On January 23, 1897 a woman died in Greenbrier County West Virginia who subsequently passed into American legal history as the "only known case in which [the] testimony from [a] ghost helped convict a murderer" as the marker to her grave would later proclaim.

The Greenbrier Ghost, as she became popularly called, once lived as Elva Zona Heaster, a popular young girl in this West Virginia county. She had a child out of wedlock in 1895 and the next year met Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue, a good-looking wandering young blacksmith newly arrived in the area. After a quick courtship they were married, though Zona’s mother Mary Jane Heaster proclaimed an almost instantaneous dislike of Shue.

Only three months later, on January 23, 1897, an eleven year old boy who was accustomed to doing chores for Zona, found her dead at the bottom of a staircase leading to the second floor of her home. Before the local doctor and coroner George Knapp arrived more than an hour later, Shue had washed and prepared the body for burial. Though noting a few bruises on her neck, nothing unusual was suspected by Knapp who recorded the cause of her death as an “everlasting faint” and in later records as death from “childbirth”.

At the funeral, Shue acted out the part of an overwhelmingly sad husband, going so far as to tie a large scarf around the corpse’s neck claiming it had been Zona’s favorite. Mary Jane Heaster, who tried to wash a sheet which had lain in the coffin, found a peculiar stain and odd odour emanating from the sheet which turned red and did not go away even when she washed it.

On the strength of this and helped by local opinion that all was not right with Zona’s death, Mary Jane Heaster convinced the local prosecutor John Alfred Preston to reopen the investigation. An exhumation was ordered and an autopsy conducted lasting three hours – the resulting report indicated Zona’s neck had been broken and the windpipe smashed, along with fingers indicating choke marks around her throat.

Shue claimed at the inquest that he was guilty but that nothing could be proved. He was arrested and subsequent checks into his background revealed he had been married twice before – divorcing his first wife while his second one had died mysteriously shortly after their marriage. Arrogantly Shue proclaimed his ambition of marrying seven wives and that he would have to be released because of lack of evidence against him.

Mary Jane Heaster was a star witness in the prosecution trial and despite intensive cross-examination by the defence with the intention of discrediting her story of ghostly sightings, never waivered in her evidence and stuck to her original testimony.

Shue was convicted and spent the remainder of his life in prison till he died three years later of an unknown illness. May Jane Heaster died in 1916 without ever retracting her story of her daughter’s visitation.

Modern scientists think that the red stain on the sheet may have been caused by a chemical reaction of iron-based substances used in the blacksmith trade with the commonly used soap of the time, proving that Shue had extensively handled the sheet in the coffin.

Zona’s ghost was never seen again.