WEBVTT
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Imagine you're wrong about the dead.
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All of us assume the grave is the end of a voice, but suppose it's only a change in how far that voice has to travel.
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It's a comforting thought at a funeral, and a terrifying one everywhere else.
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Because if the dead can speak, then no secret stays buried and no lie is ever finished.
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Somewhere in West Virginia, there's a man in an unmarked grave who learned that the hard way.
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Because the one witness he was certain he'd silenced turned out to be the only one that mattered.
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I'm Misha Harper, and this is Decoffinated.
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It's June of 1897, and the courthouse in Lewisburg, West Virginia is packed.
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People have traveled in from every corner of Greenbrier County for this trial, and the ones who couldn't fit inside are gathered out front waiting for word to be passed back.
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But why?
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Well, because a man is being tried for the murder of his wife.
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But a murder trial alone doesn't draw a crowd like this one.
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And these people came for the story attached to it that's been traveling from porch to porch for months, which says the case against this man came from the dead woman herself.
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And right now, his defense attorney is questioning a witness, a farm woman in her late 40s, plainly dressed and sitting very still.
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She's the dead woman's mother.
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The lawyer brings up that story.
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He asks her about a dream she supposedly had, and he's asking because he is certain, without a shadow of a doubt, that once she starts describing it out loud, the jury will see exactly what he sees, which is a poor woman who lost her daughter and then lost her grip on reality.
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She looks back at him and calmly states, it was no dream.
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So the stranger who rolled into Greenbrier County in the fall of 1896 is a blacksmith who drew attention immediately.
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He was described as big, handsome, super charming, and strong.
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He went by the name Edward to some and Trout to most, even though neither of those was the actual name he was born with.
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Nobody in the county knew a thing about where he'd come from or what he'd left behind.
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One of the local girls who noticed him is Elva Zona Heaster, who everyone called Zona.
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There was very little record kept of her, a single photograph, and a birthdate nobody wrote down, but the one thing the town definitely kept tabs on was the gossip.
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Because just a year before, Zona had a baby at a wedlock, and in a tiny, deeply religious county back in the 1890s, that was the kind of social stigma that basically followed a girl everywhere she went.
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Nonetheless, Zona ended up falling for the new blacksmith hard.
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Everything moved so fast that within weeks of meeting, the two of them were already engaged.
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Now, while all that's fine and dandy, there was one person who was completely against this relationship from day one, and that was Zona's mother, Mary Jane Heaster, the woman we just left sitting in that crowded courtroom.
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She could not stand Trout Shoe.
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And honestly, the wedding itself probably proved her right.
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The whole thing was a total mess.
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It was incredibly rushed, held late at night, and none of Zona's family was present.
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It actually freaked out the Methodist minister so badly that he stopped the ceremony halfway through and refused to finish it.
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But do you think do you think that stopped Trout?
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He didn't care.
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Because the very next morning, he just went out and found someone else who was willing to marry them anyway.
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But with all that work, the marriage only ended up lasting about two or three months.
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So flash forward to early January of 1897, Zona gets sick with this random illness that nobody can really identify.
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Because of that, the local doctor, a man named George W.
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Knapp, who also happened to be the county coroner, began calling the house regularly to check on her.
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Now keep that detail in your back pocket because it means that when everything finally goes down, there's already a convenient medical excuse just sitting there ready to go.
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Then came the morning of January 23rd.
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Rout went to the home of a neighbor known as Aunt Martha Jones and asked whether her son Anderson, who was about 11 years old, could go over to the shoe house and do some chores for Zona.
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Anderson had done work for them before, so the request itself wasn't unusual.
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Now, what was unusual is that Anderson had other errands to finish first, and over the course of that morning and into the early afternoon, Trout came back to the Jones home four separate times to repeat the same request.
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Four times.
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Now, whatever was going on inside that house, Trout Shu was very invested in making sure that a child and not himself would be the next person through his front door.
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Now, this is where the story kind of splits because there are two totally different versions of what Anderson actually found inside.
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The popular version you always hear is that Zona was lying at the bottom of the stairs, perfectly laid out like someone staged her there.
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But Anderson's actual eyewitness account, and remember he was the only person there, tells a completely different story.
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They don't match at all.
