Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

III

CIVIC-MINDED SPIRITS

prisons and asylums, graveyards and cemeteries, a park

Frank Wattron wasn’t sure what to do. He’d been elected to the position of Navajo County sheriff three years earlier, in 1896, and in that time he had become known throughout the county and its county seat, Holbrook, as fair and tough-minded. With his black handlebar mustache and the sawed-off shotgun he kept under his black trench coat, Wattron looked ever the part of an Arizona lawman. Newspapers described him as “a generous, whole-souled man whom no one can charge with any dishonesty,” though his capacity for boundless charity was matched by his mercurial temper and his reputation for being a “gruff, hard-boiled joker.” He had a mild opium addiction, to which some attributed his mood swings, but he’d been liked well enough to get reelected. As the Holbrook Argus put it, “Hundreds of persons who read this article can no doubt recollect instances in which they have received personal favors from Mr. Wattron.”

Now he had to figure out what do to about George Smiley. Smiley had been working for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway in 1899 as a trackwalker when he confronted a previous foreman over a missing paycheck. An argument broke out between the two men that quickly escalated, and before it was over Smiley had shot his former foreman in the back. Smiley was caught, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death, and his execution was set for December 8, 1899.

Wattron had no problem with seeing this murderer off to his reward: the case was clear-cut, the conviction straightforward, the punishment just. But it was Wattron’s first execution, and he was obligated by Arizona statute to notify the public prior to the execution to ensure that witnesses would be present. Without any sense of how such notifications were supposed to look, Wattron composed an invitation that reflected his dark sense of humor:

You are hereby cordially invited to attend the hanging of one George Smiley, murderer. His soul will be swung into eternity on December 8, 1899, at 3 o’clock p.m., sharp.

Latest improved methods in the art of scientific strangulation will be employed and everything possible will be done to make the surroundings cheerful and the execution a success.

F. J. Wattron, Sheriff of Navajo County.

Smiley’s was the first major trial held in the brand-new county courthouse. Simple, elegant, defined by the bell tower rising up from its peaked roof and by its generous arched entryway, the courthouse was built to signify order and law in a lawless land, its tower looming over the small frontier town as though a beacon or some searching eye. And it was here that Smiley was to meet his end.

Wattron’s tongue-in-cheek announcement of Smiley’s impending execution soon hit the newswires and spread across the country. His gallows humor was met with a mixture of chagrin and outrage, bringing notoriety to the tiny county. Ultimately President William McKinley got word of it and, since Arizona Territory was under federal control, issued word to its governor to address the situation. Governor Nathan Oakes Murphy mandated a thirty-day stay of execution to give Wattron time to reissue the notification with a more funereal tone.

Wattron hated nothing as much as sham and hypocrisy, and no doubt saw this unwanted federal intrusion as more of the same. Perturbed, he issued a second execution announcement, this one in the style of a Victorian mourning card.

Framed in a black border, it read:

Revised Statutes of Arizona, Penal Code, Title X, Section 1849, Page 807, makes it obligatory on sheriff to issue invitations to executions, form (unfortunately) not prescribed.

Holbrook, Arizona

Jan. 7, 1900.

With feelings of profound sorrow and regret, I hereby invite you to attend and witness the private, decent and humane execution of a human being; name, George Smiley, crime, murder.

The said George Smiley will be executed on Jan. 8, 1900, at 2 o’clock p.m.

You are expected to deport yourself in a respectful manner, and any “flippant” or “unseemly” language or conduct on your part will not be allowed. Conduct, on anyone’s part, bordering on ribaldry and tending to mar the solemnity of the occasion will not be tolerated.

F. J. Wattron, Sheriff of Navajo County.

I would suggest that a committee, consisting of Governor Murphy, Editors Dunbar, Randolph and Hull, wait on our next legislature and have a form of invitation to executions embodied in our laws.

This time, to prevent any further interference, Wattron sent the invitation out a day before the execution. And on January 8, 1900, George Smiley, age thirty-seven, was hanged from the scaffolding of the courthouse—not only the first person executed on the courthouse grounds but the only legally executed criminal in the history of Navajo County.

