SYMHC Classics: Greenbrier Ghost

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. It is our last Saturday before Halloween, so we have picked a ghost story for today's Saturday Classic, at least kind of a ghost story. It's the Greenbriar Ghost And this episode came out on October twenty eighth, twenty nineteen. Happy Early Halloween, everybody. Yeah, welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And now we're in the think of Halloween happenings, which means it is time for a ghost story. Who doesn't love a ghost story? Although this one is problematic in a variety of ways. You may recall an episode that Sarah and Deblina did in twenty twelve about London's Cockleen ghost who accused a living person of murder. That is also going to come up as a classic in the not too distant future. So if you didn't listen to it in twenty twelve and don't feel like looking for it, you're going to get it automatically in your feed very soon. And this one is in a similar vein, but it is a West Virginia story of a ghost who gave details about her murder, and we are about to go on tour, as we've said, so we were considering this as possibly one of the topics that we would cover in one leg of our upcoming tour. But as I started doing the research on it, it pretty quickly became apparent that this is a little too unsettling for our no bummer's rule for live shows. And there is are some aspects to this story that just would not be fun, bantery things to talk about in a live show. That means this is also your warning that this story features multiple instances of spousal abuse, specifically a man abusing his wives. So if that is something that you would rather not hear about, that is understandable, and this one might be best to skip over. We are talking today about the Greenbrier Ghost. It's spousal abuse up to and potentially including murder. So yeah, it's not to be a spoiler, but there's a lot going on. There's a plaque, which is a state historical marker that stands near a West Virginia cemetery and tells an incredible tale. Here's what it says. Quote Greenbrier Ghost interred in nearby cemetery is Zona Heuster Shoe. Her death in eighteen ninety seven was presumed natural until her spirit appeared to her mother to describe how she was killed by her husband. Trout autopsy on the exhumed body verified the apparition's account. Trout found guilty of murder was sentenced to the state prison. Only known case in which testimony from ghost helped convict a murderer. So first we are going to talk about mister Shoe. His full name was Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shoe, and he had a problematic past long before he met Zona. When he changed his name from Erasmus to Edward is unknown, although it could have been connected to one of the times he had some legal trouble, but he went by Trout to most people. Shoe had a history of abuse, Like we alluded to earlier, in the winter of eighteen eighty six to eighty seven, there were stories of incidents in which he had whipped his first wife. Her name was ali Estelene Cutlip McMillan, and those stories had spread and become so common that a number of teenagers and their teacher decided to go do something about it. According to an account by one of the boys involved, GS McKeever, the group went to the Shoe cabin on Rock Camp Run, which was an offshoot of Spring Creek, late one night and they knocked on the door. Obviously, we should say this account was given many many years after all of this took place, so just keep that in mind. But when Shoe answered, several of the youths jumped him and they took him to a watering hole and they dunked him in the icy water. The temperature that night was below freezing, and they told him they were doing it because he was known to beat his wife. And the next morning Shoe pressed charges against the three boys who were his primary attackers. So there was a minor bit of addressing the charges and bringing the first of the defendants to court, but there were plenty of people willing to serve as witnesses for all the young people involved. All three warrants were abandoned by the court. Shoe's wife, Ali moved back to her family home and later divorced him, and she did that while he was incarcerated for horse theft. Yeah, basically, when the first of the young men, who they were teenagers, so boys involved went before the court. There were like three people ready to go No, he wasn't. He wasn't where they're saying he is. And they realized like there was never going to be anything to come of it. So that's why they dismissed all of those others. I think probably also the judge knew what was up and was like, I'm not going to punish these kids for trying to do something right. Shoe got married again in eighteen ninety four, this time to Lucy and Tritt, and Lucy was only sixteen when she and Trout married. She did live to see seventeen. Eight months into the marriage, she fell and died when she hit her head on a rock. At least that was Trout's story. There was some doubt in the community about whether that was true, but Trout was never charged with any wrongdoing in her death, and her death was written up in the paper as just a sudden death. And then, in the autumn of eighteen ninety six, Shoe met Elva Zona Heaster, who went by Zona. Before long, they were married. Trout Shoe had