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And honestly, no one has ever been able to make sense of the two versions, so here's what the kid actually said happened.
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Anderson gets to the house a little after 1 p.m.
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Decades later, as a grown man though, he said he felt this immediate wave of dread before he even walked up, and he actually noticed blood near the porch.
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So he knocks, there's no answer.
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But the door is unlocked.
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So he steps inside, and there's a trail of blood leading him through the kitchen right to the closed dining room door.
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He knocks again.
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He hears absolute silence.
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So he pushes the door open and almost trips right over Zona.
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She's lying flat on her back on the floor, her eyes wide open, just staring at the ceiling.
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Now he goes to reach down and shake her, and he realizes how freezing cold she is and completely panics.
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So he runs.
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He sprints past his mom's house, yelling that Mrs.
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Shu is dead, and runs straight to the Blackmith shop to tell Trout.
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Trout tears off towards the house and Anderson goes to track down Dr.
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Knapp.
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Now, by the time Anderson and Dr.
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Knapp arrive at the house, Trout had already lifted his wife off the floor, laid her out on the bed, and dressed her himself in a high, stiff-collared dress with a scarf wound tight around her neck.
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Now back then, preparing a body for burial was strictly a job for the woman in the county.
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Always.
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And a husband doing it alone was strange enough to be remembered and repeated.
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When Knapp tried to examine the body, Trout sat on the bed cradling Zona's head against his chest and would not release it.
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He was sobbing, inconsolable, and rather than pry a dead woman's head out of her grieving husband's arms, the doctor cut his examination short.
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He recorded the cause of death as heart failure, and in 19th century medicine, it's called an everlasting faint.
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Now, since he's been treating her for weeks, anyways, it seemed to fit, and nobody in any official capacity asked a single further question.
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Zona died on a Friday, on Saturday, her body was carried to her mother's home for the wake, and there, Trout did the exact same thing he did at her deathbed.
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He guarded her head.
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He stayed seated at the head of the coffin the entire time, kept mourners from getting close, and propped her head up carefully in place.
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Some of the people finally passed notice and whispered about the way the head moved when the body was handled, with this looseness that heads don't have when the neck beneath them is intact.
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But whispers at a funeral aren't a legal proceeding, and the certificate said heart failure.
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On Monday, January 25th, Zona Heaster Shu was buried, and as far as the law was concerned, the case is officially closed.
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Her mother never believed a word of it.
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Mary Jane Heaster is said to have declared the moment she heard her daughter was dead that the devil had killed her, and everyone knew who she meant.
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A young woman does not simply faint out of existence, illness or not, and the explanation on that certificate struck her as an insult.
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There's even this weird little rumor she told for the rest of her life about a sheet from inside the coffin.
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Apparently, when she tried to wash it, the water turned bright red, and no matter how hard she scrubbed, the stain wouldn't budge.
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Now look, make of that what you will, but for Mary Jane, that was a definitive sign from above.
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And then just a few days after the funeral, we get to the part of this story that made it legendary.
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Over four nights, Mary Jane said her daughter came to her.
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On the first night, she woke up to a presence in the dark made out of Zona's shape, reached for her, and the figure vanished.
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She prayed to see her again, and on the second night, Zona returned and spoke.
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And then she came back a third night and a fourth.
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And during these visits, she laid out every single detail of what actually went down in that house.
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The story the ghost told was almost unbearably domestic.
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She said trout had just completely flown into a rage at dinner time because there wasn't any meat on the table.
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Zona tried to tell him that there was plenty of other food ready, like the butter, apples, the preserves, but he wasn't having it, he was just furious.
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He started smashing her nice things and then he snapped, attacked her, and broke her neck.
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Now the surrounding details do shift depending on the source.
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Whether she saw Zona or felt her, what order things happened in, exactly which words were exchanged, even Mary Jane's own tellings vary between the 1897 record and later years.
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But the core of the message never changed.
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The rage over supper, the broken neck, and the ghost's strangely precise anatomy that her neck had been squeezed off at the first joint.
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Mary Jane did not keep the visitations to herself.
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She told friends, neighbors, anyone who would listen, and the initial response was polite disbelief, a general sense that grief had carried a poor woman somewhere dark.