The Argus noted in its January 13 edition that Smiley had converted to Catholicism shortly before his execution and received baptism and confession before going to his death. “Smiley exhibited great coolness and composure until the last,” the paper reported. “He ascended the scaffold unassisted; he spoke clearly and without a tremor in his voice and showed not the slightest sign of nervousness.” With his final words Smiley thanked Wattron and his deputies for their kindness.*

Such a report implies a sense of finality and closure and that Smiley went to his death calm and at peace. But according to Marita R. Keams, who worked in the courthouse building after it was converted into a museum in 1981, Smiley has since grown restive. Teenagers using a Ouija board one Halloween, she reports, claimed to have contacted a ghost who told them his name was George. Keams says she and other employees have felt and heard Smiley, that he has turned on the faucets in the men’s restroom, and that she’s felt him playing with her hair when no one is around. The prevailing feeling among those who work in the building is that Smiley haunts the place of his execution, awaiting a second reprieve from the president that has yet to come.

Whether you believe that Smiley haunts the courthouse may have something to do with your attitude toward capital punishment. Culturally, after all, attitudes on the subject vary widely and fluctuate over time, and it’s likely not a coincidence that the stories of Smiley’s restless soul have gained ground as the mode of his original punishment has lost popularity. The story recorded by the Argus suggests that Smiley’s death sentence was instrumental in his reform: only when faced with his imminent execution did this wayward murderer find his way, facing death with peace and dignity. The ghost stories, on the other hand, suggest that Smiley’s ghost haunts the courthouse grounds, still hoping for a reprieve.

Navajo County’s Superior Court is now housed in a larger complex that includes not only an enlarged county jail but also the board of supervisors and other essential government services. Its architecture suggests a changing face of government: low-slung and economical, lacking ornament or ostentation, it projects frugality, a reluctance to spend taxpayer money. Arizona is no longer a Wild West frontier, so the power of government need not be telegraphed to the citizenry anymore. The new building is boring, but that is its point.

More so than houses, civic structures—not just courthouses but prisons, asylums, and other government buildings—are purpose-built. They are rarely constructed for convenience’s sake; they are built to send a message. They may incorporate Greek or Roman colonnades and rotundas to suggest that their lineage stretches back millennia, as though to grant further legitimacy. They may—as is common with libraries of a certain era—have the names of famous philosophers, statesmen, artists, and writers carved into the exterior stone. When they are built simply or modestly, that is part of their message, too.

A common feature of many of these buildings is the idea of permanence: they’re meant to last forever. And yet many of the ideas and philosophies that drive these constructions change over the course of time. Demographics shift, political affiliations change, new administrations are voted in, aesthetics evolve—but the buildings often are left behind, bearing traces of whatever impetus drove their construction.

How a public building—or, as we’ll see, a cemetery or even a park—can come to be haunted has a lot to do with the evolution of our cultural ideas, which change faster than our landscape can keep up with, rendering these places obsolete, archaic, and anachronistic.

Unlike businesses or private residences, these civic-minded places have less control over their haunted reputations and less power to keep out the spirits and the spirit seekers. Partly this is out of necessity: places like the West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville don’t receive enough public funding to cover operating expenses and need the revenue from dark tourism to avoid the wrecking ball. Ghost stories have become an important tool for preservationists, as a means to keep alive buildings that have civic and cultural value, buildings that might otherwise get plowed under. But as inherently public places, they belong to the public imagination. You cannot keep a paranormal researcher out of a public park, after all. Hauntings keep alive neglected spaces and make them relevant to their communities once again.

CHAPTER NINE

MELANCHOLY CONTEMPLATION

Moundsville, WV

In the wilds of Greenbrier County, West Virginia, along Route 60, stands a particularly odd national landmark sign. Erected in 1979, in sixty-four words it tells the strange tale of the Greenbrier Ghost.

