Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - The Greenbrier Ghost: A Haunting Tale of Murder and the Supernatural

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

Can a ghost point to the person who murdered them? In 1897, Zona Heaster Shue's mother thought Zona's ghost visited her in the night with vital information, an event that infamously became the only time a ghost's testimony was used in court. Known as the Greenbrier ghost, did Mrs. Shue really see her daughters ghost, or was there something else at play?   Subscribe on Patreon for more long form content, including exclusive episodes, and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by Kaelyn Moore.  Music from Artlist Shownotes: https://www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/greenbrierghost

It was a chilly October night when John Farley stumbled home from the pub. That night, he had many reasons to drink. The cold, the fact that in the 1820s beer was sometimes cleaner than water, but also, he had lost touch with his dear friend, Fred. Not at a spite or disagreement, but Fred had actually disappeared without a trace a few months prior. He hadn't left a note, he hadn't said goodbye, and he hadn't taken anything from his

house with him. There was something odd about the way Fred left town, but that night, as John is tripping down the cobblestone roads, just as he passes his old friend Fred's property, he catches something out of the corner of his eye. At first, he ignores it, but something in his brain registers it as familiar. He looks up, then away, and then double takes back. Fred? Is that you? Standing across the street on the corner of his old friend's property is Fred, the friend that vanished. John can't believe it, but his excitement sours when he realizes Fred isn't saying anything. Actually, his expression doesn't change at all.

He's looking directly at John with cold, expressionless eyes and a gaping mouth. Upon approaching Fred, John gets the sense that it's not actually him. No, this isn't even human. John starts wondering if what he's seeing is a ghost. But before he can even process it, this apparition slowly raises a bony, pale hand, and points past John towards the creek in the distance. John follows his friend's gaze in that direction, but when he turns back around, Fred's gone. The next day, in a panic, John races down turns back around, Fred's gone.

The next day, in a panic, John races down to the creek to search for signs. He wants to see if there's a reason his friends' ghost came to him in the middle of the night. Maybe he was drunk, maybe it was late and he was seeing things, but a feeling in the pit of his stomach tells him otherwise. And that feeling was confirmed when John got to a bend in the creek. There laying over the rocks was the partially decomposed body of his friend Fred. But this didn't look like an accident. From the scene, John couldn't tell who was responsible, but he could tell that his friend had been murdered.

It's that feeling when the energy and the room shifts, when the air gets sucked out of a moment, and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's saying, it's when your heart starts pounding. Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of terrifying tales. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. If you're new here, you're in good company.

This is a community for people who follow their dark curiosity wherever it leads them. We release new episodes every Thursday. I want to start by sharing some pretty big news. Heart Starts pounding one best true crime podcast, host of the year, and podcast of the year at the Parapod Awards. It was such a huge honor and I really could not have done it without all of you. I love making this podcast and I have some really fun and dark episodes planned for Heart Starts pounding this year, so follow along wherever you can. And if you want to dive deeper into our community, I have a Patreon of bonus content, archived episodes, and commentary on published

episodes with Leo, similar to how the podcast was structured in the first few episodes. All of this is linked in the description. The most frustrating element of unsolved homicides is that the key witness isn't there to just tell you what happened. I mean, that's obvious, but sometimes I think about how some cases go unsolved when the person who was killed might have looked their killer in the eye, even how to conversation or a personal relationship with them. But that knowledge is lost with their lives. But what about when that person can give us

information? There have been a few times in history where it's been reported that someone's ghost has come back to tell their loved ones something important about their murder. Like the story I shared at the beginning of this episode, Fred's ghosts led to not only the discovery of his body, but to the arrest of his neighbor for his murder. And while Fred's story has been well documented, it's not as famous as the one I'm going to share with you, and for this one, listener discretion is advised. To start this story, I'm going to share one of my own.

When I was 19 years old, I came back to my small New England town from freshman year of college feeling like an adult. My friend, who was a few years older than me, bought me a handle of grape flavored vodka to take to a party that one of my friends was having that night. Yeah, my taste was impeccable, I know. I know some of our listeners are not in the United States, but here you cannot buy or drink alcohol under 21, so not only was my intention to drink this fine beverage illegal, but even possession of it would get me grounded

until my wedding. So I had to hide it. The objective was simple. Make sure no one in my busy household saw the vodka until I left for the party that night. But there was not a lot of personal space in my house growing up. I remember standing in my room, looking at every possible hiding spot. I hit it in the drawer under some clothes.

