SYMHC Classics: Greenbrier Ghost

This 2019 episode covers the story of Zona Heaster Shue's death and subsequent appearances to her mother as an apparition. This story is often referred to as the only case in the U.S. when a ghost’s testimony convicted a murderer. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. It is our last Saturday before Halloween, so
we have picked a ghost story for today's Saturday Classic,
at least kind of a ghost story. It's the Greenbriar
Ghost And this episode came out on October twenty eighth,
twenty nineteen. Happy Early Halloween, everybody. Yeah, welcome to Stuff

(00:24):
You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. And now we're in the think of
Halloween happenings, which means it is time for a ghost story.
Who doesn't love a ghost story? Although this one is

(00:46):
problematic in a variety of ways. You may recall an
episode that Sarah and Deblina did in twenty twelve about
London's Cockleen ghost who accused a living person of murder.
That is also going to come up as a classic
in the not too distant future. So if you didn't
listen to it in twenty twelve and don't feel like
looking for it, you're going to get it automatically in
your feed very soon. And this one is in a

(01:07):
similar vein, but it is a West Virginia story of
a ghost who gave details about her murder, and we
are about to go on tour, as we've said, so
we were considering this as possibly one of the topics
that we would cover in one leg of our upcoming tour.
But as I started doing the research on it, it

(01:28):
pretty quickly became apparent that this is a little too
unsettling for our no bummer's rule for live shows. And
there is are some aspects to this story that just
would not be fun, bantery things to talk about in
a live show. That means this is also your warning
that this story features multiple instances of spousal abuse, specifically

(01:49):
a man abusing his wives. So if that is something
that you would rather not hear about, that is understandable,
and this one might be best to skip over. We
are talking today about the Greenbrier Ghost. It's spousal abuse
up to and potentially including murder. So yeah, it's not
to be a spoiler, but there's a lot going on.

(02:09):
There's a plaque, which is a state historical marker that
stands near a West Virginia cemetery and tells an incredible tale.
Here's what it says. Quote Greenbrier Ghost interred in nearby
cemetery is Zona Heuster Shoe. Her death in eighteen ninety
seven was presumed natural until her spirit appeared to her
mother to describe how she was killed by her husband.

(02:31):
Trout autopsy on the exhumed body verified the apparition's account.
Trout found guilty of murder was sentenced to the state prison.
Only known case in which testimony from ghost helped convict
a murderer. So first we are going to talk about
mister Shoe. His full name was Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shoe,

(02:54):
and he had a problematic past long before he met Zona.
When he changed his name from Erasmus to Edward is unknown,
although it could have been connected to one of the
times he had some legal trouble, but he went by
Trout to most people. Shoe had a history of abuse,
Like we alluded to earlier, in the winter of eighteen
eighty six to eighty seven, there were stories of incidents

(03:16):
in which he had whipped his first wife. Her name
was ali Estelene Cutlip McMillan, and those stories had spread
and become so common that a number of teenagers and
their teacher decided to go do something about it. According
to an account by one of the boys involved, GS McKeever,
the group went to the Shoe cabin on Rock Camp Run,

(03:37):
which was an offshoot of Spring Creek, late one night
and they knocked on the door. Obviously, we should say
this account was given many many years after all of
this took place, so just keep that in mind. But
when Shoe answered, several of the youths jumped him and
they took him to a watering hole and they dunked
him in the icy water. The temperature that night was
below freezing, and they told him they were doing it

(03:59):
because he was known to beat his wife. And the
next morning Shoe pressed charges against the three boys who
were his primary attackers. So there was a minor bit
of addressing the charges and bringing the first of the
defendants to court, but there were plenty of people willing
to serve as witnesses for all the young people involved.
All three warrants were abandoned by the court. Shoe's wife,

(04:21):
Ali moved back to her family home and later divorced him,
and she did that while he was incarcerated for horse theft. Yeah, basically,
when the first of the young men, who they were teenagers,
so boys involved went before the court. There were like
three people ready to go No, he wasn't. He wasn't
where they're saying he is. And they realized like there
was never going to be anything to come of it.

