Chasing Ghosts, page 18
On January 23, 1897, Edward Stribbling Shue, known by folks as Trout, was busy working a shift at the local blacksmith shop. Tall and muscular, the thirty-six-year-old had moved the previous fall from Droop Mountain in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, to nearby Lewisburg in Greenbrier County to take the job. Soon after, the dashing new stranger had met Zona, a comely twenty-year-old maiden. The two lovebirds had married in October.
While Trout was sweating over the forge that January day, he asked a neighborhood boy to stop by his house to help Zona with some chores. The boy obliged, only to arrive at a gruesome scene with a trail of blood leading to the young woman’s lifeless body on the dining room floor. Her head was tilted to the side. Terrified, he raced home and told his mom. She called the coroner, Dr. George Knapp, and broke the news to Trout.
The ghost of Zona Heaster Shue, known as the Greenbrier Ghost, gave testimony about her murder to her mother, resulting in the first conviction based on supernatural evidence in US history.
The sudden widower rushed home and began making the proper arrangements. Proper, that is, for his purposes. Trout placed Zona on her bed and dressed her with a high, stiff collar covering her neck, held by a large bow, and covered her face with a veil. By the time Knapp arrived he could hardly inspect the body since the grieving husband clung to her, sobbing and blocking access to Zona’s neck and head. Achieving nothing more than a cursory examination, Knapp officially recorded “everlasting faint” as the cause of death. In normal speak, Zona had a heart attack. He reportedly later changed his mind and claimed the real culprit was childbirth. In the weeks prior Knapp had been treating her for some unknown malady, which might or might not have been a pregnancy.
Zona’s mother didn’t agree with either of the doctor’s assessments, and neither did the surrounding community. Trout’s behavior at the scene of her death was fishy. So was his past. Zona was wife number three. Trout had divorced the first and the next one died, also under mysterious circumstances, after he accidentally dropped bricks on her head while repairing a roof. Rumor had it that he already had a new Mrs. Shue eager to try her luck. As if his history with women wasn’t bad enough, he was also an ex-con who’d done time for stealing a horse. To top it all off, he wouldn’t let anyone near Zona’s neck at the funeral. All these suspicions weren’t enough for authorities to take action, until Zona spoke up from the dead.
A short while after the burial, Mary Heaster prayed for an explanation of what had happened to her daughter. She wanted the truth, not Dr. Knapp’s sloppy, fickle-minded medical reports. In all, Mrs. Heaster had four visions over the course of several days. By the last one, Zona did a full Linda Blair head spin and spilled her phantom guts through her snapped neck, saying it “was squeezed off at the first joint.”
When local officials heard the stories of Zona’s ghost, they decided to exhume the body to take a closer look at her injury. With the widespread acceptance of Spiritualism, maybe detective work from a ghost wasn’t so far-fetched. Or maybe the prosecutor took pity on a grieving mother and had his own lingering doubts about Trout’s innocence. Regardless of the true reason, what Dr. Knapp found on Zona’s unearthed corpse matched her mother’s story. Her neck had been broken at the first vertebra. While other ghosts were busy rapping on tables and writing on slates, Zona’s was putting her husband on trial for murder.
Trout wasn’t worried. How could they prove he’d done the deed? Maybe they’d just pin it on the kid who’d found the body. Trout’s lawyer planned to discredit his mother-in-law by positioning the whole apparition thing as nothing more than a dream or the whims of a superstitious woman, but Mary assured him it was no such thing.
“I was as fully awake as I am at this moment,” Mrs. Heaster explained to the court. “She told me that Shue had come in from the shop very hungry and was furious when he found that she had not prepared any meat for supper. She had replied that there was plenty of supper without meat, including applesauce and preserves, and that it was a very good supper. She said he had come over to her, had taken her head in his hands and lifted her, and with a sudden wrench he had dislocated her neck, and she died.”
The grieving mother further explained that Zona shared physical descriptions of the house and surrounding neighborhood to help prove the apparition was real. When she shared these details, a neighbor confirmed their accuracy. Mrs. Heaster had never been to Zona’s house prior to her death.
The jury considered all the circumstantial evidence and the eyewitness account from the ghost. An hour later it came back with a guilty verdict of murder in the first degree. Trout was sentenced to life in prison. His sentence lasted three years, after which point he fell victim to an “unknown epidemic”—or maybe Zona found a way to finish her revenge.