No, that wouldn't work. I hit it under my bed behind my guitar case. But nothing felt right. Finally, I took the handle and put it in a backpack. Then I put that in the very back of my closet and I put a sweatshirt on top of it. Okay, perfect, that should be fine. Not even 30 seconds later,

my mom comes into my room and starts talking to me. And as she's talking, she starts messing with my room like she would sometimes do. Sometimes she would put stuff away, sometimes she'd reorganize, we're both anxious women and we have to be moving all the time so I get it. But one by one, I watch her go to each of my initial hiding places. She opens the drawer, she moves some clothes, then she moves my guitar case, she grabs a blanket from under the bed,

and I'm thinking to myself, oh wow I'm a genius, I knew exactly where she would look, but at the same time, how is she gravitating exactly to where I would hide something? So I think I'm in the clear, when finally, mid-sentence, she opens my closet. I'm sure the jig is about to be up so I have to get her out of there. But I watch her reach over, grab my sweatshirt, and start for the backpack. And just as she's about to grab it, I shout that it's getting late and I really have to get ready for my friends. And she just kind of turns and looks at me.

And she gives me this look. Like she knew I was up to something. Like she knew all along that I was hiding something in my room. But she turned around and she walked out. And I was safe to take my candy flavored vodka to my front house. I tell you all of this to say, there's something about a mother's intuition. Sometimes they just know. This story that I'm going to share with you is a tragedy. It's about a young woman whose life was cut short under mysterious circumstances. It's about a sighting of her ghost that led to the conviction of her murderer, but it's also about the intuition of a mother.

Let's dive in. In January of 1897, Andy Jones was rummaging around a chicken coop looking for eggs in the Appalachian County of Greenbrier, West Virginia. He had been instructed to gather whatever eggs he could find, take them to his neighbor Zona Hester Shoe, and then ask if she wanted him to grab her anything from the store. It was freezing in West Virginia this time of year, but Andy was just a child. And a black one at that. The shoes were a white married couple.

If they asked him to hunt for eggs in the freezing cold, it was expected that he would. Andy approaches Zona's house and he knocks on her door. No answer. He knocks again. Still nothing. So Andy peers in through the window to see if he can see anything. And there, at the foot of the stairs, he sees Zona lying lifeless on the ground. In total shock, Andy runs and tells his mom that Zona needs help, something happened.

So together, they run and get Zona's husband, Trout Shoe. Trout, Andy and Andy's mom all run back to the house where Trout sees his wife split out on the floor. Get the doctor, he shouts. The last thing Andy sees as he runs to grab the one doctor in town, Dr. Napp, is Mr. Shoe kneeling down by his wife, trying to gather her into his arms. Just a bit later, Andy comes back to the house with Dr. Napp.

He's debriefed him on the situation. Zona is lying by the stairs, and it didn't look like she was breathing. So Dr. Napp prepares himself for what he might find, but when they open the door, Zona's not there. Andy can kind of hear a soft sobbing noise coming from upstairs, so he and Dr. Napp shake off the peculiar scene and make their way up towards Zona and Trout's bedroom. When they open the door, they see Mr. Shoe in bed holding Zona's lifeless body. He had moved her from the bottom of the stairs up into his bedroom, and beyond that, he had changed her clothes.

Andy saw that she was now in a formal neck-high gown and wrapped multiple times around her neck was a large bow. So now Andy, Dr. Napp and his mother are trying to make sense of what's happening, but Trout is hysterical. are trying to make sense of what's happening, but Trout is hysterical. He's sobbing so hard he's dry heaving, and sapphire crocodile tears are streaming down his cheeks. Whenever Dr. Napp tries to get close, Trout tells him to back off. He just wants to be with his wife. He knows that she's dead, so he took her out of her earthly clothes and he dressed her for her coffin. Trout's behavior is bizarre, but Dr. Napp chalks it up to a husband in grief. Eventually, Trout agrees to let Dr. Napp give Zona