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A grieving mother on her own was easy to wave off.
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But she kept at it and minds started to change.
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And the real turning point came when she won over Zona's uncle, a man named Johnson Heaster.
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The two of them paid Trout a visit, careful not to show their hand, just to talk about the day Zona died, and they leave that meeting 100% convinced he did it.
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They talked to Anderson.
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They talked to others who had been at the house, and all around the county, people who had watched Trout at the funeral started re-examining what they'd seen.
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Because the devoted husband who couldn't bear to release his wife's head was starting to look like a man who could not afford to let a doctor near her neck.
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Eventually, Mary Jane and Johnson sat down with John A.
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Preston, the prosecuting attorney in Lewisburg, who had already been hearing the rumors, and whatever Preston privately made of the ghostly visitations, he did the one thing that mattered.
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He went down and talked to Dr.
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Knapp.
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And Dr.
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Knapp, to his credit, or perhaps out of guilt, admitted it plainly.
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His examination had been incomplete.
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He had read Trout as a man in shock rather than a man hiding something, and he could no longer stand behind his own ruling.
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On that admission, they officially decide to exhibit Zona's body.
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Trout was informed the next morning and he was made to attend, and his reaction became part of the record of this case.
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Over and over from that morning onward, he insisted they would not find anything.
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Not let her rest, not how could anyone think this?
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But just they won't find anything.
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Nobody had accused him of anything yet, and his mind went straight to what could and couldn't be proven.
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They carry the coffin into a nearby schoolhouse, and the autopsy takes several days.
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Trout is forced to stand there the whole time, and Landerson is right there too.
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Just think about that.
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The same 11-year-old kid who found her dead on the floor now has to stand there and watch her autopsy.
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When he talked about the case decades later as an old man, he barely even mentioned this part.
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He carried that trauma his entire life.
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What the doctors found ended the mystery of how Zona died.
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Her windpipe was crushed, her throat is covered in finger marks, and her neck was dislocated at the joint between the first and second vertebrae, with the ligaments torn through.
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Broken, in other words, at the first joint.
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The exact place a ghost had named in a farmhouse bedroom weeks before anyone dug up the body.
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Trout Shoe was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife.
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And only then, with him sitting in the Lewisburg jail, did Greenbrier County finally ask that question that should have been asked the day he arrived.
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Who actually was this man?
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So the answer to that question was actually way worse than anyone could have guessed.
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It turns out Zona wasn't his first wife.
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She was actually his third.
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He had been born Erasmus Stribling Trout Shoe, and back in the 1880s, he'd married his first wife, a woman named Allie Estilin Cutlip, in a marriage that went badly enough that the entire community knew about it.
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Story spread that he whipped her, and they were believed so completely that one freezing winter night, a group of local teenagers and their school teacher went out to the shoe cabin, grabbed him at the door, hauled him to the water, and plunged him in, making sure he knew exactly why.
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When Trout tried to press charges the next morning, the neighbors lined up to testify for the boys, and the court quietly let every warrant die.
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Allie eventually got out and she divorced him while he sat in prison.
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Because on top of everything else, he'd been convicted of stealing a horse.
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His second marriage came in 1894 to a girl named Lucy Ann Trent.
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And this is a detail that is just very uncomfortable.
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Lucy was 16 years old.
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She lived just long enough to see 17.
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Eight months into the marriage, Lucy was dead.
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And the only account of how come came from Trout himself, which he even couldn't keep his own story straight.
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In one version, she fell and struck her head on a rock.
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In another, he was doing repairs and dropped a brick on her.
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Either way, the sole source was her husband.
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There were doubts and whispers in the community, but that was it.
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Nobody investigated, no charges were ever filed.
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The local paper called it a sudden death, and a teenage girl went into the ground on her husband's word.
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After that, Trout moved on to Greenbrier County, where none of this had ever been heard.
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In 1896, there was no way to verify a man's past.
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No share records happened between counties like that.
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So the whipping, the prison term, the 16-year-old bride dead within a year, all of it stayed behind where it happened, and Trout walked into a new county as a stranger with a clean slate.
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Which brings us right back at last to the pack courtroom in Lewisburg.
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The trial opened in June of 1897, almost nine months to the exact day since Trout first rolled into town.
