On this day, 112 years ago, Zona Heaster was found dead in West Virginia, leading to the case of the Greenbrier Ghost and perhaps the only murder conviction in American judiciary history based on the alleged testimony of a ghost.
A doctor had declared Zona died from complications due to her pregnancy. But Heaster’s mother immediately suspected that her son-in-law, Erasmus Shue, was behind her death, saying, “The devil has killed her.”
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Four weeks after the funeral, Mrs. Heaster told prosecutors that Zona’s image appeared to her over four nights to say that Shue was a cruel man who had attacked her and broken her neck. To prove this, the ghost turned her head completely around.
Prosecutors had Zona’s body exhumed, and the examiner found that her neck had indeed been broken and her windpipe had been smashed. At the trial, the defense attorney challenged Heaster’s story about the visits but the mother did not budge. Shue was found guilty and died in prison from an unknown illness in 1900.