INTERRED IN NEARBY CEMETERY IS ZONA HEASTER SHUE. HER DEATH IN 1897 WAS PRESUMED NATURAL UNTIL HER SPIRIT APPEARED TO HER MOTHER TO DESCRIBE HOW SHE WAS KILLED BY HER HUSBAND EDWARD. AUTOPSY ON THE EXHUMED BODY VERIFIED THE APPARITION’S ACCOUNT. EDWARD, FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER, WAS SENTENCED TO THE STATE PRISON. ONLY KNOWN CASE IN WHICH TESTIMONY FROM GHOST HELPED CONVICT A MURDERER.

The husband’s name was Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue, not Edward, though he was known by most as Trout. When he arrived at the West Virginia State Penitentiary at Moundsville in 1897 as inmate number 3255, it was not his first time. A competent blacksmith, he’d been convicted of horse thievery and had spent twenty months in prison for it. His first marriage had been in 1885, and he’d divorced four years later under clouded circumstances (some would later claim that his wife had feared that he would kill her). In 1894 he married again, a woman named Lucy A. Tritt, who died less than a year into their marriage in February of the following year. Little is known about her death: the newspaper recorded only that she “died very suddenly at her home” and apparently never followed up on the cause of death. When Shue met Zona Heaster, she had several suitors, but she chose this newly arrived blacksmith, and in October 1896 they were married.

Once again it took less than a year before Shue’s marriage ended in death. On the morning of January 22, 1897, he had been out running errands and had sent a young boy, Anderson Jones, to stop by his house and see if his wife needed anything. Jones found Zona’s body on the floor, “stretched out perfectly straight with feet together, one hand lying by the side and the other lying across the body.” Her head, according to news reports, “was slightly inclined to one side.”

By the time the coroner, George Knapp, arrived, Shue had laid out his wife’s body and was cradling her head and sobbing uncontrollably. Knapp, attempting to determine the cause of death, noticed some “slight discolorations on the right side of the neck and right cheek,” but when he went to investigate further, Shue “protested so vigorously” that Knapp gave up and left the house, having made only a cursory investigation. He later reported that the woman had died from “an everlasting faint.”

Zona Heaster Shue was taken to her mother’s house and laid out for viewing, but during the wake her husband’s behavior, according to eyewitness accounts, became increasingly erratic. He claimed to have dressed her body himself and seemed agitated whenever anyone came too close to it. He had placed a pillow at one side of her head so she should could “rest easier,” he said. Even in such a state, people noticed an odd looseness to her head whenever the corpse was moved. She was buried the next day, Monday, January 25.

The ghost came shortly thereafter.

Shue’s mother-in-law, Mary Jane Heaster, had always disapproved of the marriage. The news of her only daughter’s death left her inconsolable, but in the days afterward she would claim that she began receiving regular visits from Zona’s ghost. As she later would testify under oath, “It was no dream—she came back and told me that he was mad that she didn’t have no meat cooked for supper.” The ghost told Heaster that Shue had killed her, driven to rage by such petty things as a lack of meat. The ghost then told her that if she “could look down back of Aunt Martha Jones’, in the meadow, in a rocky place; that I could look in a cellar behind some loose plank and see” some traces of blood where he had done it. Heaster did exactly as she was told and, sure enough, saw blood exactly where it had been indicated. Then, most significant, was this revelation: “She cames [sic] four times, and four nights; but the second night she told me that her neck was squeezed off at the first joint.”

After several nights of this, Heaster could stand it no more and went to the county prosecutor, John Preston, telling him she believed that Zona’s death was no accident and that Zona’s ghost would haunt her until justice was done. Nearly a month after Zona’s death, her body was disinterred and an inquest was convened. The body had kept well through the West Virginia winter; little decomposition had taken place. Though Mary Jane Heaster had claimed that the ghost had told her that her neck had been broken, the autopsy started with a search for signs of poison. Only after that came back negative did they investigate her neck, determining that Zona Heaster Shue had indeed had her neck broken and that without other bruises on her body that might indicate a fall or other accident, it was a strong likelihood that she had been murdered.

Shue was tried and convicted of his wife’s murder that summer but, unusual in the case of murder, was not given the death penalty. Instead, he was sentenced to life imprisonment at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville. He never left there, dying behind bars on March 13, 1900.