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Preston handles the prosecution and he builds this incredibly solid airtight case.
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He focuses on the autopsy, the fact that Trout went to the neighbor's house four times that morning, the way he illegally dressed the body himself, and that horrific past that finally caught up to him.
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The ghost was nowhere in this case because he didn't need her, and he also knew that an apparition was legitimately like legal quicksand.
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It was the defense that brought the ghost in.
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Trout's lawyers William Parks Rucker and James P.
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D.
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Gardner decided to take a massive gamble right in the middle of the trial.
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They put Mary Jean Heaster on the stand and asked her about the dream that had supposedly made her demand the autopsy.
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The entire courtroom goes dead silent because everyone knew exactly what the lawyers were trying to do.
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The defense was about to dismantle the ghost story in public and make the whole case look like it was built on a broken woman's grief.
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But Mary Jane does not back down.
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She looks right at them and says, it was no dream.
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And instead of crumbling, she got more specific.
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She recounted the quarrel over supper and named the food she had put up, the butter, the apples, the jellies.
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She described the nice things he'd ruined in his rage.
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She described a spot near the Jones' property, behind loose planks, where the ghost had told her to look and said she'd gone and found the place exactly as described.
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And no matter how many times the defense rephrases the question, no matter how many opportunities they give her to just admit she was tired or grieving or imagining things, she refuses to budge.
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Her daughter's neck had been squeezed off at the first joint.
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She'd been told so before anyone dug up the body, and the autopsy had proved her right.
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The defense bet everything that the jury would see a woman who had completely lost her mind.
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Instead, the jury saw a woman who was solid as a rock, whose supposedly impossible story had already been verified by real doctors on an autopsy table.
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Then Trout took the stand and he made everything worse.
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He stayed up there most of the day, denied everything, of course, wandered into rambling tangents about his own life, and at one point told the jurors to look at him straight in the eye and decide whether such a man could be guilty.
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It went so badly that the local paper covering the trial nearly in real time all but printed that the jury would have to convict.
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And they did.
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The same day.
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Murder in the first degree with a recommendation of life in prison.
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But for some of the locals, that wasn't enough, and a mob was formed to storm the jail and hang him before he could be moved.
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Eventually, Trout is shipped off by train to the state penitentiary at Moundsville, and he ends up dying there just three years into his sentence.
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He was buried in a prison grave that no member of his family ever bothered to come and claim.
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On Route 60, the state of West Virginia put up this historical marker that tells the story in about 50 words, and it ends with the line that made it famous.
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The only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer.
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It's a great line.
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And it overstates things because the ghost story isn't what convicted Trout Shoe.
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The prosecution actually never touched it.
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It's the defense that dragged it into court and impaled themselves on it.
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What convicted him was a broken neck, a crushed windpipe, his sketchy past, and his own bizarre behavior.
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The ghost didn't convict him at all.
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The ghost is just the only reason anyone bothered to look.
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Zona Heaster Shu was a young woman history barely wrote down, right up until the day she died.
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And even then, most of what got recorded was legend.
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Her killer lies in an unmarked, unclaimed grave.
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But Zona?
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She has a tombstone naming her the Green Briar Ghost, a historic marker right on the highway, and a mother who sat in a packed courtroom and refused to change a single word of her story for the rest of her life.
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That's the story of the Greenbriar Ghost.
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This has been decoffinated.
00:23:15.039 --> 00:23:19.440
Pour another cup because there are so many more stories where this came from.
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Imagine you're wrong about the dead.
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All of us assume the grave is the end of a voice, but suppose it's only a change in how far that voice has to travel.
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It's a comforting thought at a funeral, and a terrifying one everywhere else.
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Because if the dead can speak, then no secret stays buried and no lie is ever finished.
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Somewhere in West Virginia, there's a man in an unmarked grave who learned that the hard way.
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Because the one witness he was certain he'd silenced turned out to be the only one that mattered.
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I'm Misha Harper, and this is Decoffinated.
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It's June of 1897, and the courthouse in Lewisburg, West Virginia is packed.
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People have traveled in from every corner of Greenbrier County for this trial, and the ones who couldn't fit inside are gathered out front waiting for word to be passed back.