(04:43):
So that's why they dismissed all of those others. I
think probably also the judge knew what was up and
was like, I'm not going to punish these kids for
trying to do something right. Shoe got married again in
eighteen ninety four, this time to Lucy and Tritt, and
Lucy was only sixteen when she and Trout married. She
did live to see seventeen. Eight months into the marriage,
she fell and died when she hit her head on

(05:05):
a rock. At least that was Trout's story. There was
some doubt in the community about whether that was true,
but Trout was never charged with any wrongdoing in her death,
and her death was written up in the paper as
just a sudden death. And then, in the autumn of
eighteen ninety six, Shoe met Elva Zona Heaster, who went
by Zona. Before long, they were married. Trout Shoe had

(05:28):
only recently started working in Greenbrier County, and he drew
a lot of attention. He was handsome, and cocky, and
Zona really fell for him, and their wedding itself was
a peculiarity. When the Methodist minister R. R. Little arrived
at the Shoe Home for the ceremony, the bride and
the guests were there, but Troutshoe was not. He had

(05:49):
gone to get the marriage license. Is what the minister
was told, And according to an account that was given
by Reverend Little again much later after the fact, they
all sat there and waited a very long time for
Trout to return. He left them waiting from early afternoon
until approximately midnight. Then when Trout finally did get there,
there was a problem with the marriage license itself. It

(06:11):
had been issued in Greenbrier County, but the Shoe Home
was located in Pocahontas County. Little refused to perform the
ceremony in any other county than the one where the
license had been issued. I don't know how West Virginia
law works, but that is how the law works someplaces.
Shoe convienced everybody in attendance to walk a mile down

(06:31):
the road so that they would be in Greenbrier County,
and then the ceremony started there on the road. So
here is what happened next. According to Reverend Little's account, quote,
when I came to the part of the ceremony where
it says, if anyone has objections, speak now or forever
hold your peace. I waited, and after some time I
said I object I told him for the reason that

(06:54):
the girl he wished to marry was a mere child.
None of her people are present. It is now one
o'clock in the morning, and we are all here on
a country road. A marriage ceremony is a sacred rite
and should at least be performed under ordinary circumstances. I
cannot help but think there is something not right in
this case, and I will go no further. So there

(07:15):
will be no wedding, so far as I am concerned.
The minister said that he later learned that Zona was
very young, just fifteen years old. You'll recall that Trout's
previous wife, Lucy, had only been sixteen. It was probably
not accurate, though she was probably closer to twenty. Her
exact birth date is unknown, and different accounts of how

(07:36):
old she was are really all over the map. Yeah,
there are a lot of question marks surrounding Zona and
her personality and who she was. There are some stories
that will tell you that she had actually had a
child out of wedlock the year before, which would have
been very scandalous at the time. The year before she
met she, others will paint a completely different picture of her.

(07:59):
And because there are so little records, it's really hard
to know what is just country community gossip that has
spread versus what is truth, which is part of why
this story is tricky to begin with. But we know
that Troutshoe had gotten this young woman away from her
family and had rushed this wedding. And even though Reverend

(08:19):
Little refused to perform the ceremony the next morning, Trout
just took Zona to another town in Greenbrier County and
they got married there. Trout and Zona were together only
a couple of months. It's between two and three months
before she died. In early January of eighteen ninety seven,
Zona became ill with something that's not totally clear. The

(08:40):
local doctor, doctor George W. Knapp, called on the Shoes
to check on Zona regularly and to monitor her health.
On January twenty second, Trout paid a visit to the
home of a woman known as Aunt Martha Jones. Martha
had a son named Anderson, who was eleven at the time,
and Troutshoe asked if Anderson could go to the show
Shoe home and take care of some chores for Zona.

(09:02):
Anderson had done this kind of work for them before,
and he was told that Anderson had some other errands
that he needed to do first, but that he would
eventually make his way there, and over the course of
the morning in the very early afternoon, Trout stopped at
the Jones home four different times to repeat that request.
Anderson Jones did eventually make it to Trout and Zona's home,

(09:23):
and we'll get to the particulars of what he found
there after we paused for a quick sponsor break. According
to an account given by Anderson Jones decades later, when
he was a grown man, he finally got to the

(09:44):
Shoe home a little after one pm, and he felt
that there was something off about the house as he
approached it, and as he got to the porch, he
said that he saw blood. He knocked on the door,
but he got no answer, and then he tried the door,
which was unlocked, and he entered the house. He followed
the trail of blood through the kitchen to the door
to the dining room, and as with the exterior door,

(10:06):
that dining room door was closed, and he knocked and
got no answer, and then he opened the door himself.
When he did this, Anderson Jones stumbled over the body
of Zona, lying face up on the floor with her
eyes open. He shook her and found that she was
cold to the touch. Immediately realized she was dead. He
ran from the house and yelled to his mother as