only recently started working in Greenbrier County, and he drew a lot of attention. He was handsome, and cocky, and Zona really fell for him, and their wedding itself was a peculiarity. When the Methodist minister R. R. Little arrived at the Shoe Home for the ceremony, the bride and the guests were there, but Troutshoe was not. He had gone to get the marriage license. Is what the minister was told, And according to an account that was given by Reverend Little again much later after the fact, they all sat there and waited a very long time for Trout to return. He left them waiting from early afternoon until approximately midnight. Then when Trout finally did get there, there was a problem with the marriage license itself. It had been issued in Greenbrier County, but the Shoe Home was located in Pocahontas County. Little refused to perform the ceremony in any other county than the one where the license had been issued. I don't know how West Virginia law works, but that is how the law works someplaces. Shoe convienced everybody in attendance to walk a mile down the road so that they would be in Greenbrier County, and then the ceremony started there on the road. So here is what happened next. According to Reverend Little's account, quote, when I came to the part of the ceremony where it says, if anyone has objections, speak now or forever hold your peace. I waited, and after some time I said I object I told him for the reason that the girl he wished to marry was a mere child. None of her people are present. It is now one o'clock in the morning, and we are all here on a country road. A marriage ceremony is a sacred rite and should at least be performed under ordinary circumstances. I cannot help but think there is something not right in this case, and I will go no further. So there will be no wedding, so far as I am concerned. The minister said that he later learned that Zona was very young, just fifteen years old. You'll recall that Trout's previous wife, Lucy, had only been sixteen. It was probably not accurate, though she was probably closer to twenty. Her exact birth date is unknown, and different accounts of how old she was are really all over the map. Yeah, there are a lot of question marks surrounding Zona and her personality and who she was. There are some stories that will tell you that she had actually had a child out of wedlock the year before, which would have been very scandalous at the time. The year before she met she, others will paint a completely different picture of her. And because there are so little records, it's really hard to know what is just country community gossip that has spread versus what is truth, which is part of why this story is tricky to begin with. But we know that Troutshoe had gotten this young woman away from her family and had rushed this wedding. And even though Reverend Little refused to perform the ceremony the next morning, Trout just took Zona to another town in Greenbrier County and they got married there. Trout and Zona were together only a couple of months. It's between two and three months before she died. In early January of eighteen ninety seven, Zona became ill with something that's not totally clear. The local doctor, doctor George W. Knapp, called on the Shoes to check on Zona regularly and to monitor her health. On January twenty second, Trout paid a visit to the home of a woman known as Aunt Martha Jones. Martha had a son named Anderson, who was eleven at the time, and Troutshoe asked if Anderson could go to the show Shoe home and take care of some chores for Zona. Anderson had done this kind of work for them before, and he was told that Anderson had some other errands that he needed to do first, but that he would eventually make his way there, and over the course of the morning in the very early afternoon, Trout stopped at the Jones home four different times to repeat that request. Anderson Jones did eventually make it to Trout and Zona's home, and we'll get to the particulars of what he found there after we paused for a quick sponsor break. According to an account given by Anderson Jones decades later, when he was a grown man, he finally got to the Shoe home a little after one pm, and he felt that there was something off about the house as he approached it, and as he got to the porch, he said that he saw blood. He knocked on the door, but he got no answer, and then he tried the door, which was unlocked, and he entered the house. He followed the trail of blood through the kitchen to the door to the dining room, and as with the exterior door, that dining room door was closed, and he knocked and got no answer, and then he opened the door himself. When he did this, Anderson Jones stumbled over the body of Zona, lying face up on the floor with her eyes open. He shook her and found that she was cold to the touch. Immediately realized she was dead. He ran from the house and yelled to his mother as he made his way home that missus Shee was dead, and then he went onto the blacksmith's shop where Trout she worked to tell him this terrible news about his wife. According to Anderson Jones, Shoe ran home and he Anderson went to fetch doctor Nap, and by the time they got to the Shoe home that meaning Anderson and the doctor, Trout had moved his wife from the floor to the bed and dressed her in a dress with a high