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But why?
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Well, because a man is being tried for the murder of his wife.
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But a murder trial alone doesn't draw a crowd like this one.
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And these people came for the story attached to it that's been traveling from porch to porch for months, which says the case against this man came from the dead woman herself.
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And right now, his defense attorney is questioning a witness, a farm woman in her late 40s, plainly dressed and sitting very still.
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She's the dead woman's mother.
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The lawyer brings up that story.
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He asks her about a dream she supposedly had, and he's asking because he is certain, without a shadow of a doubt, that once she starts describing it out loud, the jury will see exactly what he sees, which is a poor woman who lost her daughter and then lost her grip on reality.
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She looks back at him and calmly states, it was no dream.
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So the stranger who rolled into Greenbrier County in the fall of 1896 is a blacksmith who drew attention immediately.
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He was described as big, handsome, super charming, and strong.
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He went by the name Edward to some and Trout to most, even though neither of those was the actual name he was born with.
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Nobody in the county knew a thing about where he'd come from or what he'd left behind.
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One of the local girls who noticed him is Elva Zona Heaster, who everyone called Zona.
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There was very little record kept of her, a single photograph, and a birthdate nobody wrote down, but the one thing the town definitely kept tabs on was the gossip.
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Because just a year before, Zona had a baby at a wedlock, and in a tiny, deeply religious county back in the 1890s, that was the kind of social stigma that basically followed a girl everywhere she went.
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Nonetheless, Zona ended up falling for the new blacksmith hard.
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Everything moved so fast that within weeks of meeting, the two of them were already engaged.
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Now, while all that's fine and dandy, there was one person who was completely against this relationship from day one, and that was Zona's mother, Mary Jane Heaster, the woman we just left sitting in that crowded courtroom.
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She could not stand Trout Shoe.
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And honestly, the wedding itself probably proved her right.
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The whole thing was a total mess.
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It was incredibly rushed, held late at night, and none of Zona's family was present.
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It actually freaked out the Methodist minister so badly that he stopped the ceremony halfway through and refused to finish it.
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But do you think do you think that stopped Trout?
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He didn't care.
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Because the very next morning, he just went out and found someone else who was willing to marry them anyway.
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But with all that work, the marriage only ended up lasting about two or three months.
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So flash forward to early January of 1897, Zona gets sick with this random illness that nobody can really identify.
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Because of that, the local doctor, a man named George W.
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Knapp, who also happened to be the county coroner, began calling the house regularly to check on her.
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Now keep that detail in your back pocket because it means that when everything finally goes down, there's already a convenient medical excuse just sitting there ready to go.
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Then came the morning of January 23rd.
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Rout went to the home of a neighbor known as Aunt Martha Jones and asked whether her son Anderson, who was about 11 years old, could go over to the shoe house and do some chores for Zona.
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Anderson had done work for them before, so the request itself wasn't unusual.
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Now, what was unusual is that Anderson had other errands to finish first, and over the course of that morning and into the early afternoon, Trout came back to the Jones home four separate times to repeat the same request.
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Four times.
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Now, whatever was going on inside that house, Trout Shu was very invested in making sure that a child and not himself would be the next person through his front door.
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Now, this is where the story kind of splits because there are two totally different versions of what Anderson actually found inside.
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The popular version you always hear is that Zona was lying at the bottom of the stairs, perfectly laid out like someone staged her there.
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But Anderson's actual eyewitness account, and remember he was the only person there, tells a completely different story.
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They don't match at all.
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And honestly, no one has ever been able to make sense of the two versions, so here's what the kid actually said happened.
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Anderson gets to the house a little after 1 p.m.
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Decades later, as a grown man though, he said he felt this immediate wave of dread before he even walked up, and he actually noticed blood near the porch.
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So he knocks, there's no answer.
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But the door is unlocked.
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So he steps inside, and there's a trail of blood leading him through the kitchen right to the closed dining room door.
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He knocks again.
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He hears absolute silence.
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So he pushes the door open and almost trips right over Zona.
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She's lying flat on her back on the floor, her eyes wide open, just staring at the ceiling.
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Now he goes to reach down and shake her, and he realizes how freezing cold she is and completely panics.
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So he runs.
