Ghost of a Chance

The afterlife can hold some curious answers, if you know where to look. Here are two tales that explain what we mean.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
Chances are that you've heard of someone being visited by
a loved one after they've passed away. Maybe your friend
thought that he smelled the distinctive scent of his grandpa's pipe,
or your sister swore that she could hear Grandma calling
her inside. Maybe you yourself felt your childhood dog cuddling
up next to you in bed years after they went
to that great dog park in the sky. But whether

(00:57):
you think it's your imagination or not, these visitations often
feel like someone you love just wants to see you
one more time. For Mary, seeing her dead daughter Zona
at the foot of her bed was far from heartwarming,
especially when Zona's ghost told her mother exactly who had
killed her. On January twenty third of eighteen ninety seven,
Erasmus Shoe was working in his blacksmith shop in Greenbrier, County,

(01:21):
West Virginia. He asked a local boy to check in
on his wife of three months, Zona Heaster's shoe, and
asked if she needed anything from the market. To the
boy's horror, when he opened the door of the shoe's house,
he found Zona lying dead on the floor. The next
few hours went by quickly. Erasmus rushed to the house
as soon as he heard the news. By the time
the doctor arrived to examine the body, he had already

(01:43):
laid her out for a funeral. He dressed Zona in
a long dress with a high, stiff collar and a
long veil tied under her chin. When the doctor tried
to unbutton the collar to examine Zona's neck, Arrasmus demanded
that he and the examination. He rushed the doctor out
before he could even determine the cause of death. By
the next day, Zona was in the ground, and according

(02:04):
to Erasmus, that was the end of it all. At
least it should have been, but Zona had other ideas.
A few weeks after her death, her mother, Mary Jane Heaster,
was just getting ready for sleep when something appeared next
to her on her bed. Standing in front of her,
looking as solid and healthy as ever, was her dead
daughter Zona. Over the next few nights, Zona continued to

(02:26):
appear to Mary Jane four separate times. Although at first
she seemed reluctant to answer questions about her death, she
finally relented and spoke about it. She told her mother
that Erasmus had been mad at her over the meal
she had cooked, and that her neck had been and
I quote squeezed off at the first joint. For weeks,
Mary Jane begged county officials to reopen her daughter's case.

(02:48):
Not only had Zona allegedly appeared to her mother, other
townsfolk had been whispering about murder. After it came to
light that Erasmus didn't let the doctor find a cause
of death. To quiet down the rumors, the local prosecutor
ordered that Zona's body should be exhumed. On February twenty second,
nearly a month after Zona's death, she was exhumed for
an autopsy. The doctor quickly found that Mary Jane was right.

(03:12):
Zona's neck had been broken right between the first and
second vertebrae, her windpipe had been crushed, and there were
finger marks on her skin. Zona had been strangled to death.
Erasmus was immediately arrested and four months later he was
put on trial. The star witness was Mary Jane Heaster,
who told the story on the stand of her daughter's

(03:33):
ghost solving her own murder. While the defense attorney questioned
her fiercely, hoping to make the ghost story and the
prosecution sound a bit ridiculous, his tactic backfired. Mary Jane
simply refused to admit any doubt that her dead daughter
had appeared to her. In her opinion, it wasn't a
dream or a vision or an overactive imagination. It was

(03:54):
her daughter's ghost. Her unwavering account convinced many townspeople to
believe her and likely helps way the jury to the
prosecution side. During the trial, it also came out that
Erasmus had a checkered past. He'd been divorced by one
wife who accused him of being cruel. His second wife
died mysteriously, just like Zona. In between Mary Jane's ghost story,

(04:15):
Erasmus's history, and the circumstantial evidence, it only took the
jury an hour to find him guilty. Erasmus Shu was
sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his wife,
but only lived three more years before dying from the
flu in nineteen hundred. Ane Zona's case went down in
American history as one of the only known instances in
which a ghost helped convict a murderer, giving a curious

(04:38):
new meaning to the phrase the spirit of the law.
Sister Francesca plunged the blade into the corpse, piercing flesh

(05:00):
and then bone. It was difficult work. Her tools were
poor and her training inadequate. This was, after all, her
first autopsy. To make things even more complicated, the stakes
were personal. The body on the table didn't belong to
just any forty year old woman. She had been Claire
of Montefalco, a prominent abbess renowned throughout the thirteenth century

(05:21):
in Italy for her wisdom and her holiness. Before her death,
she was the matriarch of the local Augustinian monastery, making
her sister Francesca's direct superior. The nun worked methodically, taking
great care not to damage the body more than absolutely necessary,
and finally she managed to cut through Claire's ribs, exposing
the chest cavity. With a mixture of apprehension and reverence,

(05:43):
she reached into the cadaver and drew out the heart,
placing it beside the Abbess Sister Francesca carefully sliced into
the organ and then began searching through the folds of
flesh for any abnormalities. She wasn't looking for evidence of murder.
Claire had died after a prolonged illness, so there was
no suspicion of foul play. In fact, the procedure was
not intended to reveal a cause of death at all. Instead,

(06:06):
Sister Francesca was looking for something even more important, physical
proof that Claire had been touched by the divine. Her
search was inspired by an event from fourteen years earlier.
In twelve ninety four, while celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany,
the Abbess abruptly fell into a state of spiritual ecstasy,
a prolonged religious trance in which she lost awareness of

(06:27):
the physical world. For several weeks. Claire was incapable of
taking care of herself and would not to even eat.
The nuns kept her alive by ladling spoonfuls of sugar
water into her mouth. When she finally snapped out of it,
she seemed changed. She told everyone that she'd had a
strange vision in which Christ himself had asked her to
carry his cross in her heart. Evidently he meant this literally.

(06:51):
When Claire agreed, he plunged the cross directly into her chest,
impaling her with it. Now it sounds a little intense,
but the nun took the visions as per roof of
Claire's great holiness, and this was seemingly confirmed in the
years to come. After her vision, Claire experienced near constant pain,
yet she continued to serve as abbess and eventually became

(07:11):
famous for her wisdom and her charity. When she died
in thirteen oh four, the nuns in her order hoped
to see her officially recognized as a saint, but that
wouldn't be easy. In the Catholic Church, canonizing typically requires
evidence that the deceased has performed two verifiable miracles. Sister
Francesca wasn't in the mood to sit around and wait

(07:31):
for the abbess to bless her from beyond the grave.
She believed that Claire's vision from years earlier would constitute
a miracle if she could prove that it happened, So
she took matters into her own hands and cut Claire open.
She had only been examining the heart for a few
minutes when she suddenly dropped her scalpel. She stepped back
from the table in wonder, making the sign of the Cross.

(07:53):
Within the heart, she had discovered the image of a crucifix,
and as the autopsy continued, the nun uncovered more religious symbols,
including a whip and a crown of thorns. Whether or
not you buy that largely depends on your personal beliefs.
At the time, a lot of religious people accused them
of tampering with the heart and creating the symbols themselves.

(08:15):
It's also possible that they were simply seeing what they
wanted to see. The good news is you don't have
to take Sister Francesca's word for it. You can decide
for yourself. You see. It took a little longer than
she expected, but Claire was eventually canonized as a saint,
and because of that, her heart is still on display
at the Augustinian Convent in Montefalco, which means that you

(08:36):
can see it for yourself and determine whether you think
the images are real, and by doing so, you'll be
searching for the truth in Claire's remains. Continuing, the autopsy
that Sister Francesca started seven hundred years Ago. I hope
you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(08:59):
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore

(09:20):
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.