Greenbrier County Courthouse

The building itself predates its famous case: this is the county's third courthouse, begun in 1837 and in continuous government use since 1840, with wings added in 1937 and 1963. What the record preserves from 1897 is a prosecutor doing his job. John Alfred Preston listened to Mary Heaster for hours, then quietly re-interviewed witnesses — including Dr. Knapp, who admitted that Shue had asked him "to make no further examination of the body," had dressed the corpse himself, and had wound a high collar and a large veil around a neck witnesses noticed was loose enough to drop from side to side.

Zona was exhumed on February 22, 1897, and examined for three hours in a one-room schoolhouse by Drs. Knapp, Rupert and Houston McClung, with Shue summoned to attend. The autopsy, published March 9, found the neck broken and the windpipe mashed, finger marks on the throat, the dislocation between the first and second vertebrae — exactly where the ghost had put it.

The trial opened June 22, 1897. Preston kept his star witness to the physical facts; it was Shue's own lawyer who cross-examined Mary Heaster on the apparitions, apparently hoping to break her. She did not break. The Greenbrier Independent — still publishing today as the West Virginia Daily News — reported that the jury took one hour to return first-degree murder with a recommendation of mercy, adding with some dryness that "though the evidence was entirely circumstantial, the verdict meets general approval."

Shue was sentenced to life on July 11 and sent to the state penitentiary at Moundsville, where he died about eight years later. Zona lies under a stone reading "In memory of Zona Heaster Shue, Greenbrier Ghost, 1876-1897"; the log house where she was found still stands a few miles off Interstate 64.

To be precise about the file's scope: nobody claims the courthouse is haunted. Its dossier exists because its trial records carry, verbatim, the words a dead woman allegedly spoke through her mother — the closest American jurisprudence has come to admitting spectral testimony. The case has since fed books, a Comedy Central segment, and a highway marker near the Sam Black Church exit that treats the whole thing as settled fact, which, in West Virginia memory, it is.