collar and a scarf and was sitting on the bed cradling her body. Trout allegedly held her head close to his chest and wasn't willing to let go of it even as the doctor tried to examine the body. Napp determined that Zona had experienced heart failure and said that her death was a quote everlasting faint. Zona had died on a Friday, and on Saturday, her body was taken to her mother's home, which was on a nearby mountain, where there was a period of visitation before the burial on Monday, January twenty fifth. During the visitation, Trout was similarly unwilling to step away from Zona or her coffin, choosing to stay seated at the head of it rather than stand to greet visitors. And anytime there was someone there, Trout was there at the coffin and allegedly did not allow anyone to approach it. So now we need to take a moment to talk about Zona's mother. Her name was missus Mary Jane Heaster, and she was not a fan of Trout. That cause of death recorded as everlasting faint did not sit well with her. To Mary Heaster, that didn't sound like a valid reason for her young, previously pretty healthy daughter to have died. And beginning a few days after Zona was buried, missus Heaster had what is sometimes characterized as four dreams, also sometimes described as some other event in which her daughter appeared to her. These became very significant events. Missus Heaster describes them as her daughter being real and corporeal and able to be touched, and that first night, missus Heaster felt that she had awakened when she heard a noise in her room, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she made out the shape of her daughter's Zona. But when Mary reached out on that first night, her daughter disappeared. On the second night, after Mary prayed repeatedly that she wanted to see Zona again, she said that the deceased daughter appeared to her again, and this time the apparition spoke to her, wanting her mother to understand what had really happened. Zona made a third appearance on the following night, and then a fourth night after that, and it was during that final night that Zona really told her mother all of the details of her death. The most significant part of Mary Heaster's account of Zona's dream communications with her involved details of the murder, specifically how Trout had broken her neck. Missus Heaster did not keep these communications from Zona to herself. She told people all about it. Their initial reaction to Mary telling friends and neighbors about these dreams and subsequent suspicion of her son in law's involvement in Zona's death was pretty polite disbelief. The general opinion seemed to be that grief was leading missus Heaster to come to wild conclusions and to just cling to some sort of explanation for her daughter's untimely death, one that would offer her a chance at some kind of retribution. But Mary Heaster was adamant that her daughter was actively communicating with her, so much that she started to convince people that that was what was happening. A few people at a time, and once Mary convinced her brother in law, Johnson Heaster, things really started to change. So first the pair actually went to visit Shoe. They were trying not to tip their hand, but they wanted to talk about what had happened when Zona died, and they came away from that visit believing with certainty that he had killed his young wife. They also spoke to Anderson Jones and several other people in the community who had been at the house the Dayzona's body was discovered. With Johnson's involvement and not nearly that of a distraught mother who people were happy to kind of write off, the Heasters were able to move their suspicions into action. First, they met with John A. Preston, who was the Lewisbourg prosecutor who had already heard plenty of rumors going on about Zona's mother trying to have Trout convicted for murder. As news had spread, various people offered up examples of what they perceived after the fact to have been strange behavior on Trout's part, and the fact that he had been unwilling to let doctor now examine Zona's head started to seem less like a deeply aggrieved husband who could not bear to let go of his lost beloved and maybe more like somebody who was trying to cover something up. After meeting with Mary and Johnson, Heaster Preston took things to the next step. He went to speak with doctor Knapp, and doctor Knapp admitted that he might have been wrong in ruling Zona's death a heart failure. He mentioned that in the moment, and not thinking with any sort of suspicious thoughts, he had seen Trout as a man in shock, and he didn't want to press the matter to examine Zona's body more thoroughly. Preston and Napp came to the conclusion that the only way to truly learn the facts. The case was to autopsy Zona's body, and the two of them gathered Anderson Jones and aunt Martha Jones and Trout's Shoe. The next morning, they informed Shoe that they intended to exume Zona, and then the entire party made their way to the gravesite. Trout was insistent that they would find nothing. He said that over and over throughout the remainder of this story. When they reached the grave, several men who lived nearby were ordered by the prosecutor to assist and dig up the coffin, and once it had been removed from the ground, it was taken to a nearby schoolhouse for examination, and Shoe and Anderson Jones both witnessed the autopsy. So we should have a quick sidebar here about Anderson Jones, because he was eleven and watching an autopsy. It also seems like he was used as kind of a pawn to discover Zona's body. And this is because of an element of racism that was here. Trout Shoe was white and Anderson was black. And back in twenty fourteen, the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology featured a study from UCLA that stated quote. Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as in a sense of the need for protection. Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent. That is, of course, not a new thing, even though that research was conducted five years ago. And I think it's fair to assume that Anderson was probably not treated with the care and concern for his well being that a white child probably would have received. That is something that does not come up very often when you hear about this story. People will mention that the Joneses were black, but they will not really nobody really addresses the fact that this child was in the middle of all of this potentially very disturbing stuff. And even when he talks about finding the body, which he did many years later, he sort of says like, I don't know how I did it. I don't know how I reached down and shook her because it was clear she was dead. And he doesn't really speak at length about his experience with the autopsy. It's almost like he compartmentalizes. Tracy and I talked about this beforehand, and it's like there is that thing where like in country communities, kids that grow up in the country or in rural areas around farm are often exposed to things that city kids would not be, some of which might seem a little bit gruesome. I grew up on a farm. I watched animals get slaughtered. I think my Again, it's a different time period, obviously, but I think my parents would not have been cool with me seeing a human person be autopsied or dissected. But it's one of those things that is not discussed, as we said, but it just seems like it would be remiss not to call attention to that particular angle of the whole thing, at least briefly, and just make it something that people think about. We'll get back to what happened after Zona's body was autopsied, but first we will take a breather for a little sponsor break. Over the course of the next three days, doctor Napp carefully examined the body and eventually found that Zona's neck had been snapped, and in fact, it was broken in exactly the place that Mary Heaster had described. That was the place that Zona told her it had been broken Trout was arrested, charged with murder, and put on trial. The Pocahontas Times reported the story of the exhamation and the horrific findings of the autopsy. Quote on the throat were marks of fingers, indicating that she had been choken. That the neck was dislocated between the first and second vertebrae, the ligaments were torn and ruptured. The windpipe had been crushed at a point in front of the neck. Trout's defense, led by William Parks Rucker and James P. D. Gardner, actually decided that in the midst of the trial they would call Mary Heaster to the stand. They thought it was going to help their case. Their strategy was to show that she was clearly a grieving mother, out of touch with reality due to the shock and sorrow of losing her daughter. But she was very steadfast in her testimony, and that approach failed miserably. When the defense asked her, quote, I have heard that you had some dream or vision which led to this post mortem examination, replied quote, they saw enough theirselves without me telling them. It was no dream. She came back and told me that he was mad that she didn't have no meat cooked for supper. But she said she had plenty, and said that she had butter and apple butter apples, and named over two or three kinds of jellies, pears and cherries and raspberry jelly, and she says, I had plenty. She says, don't you think that he was mad and just took down all my nice things and packed them away and just ruined them. And she told me where I could look down back of Aunt Martha Jones's in the meadow, in a rocky place, that I could look in a cellar behind some loose plank and sea. It was a square log house. It was hewed up to the square, and she said for me to go look right at the right hand side, at the door as you go in, and at the right hand corner as you go in. Well, I saw the place just exactly as she told me, and I saw blood right there where she told me. And she told me something about that meat. Every night she came just as she did. The first night, she came four times and four nights. But the second night she told me that her neck was squeezed off at the first joint, and it was just as she told me. So that is a little bit different than the version of progression that we mentioned earlier, in terms of her coming the first night and disappearing and then coming the second night and the fourth night being the one I included both of those, and part of that is something we're going to talk about at the very end of the episode, about how much this story has become a legend and it has shifted, and even when you're looking at historians documents and accounts of people there in the midst of it, because there's a book written about forty years after