Old-timers will tell you it was an ill wind that blew Edward Shue into the Richlands area of Greenbrier County back in the autumn of 1896. But at the time, the tight-knit, clannish community of Livesay's Mill was quick to accept the handsome blacksmith from Droop Mountain. Shue was a strong, charismatic man, with dark hair that fell over blue eyes, and a rich, resonant voice that drew people to him. Although an outsider, Shue soon swept a local girl off her feet in a whirlwind romance. Edward Shue and Zona Heaster were married within weeks of meeting, and set up home in a two-story frame house about a quarter mile from the blacksmith shop.
But the fairytale romance of the glamorous blacksmith and the pretty, popular local girl was short-lived. On January 23, 1897, only three months into their marriage, Edward sent a neighbor boy, Andy Jones, up to the house to do some chores for his wife. Receiving no response to his knock, Jones opened the door to the couple's home and discovered Zona lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. She looked almost peaceful with one arm draped over her body and the other at her side, but Zona's eyes were wide, staring sightlessly at the frightened boy, and he knew immediately that she was dead.
When the local doctor and coroner, Dr. George Knapp, arrived an hour later, he found Zona's wildly distraught husband had carried her upstairs and laid her on her bed. Although it was local custom for the ladies of the community to wash and dress a body in preparation for burial, Edward had done it himself, dressing Zona in a high-necked, stiff-collared dress with a veil covering her face.
Edward was inconsolable, remaining at his wife's side, cradling her head and sobbing even as the doctor attempted to examine the body. Noticing slight discolorations on Zona's right cheek, Dr. Knapp attempted to unfasten the collar to examine her neck, but her grief-stricken husband remonstrated so violently that the doctor felt it was best to cut his examination short and leave the poor, distraught Edward to grieve. Dr. Knapp announced the cause of death as "an everlasting faint."
The next day, Zona's body was taken by carriage in an unfinished coffin to her childhood home on Little Sewell Mountain. For the next 24 hours, neighbors delivered food and comfort to Zona's brokenhearted husband and her bereaved parents, Jacob and Mary Jane Heaster. All who came were moved by the desperate grief of Zona's husband, who kept vigil at the head of his young bride's coffin throughout the entire wake. Nothing could persuade him to leave her side.
Although the mourners were greatly touched by the blacksmith's devotion, some had noticed that despite the rolled-up sheet that Edward had lovingly placed around his dead wife's neck, there was a strange looseness to the corpse's head when the coffin was moved for burial.
After the wake, Zona's grieving mother removed the sheet from the coffin and took it home with her. The sheet appeared clean and white, but Mary Jane noticed it had a strange odor and decided to wash it out. When she dropped it into the tub with her other white clothes, the sheet turned bright red. Mary Jane rewashed the sheet, boiled it, hung it outside and let it freeze for several days, and still the stain remained. Concluding that the "bloodstains" were a sign from her daughter, Mary Jane began to pray that Zona would appear to her and reveal the truth about how she died—and on a cold, dark night in February 1897, her prayers were answered.
According to Mary Jane, a bright light filled her bedchamber that night, and as the air in the room became icy, her daughter appeared before her. Zona returned nightly over the course of four days, and during her final visit, she told her mother how she had died. Edward attacked her, she said, when he came home from work and found she had not cooked him any meat for supper, breaking her neck with his bare hands. Presenting terrifying evidence of her violent end, Zona spun her head around until she faced completely backward.
Mary Jane was horrified. Taking her unusual tale to the local prosecutor, John Preston, Mary Jane managed to sway the skeptical man. Preston accompanied the sheriff to speak with Dr. Knapp, who admitted that his examination of Zona's body had been cursory due to her husband's extreme distress. The men agreed that only an autopsy would put the lingering doubts to rest.
On a bone-chilling February morning, to the horror of the God-fearing citizens of Greenbrier County, Zona's body was pulled from the frozen ground and carried to the schoolhouse behind Soule Chapel. Three doctors attended the posthumous examination, while Edward sat watching from a bale of hay in the corner of the schoolhouse. At last, the doctors discovered that Zona's neck had indeed been broken—the ligaments torn and ruptured, her neck dislocated between the first and second vertebrae and her windpipe smashed. Zona's fate had been exactly as her ghost described it.
Edward was placed under arrest and locked up in the little stone jail in Lewisburg to await trial. Over the next four months, numerous stories began to circulate throughout the community, some simply rumor and hysteria, some that turned out to be true. Edward's real name was Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue, and Zona had actually been his third wife. His first marriage, in 1885, had produced a child and ended in divorce four years later while Shue was serving time in prison for horse stealing. His second marriage, in 1894, ended after only eight months when his bride suddenly died under mysterious circumstances.
On June 22, 1897, throngs of Lewisburg's citizenry moved from the blazing, early-summer heat to the cool of the courthouse, eager to witness a trial based on the testimony of a ghost. When Mary Jane finally took the stand, the courtroom was breathless with anticipation. Under oath, Zona's mother swore that her daughter had appeared from the grave on four consecutive nights to reveal how her husband had taken her life. Even in the face of intense questioning from the defense counsel, Mrs. Heaster never wavered from her story
The evidence against Shue was purely circumstantial, but most people in Greenbrier Country believed that Mary Jane had truly seen a ghost. On July 1, 1897, the jury took only one hour and 10 minutes to find Edward Shue guilty of murder in the first degree. Two jurors refused to sanction a hanging, so Shue was given a life sentence, which he served at the West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville. He died from an unspecified illness on March 13, 1900.
Mary Jane Heaster lived until 1916 and never recanted her story.
Historical photographs were used with permission from the Quarrier Press book, "The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives: The Greenbrier Ghost and the Famous Murder Mystery of 1897."
Note: These archival articles are presented exactly as they appeared at the time of the issue in which they appeared. As such, all quotes, as well as references to temporal facts, artifacts and other items are contemporaneous to the date of original publication.