(10:28):
he made his way home that missus Shee was dead,
and then he went onto the blacksmith's shop where Trout
she worked to tell him this terrible news about his wife.
According to Anderson Jones, Shoe ran home and he Anderson
went to fetch doctor Nap, and by the time they
got to the Shoe home that meaning Anderson and the doctor,
Trout had moved his wife from the floor to the

(10:50):
bed and dressed her in a dress with a high
collar and a scarf and was sitting on the bed
cradling her body. Trout allegedly held her head close to
his chest and wasn't willing to let go of it
even as the doctor tried to examine the body. Napp
determined that Zona had experienced heart failure and said that
her death was a quote everlasting faint. Zona had died

(11:15):
on a Friday, and on Saturday, her body was taken
to her mother's home, which was on a nearby mountain,
where there was a period of visitation before the burial
on Monday, January twenty fifth. During the visitation, Trout was
similarly unwilling to step away from Zona or her coffin,
choosing to stay seated at the head of it rather
than stand to greet visitors. And anytime there was someone there,

(11:38):
Trout was there at the coffin and allegedly did not
allow anyone to approach it. So now we need to
take a moment to talk about Zona's mother. Her name
was missus Mary Jane Heaster, and she was not a
fan of Trout. That cause of death recorded as everlasting
faint did not sit well with her. To Mary Heaster,

(11:58):
that didn't sound like a valid reason for her young,
previously pretty healthy daughter to have died. And beginning a
few days after Zona was buried, missus Heaster had what
is sometimes characterized as four dreams, also sometimes described as
some other event in which her daughter appeared to her.

(12:19):
These became very significant events. Missus Heaster describes them as
her daughter being real and corporeal and able to be touched,
and that first night, missus Heaster felt that she had
awakened when she heard a noise in her room, and
as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she made
out the shape of her daughter's Zona. But when Mary
reached out on that first night, her daughter disappeared. On

(12:41):
the second night, after Mary prayed repeatedly that she wanted
to see Zona again, she said that the deceased daughter
appeared to her again, and this time the apparition spoke
to her, wanting her mother to understand what had really happened.
Zona made a third appearance on the following night, and
then a fourth night after that, and it was during

(13:01):
that final night that Zona really told her mother all
of the details of her death. The most significant part
of Mary Heaster's account of Zona's dream communications with her
involved details of the murder, specifically how Trout had broken
her neck. Missus Heaster did not keep these communications from
Zona to herself. She told people all about it. Their

(13:24):
initial reaction to Mary telling friends and neighbors about these
dreams and subsequent suspicion of her son in law's involvement
in Zona's death was pretty polite disbelief. The general opinion
seemed to be that grief was leading missus Heaster to
come to wild conclusions and to just cling to some
sort of explanation for her daughter's untimely death, one that

(13:46):
would offer her a chance at some kind of retribution.
But Mary Heaster was adamant that her daughter was actively
communicating with her, so much that she started to convince
people that that was what was happening. A few people
at a time, and once Mary convinced her brother in law,
Johnson Heaster, things really started to change. So first the

(14:07):
pair actually went to visit Shoe. They were trying not
to tip their hand, but they wanted to talk about
what had happened when Zona died, and they came away
from that visit believing with certainty that he had killed
his young wife. They also spoke to Anderson Jones and
several other people in the community who had been at
the house the Dayzona's body was discovered. With Johnson's involvement

(14:29):
and not nearly that of a distraught mother who people
were happy to kind of write off, the Heasters were
able to move their suspicions into action. First, they met
with John A. Preston, who was the Lewisbourg prosecutor who
had already heard plenty of rumors going on about Zona's
mother trying to have Trout convicted for murder. As news
had spread, various people offered up examples of what they

(14:52):
perceived after the fact to have been strange behavior on
Trout's part, and the fact that he had been unwilling
to let doctor now examine Zona's head started to seem
less like a deeply aggrieved husband who could not bear
to let go of his lost beloved and maybe more
like somebody who was trying to cover something up. After
meeting with Mary and Johnson, Heaster Preston took things to

(15:16):
the next step. He went to speak with doctor Knapp,
and doctor Knapp admitted that he might have been wrong
in ruling Zona's death a heart failure. He mentioned that
in the moment, and not thinking with any sort of
suspicious thoughts, he had seen Trout as a man in shock,
and he didn't want to press the matter to examine
Zona's body more thoroughly. Preston and Napp came to the

(15:37):
conclusion that the only way to truly learn the facts.
The case was to autopsy Zona's body, and the two
of them gathered Anderson Jones and aunt Martha Jones and
Trout's Shoe. The next morning, they informed Shoe that they
intended to exume Zona, and then the entire party made
their way to the gravesite. Trout was insistent that they
would find nothing. He said that over and over throughout

(16:01):
the remainder of this story. When they reached the grave,
several men who lived nearby were ordered by the prosecutor
to assist and dig up the coffin, and once it
had been removed from the ground, it was taken to
a nearby schoolhouse for examination, and Shoe and Anderson Jones
both witnessed the autopsy. So we should have a quick
sidebar here about Anderson Jones, because he was eleven and

(16:23):
watching an autopsy. It also seems like he was used
as kind of a pawn to discover Zona's body. And
this is because of an element of racism that was here.
Trout Shoe was white and Anderson was black. And back
in twenty fourteen, the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology featured a study from UCLA that stated quote.