a brief look over to see if he can ascertain how she died. It's pretty difficult to see around her thick, modest clothing, but he wants to see if he can tell if she fell down the stairs. He sees that she has no bruising on her head, so a fall didn't seem super likely. She does, however, have a slight rouge tint to the right side of her neck and face. Dr. Napp follows the discoloration down her neck and he's about to undo her bow

when she starts with the crocodile tears again. He protests. He doesn't want anyone tampering with his dear wife. So Dr. Napt decides to use his best guess and he tells Trout he thinks his wife died of, quote, everlasting faint. I'm sorry, did a Disney Princess come up with that phrase? Everlasting faint tells us nothing and looking into it more, it seems like this may have been the only time that phrase was ever used to describe the cause of someone's death.

Even Dr. Naap went on to admit that it was kind of a BS reason. Still, there's no reason to think Zona's death was anything other than accidental, until word spreads to Zona's death was anything other than accidental, until word spreads to Zona's mother. Upon hearing the news, she is shocked and devastated. Zona was only 23 years old, and she was in great shape. She had been complaining of not feeling well for about a month, but it wasn't anything that her mother thought would kill her. When she sees her daughter's body, it sounds silly, but one of the first comments she makes is about how atrocious Zona's outfit is. Zona would never wear anything like that.

A huge bright bow on top of a high neck dress? If there's one way I would describe Zona after reading so much about her, it's cool. She loved to go out, she loved to dance, she'd give her friends a hard time if they didn't want to keep the party going, and she dressed really well. It was suspicious to her mother that Zona's husband had hastily dressed her in such an ugly outfit. This to Zona's mother is the first clue that maybe Trout had something to do with this. Back then, when someone died, you would take the body to be taken care of by a group of

typically women who would dress the body and place it nicely in a coffin. This also typically is when a more in-depth autopsy would occur. Tizona's mother felt like Trout didn't want anyone else handling the body. But why? Also, what was with this sheet? Bunched up next to Zona's head inside of her coffin was a bed sheet. That was not common at all.

Her mother had also noticed when she saw her daughter's body that Zona's head was really floppy, much more than most corpses. The sheet in the coffin looked like it was keeping Zona's head in place. On top of all this, Zona's mom always got a weird feeling about trout. He came out of nowhere, swept her daughter up in a three-week whirlwind romance, and then asked her to marry him. Zona's mother begged Zona to pump the brakes, but Zona was headstrong and she knew what she wanted.

In reality, the second trout came to town, Zona was completely enchanted by him. Word quickly spread in the small community that a new handsome blacksmith had started working, and one day, Zona and her mother walked in to get some of their axes sharpened. Zona realized that the rumors were true. In front of her stood, a handsome, freckly blacksmith with a deep, velvety voice. It wasn't like Zona to be flustered,

but she struggled to speak without blushing. Zona's mother had a different impression of the man, however. He claimed that he was 29 years old, but he seemed no-disably older. Trout told them that the axe would be ready later that night if they wanted to come back and grab it, and Zona insisted she go back by herself. Zona's mother reported she came back very late. Their relationship really took off after that. And they were engaged within a few weeks

and married shortly after. And now, just a few months after their wedding, they were at her funeral. As Zona's mother stood over her daughter's body. She thought back to her initial hesitations about trout, but it was hard to have a moment to herself to think because trout was acting kind of insane. He was hovering over Zona's body, shifting around as if he was worried someone would try to touch her. One guest reported that he didn't see Trout leave the wake for a single second, not even to use the restroom.

And wakes back then were really long events. It's sad, but they were one of the only times that friends and family all gathered together. So people indulged in the opportunity to socialize. Zona's body was on display for almost 24 hours. Though Trout was adamant about monitoring people getting too close to his deceased wife, people still got a good look at Zona, and almost everyone had the same thoughts. Why was there this random bedsheet next to Zona's head, and why is her head so floppy? Anytime

the coffin moved, whether nudged by accident or in transport to the burial site, Zona's head rolled around. Also, it's interesting to note here that Zona's cause of death was changed, from everlasting faint to childbirth. Now, there actually had been no proof that Zona was pregnant, but remember how I mentioned how Zona hadn't been feeling well in the last month of her life? The doctor decided it must have been because she was pregnant, so he changed the death certificate to childbirth, and then he re-closed the case. So now, Zona's mother is thinking, what the hell is going on?