In the decades following Shue’s death, the penitentiary gradually developed a reputation for its poor treatment of inmates—so much so that in 1981 a prisoner named Robert Crain sued the state, claiming cruel and unusual punishment and initiating a lengthy legal battle. In a 1986 opinion the West Virginia Supreme Court found a list of deplorable conditions so voluminous that they had difficulty accurately summarizing them. Back-flowing toilets leaking sewage onto the floor were common, as were bird droppings from the pigeons roosting in the eaves. The lack of temperature control meant freezing in winter and scorching heat in summer. “Because of lack of ventilation and cleanliness and sewage spills,” the justices reported, “much of the living facility is permeated with a stench. Fire and safety hazards abound and are compounded by numerous health hazards in the food service area. Food is contaminated with hair, insects, and other foreign substances.” The state’s failure to remedy these problems in the ensuing years led finally to the facility’s closure almost ten years later, in 1995.

The prison’s ghosts moved in around the same time as the inmates were cleared out. One former inmate, William “Red” Snyder, who was murdered in his cell in 1992, has been heard calling out to tour guides and has occasionally shown up on EVP recordings. Shadowy figures have been seen in the hallways, and near the North Gate roams the indignant ghost of Arvil Adkins. Adkins had been one of three men condemned to death in 1938 for a botched kidnapping that had led to their victim’s death. Adkins’s hanging did not go smoothly; the trap door beneath him was sprung prematurely, and he plummeted twenty feet onto the concrete below. Still alive, the bloodied and injured Adkins was carried back upstairs on a stretcher to be hanged properly.

After 1995, the state turned the operation of the penitentiary over to the Moundsville Economic Development Council but provided no additional funds for its upkeep or restoration. So the council turned to the haunted reputation of the prison to keep it open to the public, running a staged haunted attraction each fall, the Dungeon of Horrors, and regular ghost-hunting sessions throughout the year.

The Dungeon of Horrors tour, according to one employee I spoke to who worked there for a season, didn’t have to rely on ginned-up shocks. Even without any canned effects, strange sounds could be heard: dripping water from an unknown source and unidentified clanging sounds cutting through the eerie silence. As part of the tour, guides would recount real stories of murder, torture, and abuse that had taken place in the prison. Its reputation was such that a haunted tour could rely heavily on well-established facts.

Attractions like these have become enormously popular. Sociologist Margee Kerr explains that they are “frightening yet intriguing—creating a kind of attraction/repulsion dynamic.” Though they’re places we hope never to find ourselves confined in, we nonetheless are attracted to them because of what they stand for. In Kerr’s words, “In the public act of confining the criminal, or the ‘abnormal’ other, societies reaffirm their shared values, the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ become visible, and the dividing lines are fortified.” If you are terrified by the thought of one day finding yourself behind bars in a place like Moundsville, Kerr suggests you’re also relieved by the recognition, at the tour’s end, that you are not one of the “bad guys,” and once past the gift shop you’re allowed to go free back into civilization. The good attractions, she notes, push your boundaries while leaving you safe and inspired; the less reputable ones, on the other hand, “leave you there or drop you.”

But perhaps we should be left slightly disturbed by a place like Moundsville. The employee I spoke to recalled how, after a month at that prison, the place began to work on him. There was little after-hours bonding among the staff; no sharing of beers or stories after a job well done. “No one wanted to stick around,” he said.

Prison architecture evolved, after all, to elicit extremely specific emotional and physical reactions. While the idea of solitary confinement and cellular prisons grew out of the monastic tradition, in a punitive context isolation rarely produces rehabilitation. Repeated studies have, in fact, shown the opposite: that solitary confinement acts as a barrier to mental and physical health, creating increasing psychological instability and antisocial behavior among those subjected to it.

When prisons like Moundsville were being planned and built, little of this was known. Prior to the nineteenth century, prisons were temporary spaces. You were imprisoned while you were awaiting trial, and in some cases, after you’d been sentenced and were waiting for the sentence to be carried out. The punishments themselves were almost uniformly physical: beatings or death. The notion that imprisonment itself could be a punishment, that one could be made to pay for crimes by the loss of time, is a relatively recent phenomenon.