(16:46):
Children in most societies are considered to be in a
distinct group with characteristics such as in a sense of
the need for protection. Our research found that black boys
can be seen as responsible for their actions at an
age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that
children are essentially innocent. That is, of course, not a
new thing, even though that research was conducted five years ago.

(17:09):
And I think it's fair to assume that Anderson was
probably not treated with the care and concern for his
well being that a white child probably would have received.
That is something that does not come up very often
when you hear about this story. People will mention that
the Joneses were black, but they will not really nobody
really addresses the fact that this child was in the

(17:29):
middle of all of this potentially very disturbing stuff. And
even when he talks about finding the body, which he
did many years later, he sort of says like, I
don't know how I did it. I don't know how
I reached down and shook her because it was clear
she was dead. And he doesn't really speak at length
about his experience with the autopsy. It's almost like he compartmentalizes.

(17:52):
Tracy and I talked about this beforehand, and it's like
there is that thing where like in country communities, kids
that grow up in the country or in rural areas
around farm are often exposed to things that city kids
would not be, some of which might seem a little
bit gruesome. I grew up on a farm. I watched
animals get slaughtered. I think my Again, it's a different

(18:13):
time period, obviously, but I think my parents would not
have been cool with me seeing a human person be
autopsied or dissected. But it's one of those things that
is not discussed, as we said, but it just seems
like it would be remiss not to call attention to
that particular angle of the whole thing, at least briefly,
and just make it something that people think about. We'll
get back to what happened after Zona's body was autopsied,

(18:37):
but first we will take a breather for a little
sponsor break. Over the course of the next three days,
doctor Napp carefully examined the body and eventually found that
Zona's neck had been snapped, and in fact, it was
broken in exactly the place that Mary Heaster had described.

(19:00):
That was the place that Zona told her it had
been broken Trout was arrested, charged with murder, and put
on trial. The Pocahontas Times reported the story of the
exhamation and the horrific findings of the autopsy. Quote on
the throat were marks of fingers, indicating that she had
been choken. That the neck was dislocated between the first
and second vertebrae, the ligaments were torn and ruptured. The

(19:24):
windpipe had been crushed at a point in front of
the neck. Trout's defense, led by William Parks Rucker and
James P. D. Gardner, actually decided that in the midst
of the trial they would call Mary Heaster to the stand.
They thought it was going to help their case. Their
strategy was to show that she was clearly a grieving mother,
out of touch with reality due to the shock and

(19:45):
sorrow of losing her daughter. But she was very steadfast
in her testimony, and that approach failed miserably. When the
defense asked her, quote, I have heard that you had
some dream or vision which led to this post mortem examination,
replied quote, they saw enough theirselves without me telling them.
It was no dream. She came back and told me

(20:06):
that he was mad that she didn't have no meat
cooked for supper. But she said she had plenty, and
said that she had butter and apple butter apples, and
named over two or three kinds of jellies, pears and
cherries and raspberry jelly, and she says, I had plenty.
She says, don't you think that he was mad and
just took down all my nice things and packed them

(20:27):
away and just ruined them. And she told me where
I could look down back of Aunt Martha Jones's in
the meadow, in a rocky place, that I could look
in a cellar behind some loose plank and sea. It
was a square log house. It was hewed up to
the square, and she said for me to go look
right at the right hand side, at the door as
you go in, and at the right hand corner as
you go in. Well, I saw the place just exactly

(20:49):
as she told me, and I saw blood right there
where she told me. And she told me something about
that meat. Every night she came just as she did.
The first night, she came four times and four nights.
But the second night she told me that her neck
was squeezed off at the first joint, and it was
just as she told me. So that is a little

(21:10):
bit different than the version of progression that we mentioned earlier,
in terms of her coming the first night and disappearing
and then coming the second night and the fourth night
being the one I included both of those, and part
of that is something we're going to talk about at
the very end of the episode, about how much this
story has become a legend and it has shifted, and
even when you're looking at historians documents and accounts of

