “posthumous testimony” was then the only means of forcing a reckoning.
Modern parallels linger. As of October 14, 2025, the Philadelphia medical examiner reaffirmed that Ellen Greenberg’s death—twenty stab wounds, ten to the back of her neck—was a suicide. The report calls the injuries “unusual but self-inflicted” and cites anxiety, not foul play. Yet the conclusion feels haunted by omission, particularly in regards to the role played by Greenberg’s fiancé, who found her body and was the last to see her alive. Absence of evidence, after all, is not evidence of absence.
Greenberg’s story also shows how domestic violence and institutional skepticism remain intertwined. Both cases raise the same quiet indictment: that the first story told too often becomes the official one. Greenberg’s fiancée was never questioned by police and was never considered a suspect.[3] Both narratives provoke the same unsettling question: Who gets to testify, and whose voice do we trust?
And yet, the Greenbrier legend endures not because of its ghost, but because of its witness. Mary Jane Heaster believed her daughter, spoke when others would not, and in doing so restored a measure of justice to a silenced woman. Every community that still doubts, delays, or rationalizes domestic harm might take a lesson from that. The living, it turns out, are not always the most reliable witnesses—but they are the ones with the chance to listen.
[1] Some reports indicate that when the coroner, a local doctor, arrived, Zona’s husband had already “dressed her and laid her out” and essentially told the doctor he needn’t do a full exam. Thus, the doctor put down “heart failure.” But a few days after Zona was buried, the coroner filed the official return, not with “heart failure,” but with a different cause: childbirth. This cause of death was never mentioned in newspapers nor in Zona’s trial by the defense or prosecution. See Jennifer Jones, Death did not silence her: The Murder of Zona Heaster Shue, https://thedeadhistory.com/2025/04/22/zona-heaster-shue/.
[2] The description of her injuries was more intense than this, but I think it a bit ghoulish even in October to go into lurid detail about a murder for no real purpose. I do think, however, that the extent of her injuries is notable given the initial coroner’s determination of heart failure, and I encourage readers to look up the report if they choose to do further reading on Zona’s story. See Greenbrier Independent, Feb. 25, 1897; Jennifer Jones, supra note 1.
[3] Perhaps we should raise the ghost of John Alfred Preston to mount a proper inquiry into Ms. Greenberg’s alleged suicide.