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He sprints past his mom's house, yelling that Mrs.
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Shu is dead, and runs straight to the Blackmith shop to tell Trout.
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Trout tears off towards the house and Anderson goes to track down Dr.
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Knapp.
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Now, by the time Anderson and Dr.
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Knapp arrive at the house, Trout had already lifted his wife off the floor, laid her out on the bed, and dressed her himself in a high, stiff-collared dress with a scarf wound tight around her neck.
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Now back then, preparing a body for burial was strictly a job for the woman in the county.
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Always.
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And a husband doing it alone was strange enough to be remembered and repeated.
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When Knapp tried to examine the body, Trout sat on the bed cradling Zona's head against his chest and would not release it.
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He was sobbing, inconsolable, and rather than pry a dead woman's head out of her grieving husband's arms, the doctor cut his examination short.
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He recorded the cause of death as heart failure, and in 19th century medicine, it's called an everlasting faint.
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Now, since he's been treating her for weeks, anyways, it seemed to fit, and nobody in any official capacity asked a single further question.
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Zona died on a Friday, on Saturday, her body was carried to her mother's home for the wake, and there, Trout did the exact same thing he did at her deathbed.
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He guarded her head.
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He stayed seated at the head of the coffin the entire time, kept mourners from getting close, and propped her head up carefully in place.
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Some of the people finally passed notice and whispered about the way the head moved when the body was handled, with this looseness that heads don't have when the neck beneath them is intact.
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But whispers at a funeral aren't a legal proceeding, and the certificate said heart failure.
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On Monday, January 25th, Zona Heaster Shu was buried, and as far as the law was concerned, the case is officially closed.
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Her mother never believed a word of it.
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Mary Jane Heaster is said to have declared the moment she heard her daughter was dead that the devil had killed her, and everyone knew who she meant.
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A young woman does not simply faint out of existence, illness or not, and the explanation on that certificate struck her as an insult.
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There's even this weird little rumor she told for the rest of her life about a sheet from inside the coffin.
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Apparently, when she tried to wash it, the water turned bright red, and no matter how hard she scrubbed, the stain wouldn't budge.
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Now look, make of that what you will, but for Mary Jane, that was a definitive sign from above.
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And then just a few days after the funeral, we get to the part of this story that made it legendary.
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Over four nights, Mary Jane said her daughter came to her.
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On the first night, she woke up to a presence in the dark made out of Zona's shape, reached for her, and the figure vanished.
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She prayed to see her again, and on the second night, Zona returned and spoke.
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And then she came back a third night and a fourth.
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And during these visits, she laid out every single detail of what actually went down in that house.
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The story the ghost told was almost unbearably domestic.
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She said trout had just completely flown into a rage at dinner time because there wasn't any meat on the table.
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Zona tried to tell him that there was plenty of other food ready, like the butter, apples, the preserves, but he wasn't having it, he was just furious.
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He started smashing her nice things and then he snapped, attacked her, and broke her neck.
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Now the surrounding details do shift depending on the source.
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Whether she saw Zona or felt her, what order things happened in, exactly which words were exchanged, even Mary Jane's own tellings vary between the 1897 record and later years.
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But the core of the message never changed.
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The rage over supper, the broken neck, and the ghost's strangely precise anatomy that her neck had been squeezed off at the first joint.
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Mary Jane did not keep the visitations to herself.
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She told friends, neighbors, anyone who would listen, and the initial response was polite disbelief, a general sense that grief had carried a poor woman somewhere dark.
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A grieving mother on her own was easy to wave off.
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But she kept at it and minds started to change.
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And the real turning point came when she won over Zona's uncle, a man named Johnson Heaster.
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The two of them paid Trout a visit, careful not to show their hand, just to talk about the day Zona died, and they leave that meeting 100% convinced he did it.
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They talked to Anderson.
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They talked to others who had been at the house, and all around the county, people who had watched Trout at the funeral started re-examining what they'd seen.
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Because the devoted husband who couldn't bear to release his wife's head was starting to look like a man who could not afford to let a doctor near her neck.
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Eventually, Mary Jane and Johnson sat down with John A.
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Preston, the prosecuting attorney in Lewisburg, who had already been hearing the rumors, and whatever Preston privately made of the ghostly visitations, he did the one thing that mattered.