So at the time Moundsville was built, treatments like solitary confinement seemed novel, even humane. The commissioners appointed with the design and construction of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary wrote, “Its good design is to produce, by means of sufferings principally acting on the mind and accompanied with moral and religious instruction, a disposition to virtuous conduct, the only sure preventive of crime.” Alone with only one’s thoughts and a Bible, one could focus on penance and self-correction, unencumbered by the distractions of one’s surroundings and any further temptation to sin once more.

But this wouldn’t work with all criminals, of course, hence the other factor of Eastern State’s design: its imposing façade, its castlelike exterior, which exudes a gothic dread to all passing by. This malevolent exterior was intentional, meant “to impress so great a dread and terror, as to deter the offender from the commission of crime in the state where the system of solitary confinement exists.”

Moundsville, like Eastern State, was designed explicitly to spread this sense of gloom and melancholy, a means of further inspiring penance upon those trapped in its walls or those on the outside who might contemplate a life of crime. An 1826 encyclopedia noted, “The style of architecture of a prison, is a matter of no slight importance. It offers an effectual method of exciting the imagination to a most desirable point of abhorrence.” Continuing, it recommended that “the exterior of a prison should, therefore, be formed in the heavy and sombre style, which most forcibly impresses the spectator with gloom and terror. Massive cornices, the absence of windows or other ornaments, small low doors, and the whole structure comparatively low, seem to include nearly all the points necessary to produce the desired effect.”

The architects who designed institutions like Eastern State and Moundsville, then, attempted to inspire the same sense of foreboding that London’s Newgate Prison had long been famous for, inciting in their inmates (in the words of one commentator) a sense of awe and “melancholy contemplation.” Eastern State, though far more expensive than other prisons of the day, continually succeeded in creating this impression, at least among the law-abiding. “The design and execution impart a grave, severe, and awful character to the external aspect of this building,” George Washington Smith noted in 1830. “The effect which it produces on the imagination of every passing spectator, is particularly impressive, solemn, and instructive.”

Even today the prison feels deeply unsettling, and walking through its halls leaves you with a pervasive sense of unease. It feels both claustrophobic and endless, forlorn and merciless. The cool stone sucks out all the available heat in the room; no doubt the place gets unbearable in summer, but even when I visited in late April, it felt unnaturally chilled, as though the whole building were a cold spot. The walls ricochet sound in unexpected ways, making for strange echoes. Moundsville works on you, even as a tourist.

The prison also speaks to you, giving the history of its former occupants through the paintings and words that decorate the walls. Somewhat anomalously, the wardens at Moundsville began allowing prisoners to paint murals on the walls, starting in the 1960s until the prison’s closure in 1995. The insides of Moundsville are covered with cryptic imagery, traces of the lives lived inside these walls—everything from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to lyrics by Guns N’ Roses and Hank Williams. For the most part there is a mixture of fantasy and nature imagery (mountain waterfalls, medieval knights, dinosaurs), gang signs, Confederate flags, skulls and demons, along with cartoon characters. The prison failed to keep records of the artists, and aside from what’s passed down in oral history, the purpose and meaning of the images have become ambiguous. Once a series of faceless cells and corridors, Moundsville today, through these murals, preserves strange, elliptical stories of the people who were once imprisoned here.

Many buildings—most notably the houses we live in, but, really, any building in which we spend a great deal of time—establish a kind of feedback loop with their inhabitants. Through the placement of furniture and decoration, patterns of wear and habit, even the unpacking of luggage in a hotel room, we arrange and order the spaces we move through to suit our needs. But this doesn’t happen in a prison. The effect here is entirely one-way; the prison molds the inmate and gives the inmate no quarter to be himself or herself, to step out of line, to change the circumstances of the prison to suit personal needs. The caged-in hallways, the towering rows of identical cells, the naked toilets in plain sight—everything is designed to remind you that no human could live here, despite the reality that thousands do.

Eastern State Penitentiary gets more press than Moundsville—it’s bigger, more famous, and more likely to show up in online roundups as the “most haunted” prison. But it’s also right in the middle of Philadelphia, hemmed in by restaurants and cafés and upscale salons and nice houses, and despite the gothic ambiance of its façade, it is integrated into the city. Moundsville is itself remote, and the prison rises out of the ground as an anomaly, forlorn and distant.