What she didn't know was that their tight little community was starting to talk. Their whispering about the strangeness of Zona's death started morphing into whispers about trout, rumors of wives before Zona, of domestic violence, of the mysterious death of another woman. Trout's dark past after the break. So, we know that around the time of Zona's death, rumors were starting to circulate that Trout maybe had been married before he met Zona. The short answer is yes, he had, but that wasn't the only thing he was lying about. Erasmus, Stribling, Trout Shoe, yes that's his full name, was born in Augusta County, Virginia,

probably in the year 1861. This puts him at about 35 years old when he first became the blacksmith and greenbrier, not 29. Trout's first marriage was to 17-year-old Estee Cutlip in 1885. He was potentially going by Erasmus at the time, though the name he was using did change over the years. Estee was a few months pregnant at the wedding. She had swept her up in another whirlwind romance, and before Estee could even process his new presence in her life, she was pregnant with his child. The couple divorced not long after she gave birth to their daughter, Gurdie.

There had been rumors of trout beating Estee, and there were also rumors that trout had fathered another child with a woman named Annie, not long before Gurdie was born. At one point in their marriage, a group of men burst into trout and Estee's home in the middle of the night and ripped Trout from his bed. One of the men was identified as Annie's brother. Reasons given as to why the group was there vary. Some say it was Annie's brother's getting revenge on Trout. Others argue that the group knew he was abusing Estee and wanted justice.

Maybe it was a blend of the two. Regardless, the group grabbed Trout, marched him down to the frozen river, cut a hole in the ice, and shoved his head inside. But this lesson was lost on Trout. In 1894, he married his second wife, Lucy Ann Tritt, who died within eight months of the marriage. Accounts of what happened to Lucy also vary.

Some say Trout killed her with a brick, others say that she fell while she was pregnant on ice. Some say he yanked her off of a hay-bale and broke her neck, others that he poisoned her with laurel tea and so on and so forth. Trout makes his way into Greenbrier less than two years later, where he meets Zona. Once Zona is buried, Trout just kind of hangs around. And some people think that's evidence that he had nothing to do with her death. What kind of a madman would linger around a town if he were really responsible for someone's

murder? But Zona's mom is not convinced. After the funeral, Trout gives her the sheet that he was propping Zona's head up on. He says that he wants her to have it. And Zona's mom is grateful for it, but one, it's Trout's bed sheet, so she doesn't feel that sentimental towards it. And two, her daughter's corpse had been lying on it, so it smelled. It doesn't smell like Zona, it smells like death.

So when she goes home, she washes the sheet. It's just a normal white bed sheet, but when she washes it, the water rinses out bright crimson, as if it had been soaked with blood. There was definitely not blood on the sheet when she received it, so Zona's mother takes this as a sign from some sort of higher power that she's right. Something is fishy about Zona's death, but there's not a lot of options. So Zona's mom prays. Every night before she goes to sleep,

she prays to God, to Zona, to whoever will listen. For a sign, something that she can use against trout. And one night, she gets it. In the dead of night, Zona's mother awakes to a sound, creaking on her floorboards. There's someone in the house.

But who? Hello? She calls out, but there's no one there. She tries to go back to sleep, but there it is again. There's pressure on the floorboards. Someone is getting closer. She shoots up to search the dark hall for the intruder, but before she can even get out of bed, a figure crosses the threshold into her room. It's Zona.

Flesh and blood, full-bodied operation. Zona, her mother shouts, the tears welling in her eyes. She runs over to touch her, but Zona is ice cold. Her mother would go on to testify that she was fully awake while this was happening, nothing about this felt like a dream. Zona appeared in her mother's room for nights, and she spoke to her mother each of those times. The first night she was hesitant to say anything, but the more she appeared, the more information she told her mother. According to the apparition, this is what happened the night of Zona's death.