(21:33):
people there in the midst of it, because there's a
book written about forty years after all of this took place,
and accounts of the surviving people involved were interviewed, it's
just very interesting to me to hear how even though
missus Heaster was pretty adamant about the whole thing, throughout
those facts and I have to use the air quotes
there change a little bit in the telling, even by

(21:55):
people who were first hand witnesses to the whole thing.
The questioning of missus Heaster went on to ask her
repeatedly if she really saw her daughter, eventually posing the
possibility that these visions may have been quote nothing more
or less than four dreams founded upon your distress. But
Mary Jane Heister replied confidently and repeatedly that these were
not mere dreams, but true visitations from her daughter Zona.

(22:18):
When trout Schu took the stand, he stayed there for
almost an entire day. He denied everything any witness had
said against him. He rambled on in a lot of
detail about odd particulars of his life that weren't really
directly related to the case, and told the jury that
he truly loved his wife. He asked them to look
into his eyes and then decide if he was guilty,

(22:39):
and he came off very poorly, so much so that
when the Greenbrier Independent reported on his testimony, the article
insisted that the jury had to find him guilty. Yeah,
that piece came out very quickly. They were essentially running
like real time extras to cover the case because the
jury only had a pretty short deliberation. They came back

(23:00):
that same day and they returned a guilty verdict with
a recommendation of life imprisonment. And while most of the
community agreed that he was guilty, imprisonment rather than the
death penalty was seen as a miscarriage of justice by many.
A vigilante mob formed to storm the county jail and
hang Shoe before he could be transferred to the penitentiary,

(23:20):
but the sheriff interceded and talked them out of their plan.
Edward Trout's shoe was moved by train to the Mounds
Built Penitentiary and he died there in March of nineteen hundred.
So again, this is one of those historical stories where
as I was just saying, the details get fudged or
shifted around pretty frequently. Some of that is simply because
original records of things like births and deaths from that

(23:41):
time are not always available, and also because some records
have simply been lost, and as I said, first hand
accounts shift. We talk about this on the show all
the time that, especially four decades later, people are going
to tell the story maybe a little differently than they
were telling it at the time that it was actually
going on. But the inaccuracy of reporting on this case
was actually happening from the very beginning. So here's the

(24:04):
brief writeup of the murder and the trial as reported
by the Baltimore American on July fifth, eighteen ninety seven,
under the headline mother in Law's visions as evidence quote.
Some time ago, the wife of E. S. Schue was
found dead in her home. A coroner's jury rendered a
verdict death by heart disease. Neighbors were not satisfied, and
the woman's body was exhumed that her neck was found broken.

(24:27):
She was indicted, convicted, and sentenced to the penitentiary for life.
The principal evidence was that Off She's mother in law,
who testified that her daughter's spirit had come to her
at a seance and said Shoe had killed her by
breaking her neck. All other evidence was purely circumstantial. So
while the broad strokes of that account are correct, the
mention of the neighbors initiating the investigation and the appearance

(24:50):
of Zona at a seance stand out as problematic and incorrect,
And even the framing of the case as an instance
of a ghost's account convicting a murderer isn't really accurate.
The markings and damage to Zona's neck and Shoe's odd
behavior probably went farther in the jury's decision than missus
Heaster's testimony, even though it was her insistence that catalyzed

(25:13):
the re examination of the case. This is one that
I love this story because, even though it is not pleasant,
it's a good example of where factual history and mythology
start to become a very blurry space together, because it
is one of those things that's like a classic ghost

(25:33):
story of West Virginia, and it gets told in a
lot of different ways. One thing that also comes up
all the time when you're reading it is that Shoe
died eight years later in prison, but his death is
reported as nineteen hundred, which was only three years later.
I don't know if that's just a record where a
three looked like an eight, someone ran with it and
everybody else picked it up. That kind of stuff happens
all the time. Yeah, it's why we always encourage everybody

(25:58):
to really look at any account of any event in history,
just with a sense of knowing that you know, primary
sources are your best. But even then, like we said,
interviews with people who were there at the time aren't
always accurate and they don't always reflect the exact same details. Yeah,
especially when they're conducted a lot later, as is the

(26:20):
case some of the ones in the story. So that
is the Greenbrier Ghost, who's fascinating and a good ghost
story for Halloween, but also a good example of the
scariness of how information can get cloudy and change pretty
rapidly in the historical record, so hopefully that was an

(26:41):
enjoyable ride. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
If you'd like to send us a note, our email
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