Zona Heaster Shue’s identification of her murderer from beyond the grave is commemorated by a plaque on Route 60 in West Virginia.
With justice served, the Greenbrier Ghost lived on as a claim to fame for the small town. By the 1970s the story had been so embraced by locals that a sign commemorating the event was erected along Route 60. About a decade later, historian Katie Letcher Lyle read the curious marker and began researching the case. She eventually uncovered an article in the January 28, 1897, edition of the Greenbrier Independent that announced the death of Zona—and also happened to include a story on the front page about a ghost. But not just any ghost. The story was about the ghost of a murdered man in Australia who came back from the grave to tell authorities about the crime against him. Years later, as the article reported, the man who shared the ghost’s story confessed that he’d made the whole thing up. He had witnessed the crime, but death threats prevented him from telling the police. So he let a “ghost” handle it.
“As soon as he started the story, such is the power of nervousness that numerous other people began to see it,” the story recounted, “until its fame reached such dimensions that a search was made and the body found, and the murderers brought to justice.”
Had Mrs. Heaster read the local paper that day? It seems highly likely she saw her daughter’s name in print and would’ve caught the ghost story on page one. She knew natural causes hadn’t taken her daughter’s life, but if no one was going to listen to her pleas, maybe she believed they’d listen to a ghost.
Decades later, and a couple hundred miles directly south, another ghost spoke up and forced the legal system to listen. But before James L. Chaffin became that particular ghost, he was an eccentric but well-off farmer in Davie County, North Carolina, who’d inexplicably willed his property to just one of his four sons, Marshall. By September 1921, a fall down a staircase led to Chaffin’s death. Marshall inherited everything and shared nothing with his brothers and mother. With no bad blood between the father and the rest of his family, the whole situation was baffling and left everyone but Marshall angry and confused. But rather than fight the legitimacy of the will, the family went their separate ways and got on with their lives. In a twist of karma, Marshall died shortly after the ugly affair and so the estate was passed along to his widow and son, who were perfectly happy to keep all of it.
Unlike Zona, who wasted little time trying to make things right, Chaffin’s ghost took four years to come to his senses and fix his inheritance mess. It began on a night in June 1925, when his son, James, woke in fear from a nightmare. There, standing beside his bed, was an apparition of James’s father wearing his favorite old black overcoat. Tugging at the inside pocket, the ghost told his frightened son, “Look in the inside pocket of this coat and you will find my will.”
James was convinced this was no dream. He shared the tale with his wife, who laughed at him and told him to forget about it. But he couldn’t. That overcoat had been so vivid, and the message about the pocket so specific. His mother searched her house high and low before remembering that his brother John had the coat. James drove to John’s house in a nearby county and, sure enough, found what his father’s ghost had pointed him to.
“I looked in the inside pocket and found that the lining had been sewn together,” he recalled. “I opened the lining and discovered in the inside a small piece of paper rolled up with a piece of string around it. I opened the paper and written on it in my father’s handwriting was this line: ‘Look in the 27th chapter of Genesis.’”
The spectral scavenger hunt continued with a reference to a large Bible that had been in the family for generations. Recognizing the whole ghost thing might sound suspect, James brought a neighbor as a witness to whatever might be found inside the Bible. Together, they tracked down the well-worn book in a bureau drawer at his mother’s home, and there at the designated location was a sheet of paper with his father’s handwriting:
“After reading the 27th chapter of Genesis, I, James L. Chaffin, do make my last will and testament, and here it is. I want, after giving my body decent burial, my little property to be equally divided between my four children, if they are living at my death, both personal and real estate divided equal.” This updated will, dated January 16, 1919, also stipulated that his children were to care for their “Mammy” if she was still alive.
Genesis 27, if you’re not up on your Bible studies, is the chapter where Jacob poses as his elder brother, Esau, to secure Isaac’s blessing. Chaffin seemed to be suggesting that Marshall had pulled a Jacob. Chaffin may have been more to blame for that than Marshall, but James was about to put all that behind him.
Anyone who knew the late farmer agreed that the handwriting was his, as did a handwriting analyst. Armed with a new will, apparently written after the Marshall version, and a host of witnesses, the inheritance-less Chaffin boys prepared to go to court and fight for their long overdue share. By December 1925, a jury had been sworn in. It was suggested that perhaps Chaffin had mentioned the coat-pocket-Bible will at some point and that James subconsciously was aware of it, but he adamantly claimed neither he nor anyone else in the family knew anything about it. As the case went on, even Marshall’s widow acknowledged the new will appeared to be in her father-in-law’s handwriting. The court agreed and the second will was probated, meaning Davie County had officially accepted into its records a message from beyond.