And then there’s the mound across the street.

Nearly seventy feet tall and nine hundred feet in circumference, consisting of some fifty-five thousand cubic yards of dirt, the Grave Creek Mound is the largest extant burial mound in the country. It was constructed some two thousand years ago by the Adena, a culture that had mostly died out by the year 200. The Adena remain a mystery to anthropologists, and the very existence of the startling-looking mound has belied attempts to definitively explain its purpose or its creators.

Joseph Tomlinson discovered it in 1770. After a day on his land, south of Wheeling, he climbed a small knoll less than a quarter mile from his cabin, only to realize that he was standing not on a hill but on an enormous mound of excavated dirt that had been more or less hiding in plain sight. Gradually, it began to draw curiosity seekers, and theories abounded as to what might be inside the massive mound, with people speculating that it held the keys to ancient civilizations long gone. By 1838, the Tomlinsons had raised enough money to fund an excavation of the site.

The mound, as it happened, contained not mysteries to vast civilizations but only the remains of two individuals. A museum of sorts was created in the middle of the mound, where a visitor could pay a quarter to see the mound’s contents. Upon entering the mound, one found a central room supported by a brick column. “Around the base of this column there is a circular shelf provided with wire cases,” recorded one visitor in 1842, “in which the bones, head ornaments, and other objects of interest, found in the vaults are arranged. The place was dark, or but dimly lighted with a few tallow candles, which cast around a sepulchral glare on the wired skeleton and other bones spread around.” But without a railroad or other easy access to Moundsville, the mound couldn’t attract widespread excitement.

As a tourist attraction the Grave Creek Mound had failed by 1846, but over the years other attempts were made to wring some value from this inexplicable earthwork: a saloon was built on top of it at one point, and during the Civil War artillery cannons were stationed there. In 1874 a former warden of the penitentiary bought it; he first installed a dance platform on it but was hoping to use it to support a water tank to supply the prison and the town. This plan, too, failed, and the state finally purchased the site in 1909.

The mound was in serious disrepair by then. The state used prison labor to refill the holes in the mound and repair other damage. A cultural center was added, but while it does an admirable job of reconstructing early Adena culture, there’s so much that simply isn’t known. The mound stands as a monument to the gaps in our history, the things in the past that we can no longer access.

Numerous blogs have connected the haunted prison with the Grave Creek Mound via a variety of bizarre speculations involving aliens, buried giants, and more. The two structures are a study in contrasts: one ephemeral, composed of dirt, perpetually threatening to return to the land; the other cut from solid rock, utterly impregnable, not likely to ever come down except by the most strenuous effort. The mound has stubbornly resisted attempts by the local white population to monetize it, whereas the prison has been relatively successful in turning its legacy into much-needed funds that keep it alive. And while the Grave Creek Mound remains unknowable, the prison lends itself remarkably well to a narrative of crime and punishment, of good and evil.

No matter your crime, once you were in Moundsville, your life was pretty much forfeit. The place was underfunded and understaffed, and there was no room for pity. The world of the penitentiary is one of lawlessness, of anarchy, which is in part why it’s so frightening. By one estimate, at any given time in Moundsville’s operating history, inmates outnumbered guards by at least 20 to 1. Designed to hold 650 inmates but often holding in excess of 2,000, it was staffed with fewer than 50 guards on shift at any given time during the day.

This chronic lack of guards and resources led, as one might expect, to a level of violence among the inmates that approached pure anarchy. In November 1992, a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, “Red” Snyder, was stabbed repeatedly by his neighbor Rusty Lassiter. The two had been good friends, but a price on Snyder’s head by a rival proved too enticing for Lassiter.

This betrayal perhaps accounts for why Snyder’s restless ghost continues to haunt his cell, calling out to the former guards who now give tours of the prison. But his murder is only one of many instances of horrific brutality that have transpired behind the prison’s walls. Its history is filled with savage violence by inmates—prominently involving rival gangs making examples of each other. Moundsville is perhaps most notorious for the underground recreation room—the Sugar Shack, as it was known—which was unsupervised and played host to countless beatings, rapes, and murders.

