irregularincidents:

The 1897 Greenbrier Ghost case is on record as the first, if
only, court case in the United States where the testimony of a ghost is used as
evidence. This was due to the mother of murder victim Zona Heaster Shue claimed
that her daughter’s ghost came to her four times saying that she had been
murdered by her husband, Edward Stribbling Trout Shue.

Now, Edward was a drifter who had been married multiple
times before, with each ending due to marital abuse (and in one case, the
unexplained death of his wife). But Zona and the people of Greenbrier, West
Virginia didn’t know this when she married him, otherwise they would have been
more suspicious when she ended up dead at the bottom of the stairs.

Edward stuck by Zona’s body until she was buried to prevent
a proper medical examination, something which Zona’s mother, Mary Jane Heaster,
found to be… troubling. She then claimed that, after praying, she had been
visited by her daughter’s ghost over the course of four nights, claiming that
she had been murdered by Edward.

Now, Mary never liked Edward, and reportedly said “The devil
has killed her“ upon hearing the news. She went to the local prosecutor, John
Alfred Preston, and gave her story to him, although it’s unknown whether the
ghost story convinced him or the holes in the official explanation of Zona’s
death (officially given as “childbirth”).

Nevertheless, John had Edward arrested to prevent him from
escaping, and after interviewing the people of interest (including the local
doctor, who admitted she hadn’t actually examined her body), he had Zona
exhumed. It was then during an actual autopsy that they found she in fact had
both a broken neck and evidence of strangulation.

Faced with the new physical evidence and the testimony of
Edward’s surviving ex-wives, the prosecution decided to not bring up Mary’s
ghost story lest it make her seem… well… crazy. Instead of a woman who
rightly suspected that her son-in-law was violently abusive and who possibly had
to fabricate a story to get someone to listen to her accusations.

The defence, however, decided to bring up her ghost story as
a means of discrediting Mary… only for her to say it completely
straight-faced way which the jury found to be actually very convincing. And
since it was the defence that brought it up, Mary’s recounting of the ghost’s
testimony was officially entered as evidence.

Consequently, Shue was found guilty of murder on July 11 and
sentenced to life in prison. A lynch mob was formed to hang Edward for the
death of his wife and unborn child, but it was disbanded with only a few
arrests. He would later die in prison in 1900 of an unknown disease. Mary never
recanted her story.

The overall structure of the Greenbrier Ghost story is
curious for a number of reasons, not least due to it having a number of
similarities with the Murder in the Red Barn case in England in 1827. There the
stepdaughter of a murdered young woman,
Maria Marten, supposedly came to her stepmother in a dream as a
ghost to say that, rather than having moved away to marry her lover,
William Corder, she had in
fact been murdered and buried in the local red barn.

Based on this story, Maria’s dad, a mole trapper, went to the barn
and sure enough found his daughter’s corpse buried inside, having been shot to
death. This led to her lover being arrested, and the revelation that he had
been forging letters from her to try and hide the fact that she had been
murdered. William was tracked down to London, where had established a new life for himself, and in 1828 was hanged after a highly publicised trial.

Both Maria and Zona were unmarried mothers who entered relationships with “wayward“ men, only to be murdered, and subsequently their female relations used the idea of their step/daughter coming to them after death to accuse their killers. Both murderers were convicted based on physical evidence despite the claims of supernatural intervention.

There is a… suggested difference though. Reportedly, Maria’s mother had possibly been blackmailling Corder about Maria’s disappearance, and that her sudden “ghost dream” was her making good on her threat to expose him once the cashflow stopped. Mary’s story, meanwhile, may have been her way to get the authorities interested in the crime despite her and Zona having the social stigma of being unmarried mothers at the time.

Side Note: James Lea, a London-based police officer who assisted in the arrest of Cordor woud later go on to lead the Spring-Heeled Jack case some years later. Both Spring-Heeled Jack and the Murder in the Red Barn became popular subjects for proto-horror novels known as Penny Dreadful (hence the name of the show). The Red Barn itself was stripped and dismantled for souvenirs, such was public demand to be included in the story in some manner.

Corder was dissected after his execution, and his skeleton was put on display in the Hunterian Museum until 2004, when they were removed and cremated.