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He went down and talked to Dr.
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Knapp.
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And Dr.
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Knapp, to his credit, or perhaps out of guilt, admitted it plainly.
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His examination had been incomplete.
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He had read Trout as a man in shock rather than a man hiding something, and he could no longer stand behind his own ruling.
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On that admission, they officially decide to exhibit Zona's body.
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Trout was informed the next morning and he was made to attend, and his reaction became part of the record of this case.
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Over and over from that morning onward, he insisted they would not find anything.
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Not let her rest, not how could anyone think this?
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But just they won't find anything.
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Nobody had accused him of anything yet, and his mind went straight to what could and couldn't be proven.
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They carry the coffin into a nearby schoolhouse, and the autopsy takes several days.
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Trout is forced to stand there the whole time, and Landerson is right there too.
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Just think about that.
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The same 11-year-old kid who found her dead on the floor now has to stand there and watch her autopsy.
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When he talked about the case decades later as an old man, he barely even mentioned this part.
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He carried that trauma his entire life.
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What the doctors found ended the mystery of how Zona died.
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Her windpipe was crushed, her throat is covered in finger marks, and her neck was dislocated at the joint between the first and second vertebrae, with the ligaments torn through.
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Broken, in other words, at the first joint.
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The exact place a ghost had named in a farmhouse bedroom weeks before anyone dug up the body.
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Trout Shoe was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife.
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And only then, with him sitting in the Lewisburg jail, did Greenbrier County finally ask that question that should have been asked the day he arrived.
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Who actually was this man?
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So the answer to that question was actually way worse than anyone could have guessed.
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It turns out Zona wasn't his first wife.
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She was actually his third.
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He had been born Erasmus Stribling Trout Shoe, and back in the 1880s, he'd married his first wife, a woman named Allie Estilin Cutlip, in a marriage that went badly enough that the entire community knew about it.
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Story spread that he whipped her, and they were believed so completely that one freezing winter night, a group of local teenagers and their school teacher went out to the shoe cabin, grabbed him at the door, hauled him to the water, and plunged him in, making sure he knew exactly why.
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When Trout tried to press charges the next morning, the neighbors lined up to testify for the boys, and the court quietly let every warrant die.
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Allie eventually got out and she divorced him while he sat in prison.
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Because on top of everything else, he'd been convicted of stealing a horse.
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His second marriage came in 1894 to a girl named Lucy Ann Trent.
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And this is a detail that is just very uncomfortable.
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Lucy was 16 years old.
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She lived just long enough to see 17.
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Eight months into the marriage, Lucy was dead.
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And the only account of how come came from Trout himself, which he even couldn't keep his own story straight.
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In one version, she fell and struck her head on a rock.
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In another, he was doing repairs and dropped a brick on her.
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Either way, the sole source was her husband.
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There were doubts and whispers in the community, but that was it.
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Nobody investigated, no charges were ever filed.
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The local paper called it a sudden death, and a teenage girl went into the ground on her husband's word.
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After that, Trout moved on to Greenbrier County, where none of this had ever been heard.
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In 1896, there was no way to verify a man's past.
00:17:56.960 --> 00:18:00.640
No share records happened between counties like that.
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So the whipping, the prison term, the 16-year-old bride dead within a year, all of it stayed behind where it happened, and Trout walked into a new county as a stranger with a clean slate.
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Which brings us right back at last to the pack courtroom in Lewisburg.
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The trial opened in June of 1897, almost nine months to the exact day since Trout first rolled into town.
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Preston handles the prosecution and he builds this incredibly solid airtight case.
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He focuses on the autopsy, the fact that Trout went to the neighbor's house four times that morning, the way he illegally dressed the body himself, and that horrific past that finally caught up to him.
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The ghost was nowhere in this case because he didn't need her, and he also knew that an apparition was legitimately like legal quicksand.
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It was the defense that brought the ghost in.
00:18:59.519 --> 00:19:03.279
Trout's lawyers William Parks Rucker and James P.
00:19:03.440 --> 00:19:03.519
D.
00:19:03.680 --> 00:19:09.039
Gardner decided to take a massive gamble right in the middle of the trial.