The desire for a quick and ready dispatch of justice underlies so many of our ghost tales. Part of our belief in ghosts, you could say, comes from our belief in perfect and unambiguous justice. As opposed to tales of, say, a poltergeist, a spirit that is mischievous without direction, or a demon or other actively malevolent spirit, ghost stories often revolve around crime and punishment. The story of Zona Heaster Shue’s murder is a perfect example: a murderer nearly gets away with a crime, but the ghost returns to see justice done. The mother avenges the daughter, an inverted Hamlet, where the ghost will not rest until its relatives stand up for it. Indeed, the story of the Greenbrier Ghost is so perfectly literary that it almost seems like something out of a book.

But did a ghost actually help convict Trout Shue?

In the early 1980s author Katie Letcher Lyle, having heard the story of the Greenbrier Ghost from one of Trout Shue’s descendants, set out to discover what was fact and what was fiction. She interviewed living descendants, scoured news stories and trial records, and while she found that the main elements of the story are by and large true, there are odd discrepancies between how Zona’s story is usually told and the actual history.

For one, while Zona’s mother did testify to having seen a ghost during Shue’s murder trial, she did so at the behest of the defense, not the prosecution. John Preston, the prosecuting attorney, apparently thought the ghost story too fantastic to be of any actual help and did not call Mary Jane Heaster as a witness for fear of sabotaging his case. It was the defense who summoned her to the stand, hoping to discredit the whole proceedings by implying it had been initiated by a hysterical mother.

Aside from her testimony in court, there is no other record of the ghost visiting Heaster until after the conviction, and the supposedly telling detail—that the ghost had told her mother about the broken veterbrae—doesn’t explain why the autopsy (if done at the ghost’s urging) would have started by searching for signs of poisoning.

Lyle came up with her own theory as to what really happened: In the January 28, 1897, edition of the Greenbrier Independent, news of Zona Heaster Shue’s death was covered on page three, but on page one was a curious story out of Australia. “One of the most famous murder cases in Australia,” it read, “was discovered by the ghost of the murdered man sitting on the rail of a dam (Australian for horse pond) into which his body had been thrown. Numberless people saw it, and the crime was duly brought home.” The item continues:

Years after, a dying man making his confession said that he invented the ghost. He witnessed the crime, but was threatened with death if he divulged it as he wished to, and the only way he saw out of the impasse was to affect to see the ghost where the body would be found. As soon as he started the story, such is the power of nervousness that numerous other people began to see it, until its fame reached such dimensions that a search was made and the body found, and the murderers brought to justice.

Mary Jane Heaster was no idiot, nor was she hysterical. She had strong suspicions that Shue had killed her daughter and that the local officials, whatever their own beliefs might have been, weren’t doing anything about it. The Australian ghost story inspired her, according to Lyle, to concoct her own vision of justice, which she then used as leverage to spur the authorities back into action.

Lyle admits that, as Mary Jane Heaster is long dead and left no confession, this hypothesis is circumstantial. And yet so, too, was Shue’s conviction. Though the autopsy proved that Zona was murdered, during the trial the prosecution provided no physical evidence that Trout was the culprit. He was convicted based entirely on his suspicious actions after her death.

The case of Trout Shue is unsettling, I think, not because of its supernatural element but because of the obviously roughshod manner in which justice was carried out. Shue might very well have been guilty; the people of Greenbrier certainly thought so. If so, why couldn’t they convict him through more substantial means? What is more troublesome about Zona Heaster’s story: that a possibly innocent man was convicted of her death based on nothing but circumstantial evidence? Or that a guilty man could not have been convicted through the accepted legal framework on which we usually rely?

The ghost story does away with this unsettling quandary. In the years since the verdict and Shue’s death, the Greenbrier Ghost has come to stand for a kind of certainty, the same certainty we seek in the thick walls of an old prison. Offering a vision of pure justice, the unavenged ghost wipes away all the legal ambiguities of the case with a brush of a spectral hand, leaving only the pure truth.