Greenbrier Ghost

But the legend of Zona has never, and will never, die.

Today, she is more commonly known as the Greenbrier Ghost.

As you head down US Route 60 eastbound, you'll find a historical highway marker that reads,

Greenbrier

Edward, found guilty of murder, was sentenced to the state prison.

Only known case in which the testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer.

There is no doubt that the Greenbrier ghost is one of the most extraordinary cases in American history.

But at the end of the day, to me, Zona Hester Shue's story isn't just a local legend, but rather the tale of a strong and determined woman who advocated for herself from beyond the grave.

What was it you wanted to talk to her about?

It was probably the Greenbrier Ghost Mystery.

Yeah, yeah, that was it.

Now

Oh, our next one.

is from episode 57 that I did on the Greenbrier Ghost.

I loved this one.

Enjoy.

Now that we've gotten to sounding with uranium, I think it's time to talk about our next ghost.

The Greenbrier ghost is said to be the ghost of Elva Zona Hester Shue, a young woman of Greenbrier County, West Virginia, who was murdered in 1897.

In October of 1896, Elva met a blacksmith named Edward Stribling Trout Shoe, and the two married soon after.

Not long after that, on January 23rd, 1897, Elva was found dead in her home, with the coroner's jury rendering a verdict of death by heart disease.

And so, you know, I did look around in old Virginia for other stories.

I saw, for example, the Greenbrier Ghost.

Mm-hmm.

That case is really similar to the Red Barn murder.

Or, like, a little snippet of a song, um, like a Carter family song would make me start to think about something, and then I was like, God, I should write about, like, Appalachia.

So then that came to be, and I was reading Ruthann Music's, uh, Telltale Lilac Bush, and I was like, oh, I wanna write about West Virginia, and there's that really famous story about the Greenbrier Ghost, and I was like, let's talk about, like, wives of West Virginia.

It's like these little random inspirations, I would just sort of pluck them from the sky, and then if they were enough to flesh out a chapter, they would become a chapter.

If not, they might become, like, a sort of, uh, th- folded into an introduction, and then, like, ultimately it was like, do they fit with the scope of the book? Do they fit within one of the tropes that we've outlined? Where do they belong? Um, you know, it was kinda stuff like that, and, uh, I had a long time kind of interest in the, uh, Lizzie Borden story.

That's right.

So the Greenbrier Ghost is actually a story.

And I'm going to, you'll understand here in a minute.

So what this story is about is about this lady named Elva Zona Heaster Shoe.

It's about a young woman's death being accepted too quickly, a husband who believed there was no witness against him, and a mother who refused to let the grave close over the questions.

Before she became the Greenbrier Ghost, she was simply Zona.

The surviving record preserves only fragments of Elva Zona Heaster's life.

She grew up in Greenbrier County in the southeastern mountains of West Virginia and was still a young woman when a newcomer arrived in 1896.

When counsel tested her religious beliefs, she turned the question back on him.

When asked to withdraw the claim, she said she would not lie.

This is where the simplified version of the Greenbrier Ghost becomes misleading.

Zona did not appear in court.