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They put Mary Jean Heaster on the stand and asked her about the dream that had supposedly made her demand the autopsy.
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The entire courtroom goes dead silent because everyone knew exactly what the lawyers were trying to do.
00:19:25.039 --> 00:19:33.599
The defense was about to dismantle the ghost story in public and make the whole case look like it was built on a broken woman's grief.
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But Mary Jane does not back down.
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She looks right at them and says, it was no dream.
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And instead of crumbling, she got more specific.
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She recounted the quarrel over supper and named the food she had put up, the butter, the apples, the jellies.
00:19:52.640 --> 00:19:55.920
She described the nice things he'd ruined in his rage.
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She described a spot near the Jones' property, behind loose planks, where the ghost had told her to look and said she'd gone and found the place exactly as described.
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And no matter how many times the defense rephrases the question, no matter how many opportunities they give her to just admit she was tired or grieving or imagining things, she refuses to budge.
00:20:21.519 --> 00:20:25.440
Her daughter's neck had been squeezed off at the first joint.
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She'd been told so before anyone dug up the body, and the autopsy had proved her right.
00:20:31.920 --> 00:20:38.000
The defense bet everything that the jury would see a woman who had completely lost her mind.
00:20:38.400 --> 00:20:50.640
Instead, the jury saw a woman who was solid as a rock, whose supposedly impossible story had already been verified by real doctors on an autopsy table.
00:20:50.799 --> 00:20:54.960
Then Trout took the stand and he made everything worse.
00:20:55.279 --> 00:21:10.640
He stayed up there most of the day, denied everything, of course, wandered into rambling tangents about his own life, and at one point told the jurors to look at him straight in the eye and decide whether such a man could be guilty.
00:21:10.880 --> 00:21:19.839
It went so badly that the local paper covering the trial nearly in real time all but printed that the jury would have to convict.
00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:20.880
And they did.
00:21:21.200 --> 00:21:22.400
The same day.
00:21:22.720 --> 00:21:27.200
Murder in the first degree with a recommendation of life in prison.
00:21:27.440 --> 00:21:34.960
But for some of the locals, that wasn't enough, and a mob was formed to storm the jail and hang him before he could be moved.
00:21:35.200 --> 00:21:44.559
Eventually, Trout is shipped off by train to the state penitentiary at Moundsville, and he ends up dying there just three years into his sentence.
00:21:44.720 --> 00:21:50.000
He was buried in a prison grave that no member of his family ever bothered to come and claim.
00:21:50.160 --> 00:22:01.440
On Route 60, the state of West Virginia put up this historical marker that tells the story in about 50 words, and it ends with the line that made it famous.
00:22:01.759 --> 00:22:08.319
The only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer.
00:22:08.559 --> 00:22:09.839
It's a great line.
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And it overstates things because the ghost story isn't what convicted Trout Shoe.
00:22:16.559 --> 00:22:18.799
The prosecution actually never touched it.
00:22:18.960 --> 00:22:23.440
It's the defense that dragged it into court and impaled themselves on it.
00:22:23.680 --> 00:22:32.079
What convicted him was a broken neck, a crushed windpipe, his sketchy past, and his own bizarre behavior.
00:22:32.319 --> 00:22:34.400
The ghost didn't convict him at all.
00:22:34.640 --> 00:22:38.799
The ghost is just the only reason anyone bothered to look.
00:22:39.039 --> 00:22:45.440
Zona Heaster Shu was a young woman history barely wrote down, right up until the day she died.
00:22:45.680 --> 00:22:48.880
And even then, most of what got recorded was legend.
00:22:49.119 --> 00:22:52.559
Her killer lies in an unmarked, unclaimed grave.
00:22:52.720 --> 00:22:53.359
But Zona?
00:22:53.759 --> 00:23:09.200
She has a tombstone naming her the Green Briar Ghost, a historic marker right on the highway, and a mother who sat in a packed courtroom and refused to change a single word of her story for the rest of her life.
00:23:09.440 --> 00:23:12.720
That's the story of the Greenbriar Ghost.
00:23:13.119 --> 00:23:14.799
This has been decoffinated.
00:23:15.039 --> 00:23:19.440
Pour another cup because there are so many more stories where this came from.
