Zona Heaster Shue was buried at Soule Chapel Methodist Cemetery in 1897 with nothing over her. Her mother testified that Zona came back four times to say her husband had wrenched her neck. The stone eventually raised over her reads Greenbrier Ghost.
The stone at Soule Chapel Methodist Cemetery, in the Meadow Bluff district of Greenbrier County, West Virginia, gives Zona Heaster Shue a title instead of an epitaph. In memory of Zona Heaster Shue. Greenbrier Ghost. 1876 to 1897. She got that second line from her mother, who said the dead woman came back and talked.
Mary Jane Heaster said Zona appeared to her four times, four nights running in some tellings and four weeks apart in others, and said the same thing each visit. Her husband had come home from the blacksmith shop in a rage because there was no meat cooked for supper. "He seized each side of my head with his hands," Mary Jane quoted her, "and by a sudden wrench, dislocated my neck." To show what he had done, the apparition turned her head all the way around.
Zona had been found on January 23, 1897, at the foot of the stairs in the house at Livesay's Mill. Edward Shue sent an 11-year-old neighbor, Anderson Jones, over on an invented errand, and the boy found her lying stretched out with her eyes open. By the time the local doctor arrived, Shue had already washed the body himself and dressed it in a high-necked dress with a large collar and a veil folded and tied under the chin. The Greenbrier Independent's trial report says he asked that no further examination be made, and that witnesses saw the head sit very loose upon the neck, dropping from side to side when nothing held it. The death was filed as complications of childbirth.
Mary Jane took her account to the prosecuting attorney, John Alfred Preston, who questioned her for hours instead of sending her home. Zona was exhumed on February 22 and examined in the Nickell schoolhouse, a one-room building near the cemetery she had been buried in. West Virginia Explorer's account has the doctors over the body for three days and nights. The report: "the neck was broken and the windpipe mashed. On the throat were the marks of fingers indicating that she had been choked."
Preston never raised the ghost at trial. The Virginia Law Weekly's reading of the case notes that the defense brought the apparitions up on cross-examination, hoping the jury would laugh at Mary Jane. She gave them nothing. "It was no dream," she said. "She came back and told me." The jury was out about an hour, and Shue went to the penitentiary at Moundsville, where he died in 1900.
West Virginia raised a highway marker in 1991, out at the Sam Black Church exit off I-64, a few miles east of where she actually lies: "Only known case in which testimony from ghost helped convict a murderer." The grave it points to stayed bare far longer. Gothic Horror Stories dates the stone to 1979, set by the Soule congregation roughly 80 years after they buried her.
