The Ghost Who Helped Solve Her Own Murder

The Greenbrier Ghost is the name popularly given to the alleged ghost of Elva Zona Heaster, a young woman in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, United States, who was murdered in 1897. The events surrounding the haunting have led to it becoming a very late instance in American legal history in which the so-called 'testimony of a ghost' was accepted at a murder trial.

According to local legend, Elva Zona Heaster appeared to her mother in a dream four weeks after the funeral. She said that her husband was a cruel man who abused her, and who had attacked her in a fit of rage when he believed that she had cooked no meat for dinner. Autopsy on the exhumed body verified the apparition's account. Her husband, Edward Shue, was found guilty and sentenced to the state prison.