all of this took place, and accounts of the surviving people involved were interviewed, it's just very interesting to me to hear how even though missus Heaster was pretty adamant about the whole thing, throughout those facts and I have to use the air quotes there change a little bit in the telling, even by people who were first hand witnesses to the whole thing. The questioning of missus Heaster went on to ask her repeatedly if she really saw her daughter, eventually posing the possibility that these visions may have been quote nothing more or less than four dreams founded upon your distress. But Mary Jane Heister replied confidently and repeatedly that these were not mere dreams, but true visitations from her daughter Zona. When trout Schu took the stand, he stayed there for almost an entire day. He denied everything any witness had said against him. He rambled on in a lot of detail about odd particulars of his life that weren't really directly related to the case, and told the jury that he truly loved his wife. He asked them to look into his eyes and then decide if he was guilty, and he came off very poorly, so much so that when the Greenbrier Independent reported on his testimony, the article insisted that the jury had to find him guilty. Yeah, that piece came out very quickly. They were essentially running like real time extras to cover the case because the jury only had a pretty short deliberation. They came back that same day and they returned a guilty verdict with a recommendation of life imprisonment. And while most of the community agreed that he was guilty, imprisonment rather than the death penalty was seen as a miscarriage of justice by many. A vigilante mob formed to storm the county jail and hang Shoe before he could be transferred to the penitentiary, but the sheriff interceded and talked them out of their plan. Edward Trout's shoe was moved by train to the Mounds Built Penitentiary and he died there in March of nineteen hundred. So again, this is one of those historical stories where as I was just saying, the details get fudged or shifted around pretty frequently. Some of that is simply because original records of things like births and deaths from that time are not always available, and also because some records have simply been lost, and as I said, first hand accounts shift. We talk about this on the show all the time that, especially four decades later, people are going to tell the story maybe a little differently than they were telling it at the time that it was actually going on. But the inaccuracy of reporting on this case was actually happening from the very beginning. So here's the brief writeup of the murder and the trial as reported by the Baltimore American on July fifth, eighteen ninety seven, under the headline mother in Law's visions as evidence quote. Some time ago, the wife of E. S. Schue was found dead in her home. A coroner's jury rendered a verdict death by heart disease. Neighbors were not satisfied, and the woman's body was exhumed that her neck was found broken. She was indicted, convicted, and sentenced to the penitentiary for life. The principal evidence was that Off She's mother in law, who testified that her daughter's spirit had come to her at a seance and said Shoe had killed her by breaking her neck. All other evidence was purely circumstantial. So while the broad strokes of that account are correct, the mention of the neighbors initiating the investigation and the appearance of Zona at a seance stand out as problematic and incorrect, And even the framing of the case as an instance of a ghost's account convicting a murderer isn't really accurate. The markings and damage to Zona's neck and Shoe's odd behavior probably went farther in the jury's decision than missus Heaster's testimony, even though it was her insistence that catalyzed the re examination of the case. This is one that I love this story because, even though it is not pleasant, it's a good example of where factual history and mythology start to become a very blurry space together, because it is one of those things that's like a classic ghost story of West Virginia, and it gets told in a lot of different ways. One thing that also comes up all the time when you're reading it is that Shoe died eight years later in prison, but his death is reported as nineteen hundred, which was only three years later. I don't know if that's just a record where a three looked like an eight, someone ran with it and everybody else picked it up. That kind of stuff happens all the time. Yeah, it's why we always encourage everybody to really look at any account of any event in history, just with a sense of knowing that you know, primary sources are your best. But even then, like we said, interviews with people who were there at the time aren't always accurate and they don't always reflect the exact same details. Yeah, especially when they're conducted a lot later, as is the case some of the ones in the story. So that is the Greenbrier Ghost, who's fascinating and a good ghost story for Halloween, but also a good example of the scariness of how information can get cloudy and change pretty rapidly in the historical record, so hopefully that was an enjoyable ride. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, app podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M