Zona was in the kitchen baking bread and making fruit preserves when trout stormed in, back from a long day at the shop. He asked her what was for dinner and she explained bread, butter, and fruit preserves. What about any meat? Asked trout. Zona explained that she hadn't planned on cooking any meat that night. This enraged trout, and he grabbed her by the neck and he snapped it at the first vertebrae. This is it. This was the information her mother needed. The next day, she runs to the authorities

and Dr. Napp with this information and begs them to dig up Zona's body to do a proper autopsy. At the time, there was a lot of stigma around digging up a body after a Christian burial, but Dr. Napp admitted that he too had his doubts about Zona's death, where this concern was when he came up with everlasting faint, I just don't know. During Zona's autopsy, her mother kept insisting that they look at her neck,

but Dr. Napp wanted to start with Zona's stomach. He couldn't shake the feeling that, perhaps she was poisoned, and that's why she hadn't been feeling well leading up to her death. This also could be because he was hesitant to believe a grieving mother who ran to him saying a ghost told her where to look. Dr. Napp ultimately didn't find any signs of poisoning. He was able to see the contents of Zona's stomach, however. The night of her death, she had eaten bread, butter, and fruit preserves. No meat, just like the ghost of Zona had mentioned. And after untying the ludicrously

capricious bow and examining Zona's neck, he saw that her mother was correct in that regard as well. Zona's neck was broken at her first vertebrae. Trout was approached with the news, but he maintained that he would be found innocent. Apparently, Trout thought that if there were no witnesses to a death, no one could be found guilty, which we all know is simply untrue. He didn't even hire a lawyer,

he represented himself during the trial, and shocking to no one, he did a pretty poor job. He insisted they arrest the black boy that found Zona, Andy. Trout seemed to rely heavily on the atmosphere at the time and assumed the jury would find Andy guilty simply because he was black. Despite his prejudices, Greenbrier County was more progressive than he thought, even for the time. Andy testified but was never considered a real suspect. One fact that I think re-contextualizes Andy getting the eggs is that Trout asked him to.

If Trout knew Zona was dead, did he think sending Andy to the house would put Andy at the scene of the crime and then make him a suspect? The real showstopper during the trial was Zona's mother's testimony. The judge was hesitant to include it because never before and never since was a ghost's testimony relayed to a jury in court. But the jury was so moved by her mother's story of Zona reaching out to her in the afterlife that they issued a resounding guilty. Shoe was sentenced to life in prison, but he died of pneumonia in 1900. He almost didn't even make it that long, as a mob of vigilantes tried to hang him one night.

A group of local men and greenbrier were so appalled that Shoe would kill his wife that they decided to take care of him themselves. They took up pitchforks and lanterns one evening, intending to drag shoe from his cell and hang him in the public square. But on their way to the jailhouse, a neighbor stopped them and convinced them to go home. They were very easily convinced, vigilantes, if you ask me. Zona's ghost never visited her mother again, and many have speculated over the years about what really happened. Did Zona's mother

really see a ghost? Or was she hallucinating in her grief? Or was it something else entirely? I found this little tidbit of information, and it's super interesting. This comes from author Katie Letcher-Lyle, who wrote a book about the Greenbrier Ghost in the 80s. Like all of us, Katie likes to dig deeper to get to the bottom of things. Remember that story I told you at the beginning about John Farley seeing his friend Fred's ghost? Well, years later, that story was debunked. It turned out that John knew Fred's neighbor was to blame for Fred's death because he witnessed

the whole thing take place. He was too afraid to speak out publicly because he thought the man that killed Fred would also come for him. Later, he admitted to using the ghost of Fred as an excuse to be able to turn the neighbor into the police. And even more interesting is that the story was wildly publicized, showing up in newspapers all over the world, including in Greenbrier. In January of 1897, when Zona's obituary appeared on page 3 of the local newspaper, appeared on page 3 of the local newspaper, what would you guess was on page 1? An article about Farley's ghost sighting. Maybe this is total coincidence, but maybe. Just maybe.

Zona's mother read the paper that day and got an idea. Just like John who was afraid to speak out, Zona's mother worried she didn't have enough of a case to build against Trout, but she knew in her heart who was responsible. And so, she spun a tail, and it worked. But I'll leave you with this. If Zona's mother invented the whole thing, then how did she know that her daughter had no meat that night? Or which vertebrae was broken? That, I cannot answer. This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelin Moore, heart starts pounding written and produced by me, Kaelin Moore. Music by ArtList. Follow the podcast on TikTok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror at heart starts pounding.

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