“Many of my friends do not believe it is possible for the living to hold communication with the dead, but I am convinced that my father actually appeared to me on these several occasions, and I shall believe it to the day of my death.”
—James P. Chaffin, in December 1925, after the jury returned a verdict in his favor
Friendly Ghosts
When Michael and Stephanie Romano (last name changed for privacy) bought their house in New Rochelle, New York, a paranormal experience was the last thing they expected in their new suburban neighborhood. This was a town best known as the idyllic home of the Petries from The Dick Van Dyke Show, not ghosts. For the most part, life was more Petrie than paranormal, until their two-year-old daughter, Isabelle, started talking about an “angel” who would come into her room to care for her and just be with her. The young girl called her Rebecca. “She was never scared of her,” Stephanie recalls. “She was super matter-of-fact. It wasn’t like an imaginary friend.”
After a few years Isabelle stopped talking about Rebecca. The spirit, whatever it was, seemed to have gone away. Then the Romanos had a second daughter.
“We’d joke that Rebecca was back because Amelia would track like she was looking at someone, but there was no one there,” Stephanie says.
As the newborn appeared to be seeing something, Isabelle began having dreams about a monster climbing the stairs and heading to her room.
“It felt like it wasn’t a dream the way she talked about it,” Stephanie says. “I got to the point where I put up a cross in her room and a St. Benedict’s medal. I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s upsetting her.”
Stephanie, a New York City lawyer, found herself researching what to do to get rid of a ghost. One answer suggested the solution was as simple as asking the ghost to leave.
“I’m up with the baby in the middle night, and I said, ‘Rebecca, I think you’re here taking care of my babies, but I’ve got this. I’m taking care of them and they’re okay, and I need you to leave now because you’re not taking care of her, you’re scaring her. So I need you to leave.”
After that Isabelle stopped having the bad dreams, and Amelia’s eyes stopped tracking movements that weren’t there.
The previous and only other owner of the home had been a woman who’d passed soon before the Romanos purchased the house. She was the mother of two daughters.
There are often reports of children reminiscent of that creepy kid in the 1999 film The Sixth Sense. They see dead people. Fortunately the ghosts they’re seeing aren’t like the ones believed to be haunting places like the LaLaurie Mansion or Eastern State Penitentiary. Ghosts, after all, aren’t always trapped in places where their living selves suffered gruesome torture or other terrible misfortunes. The ghosts children see might be perfectly friendly; comforting, even.
While working at the American Society for Psychical Research years ago, Loyd Auerbach had colleagues working a case in Brooklyn regarding a “doting grandmother” who’d recently died. Her daughter had two young boys who claimed the grandmother appeared in their bedroom at night to tuck them in and watch over them. The experience was a pleasant one, not a scary one. At one point their father was quoted as saying, “If we could leave them with her legally as a babysitter, without getting into trouble, we would’ve done it.” The family had no issues with the ghost; they called the ASPR purely out of curiosity.
These types of stories happen often enough to cause wonder. Sure, kids are known to have imaginary friends and their tales of “ghosts” might be nothing more than some phantasm of their own creation or even just a dream.
“I think, on occasion, kids do mix up imagination and reality to have something like a hallucination-like experience,” said Charles Fernyhough, a psychologist at Durham University, in a 2019 interview with the Washington Post.
Then there are occasions where something else seems to be happening. Jason Lambert, an advertising creative director, shared a story from his childhood that would appear to fall squarely in the “something else” category. His ghostly encounter happened at the age of eleven while visiting his aunt’s late-eighteenth-century farmhouse in Cheshire, Connecticut. Lambert and his younger sister were staying for the weekend, and being the older sibling, he took the larger of the two guest rooms. It had a single window and just a few pieces of antique furniture as décor. A large closet held linens but was mostly empty.
“I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was a little freaked out when I went to bed that first night—clearly a combination of my eleven-year-old imagination plus the fact that a house over two centuries old will no doubt take on a different feel at night,” Lambert says. “Regardless, though, I managed to fall asleep easily.”
All was well until just after midnight when he woke with a feeling that he wasn’t alone. It wasn’t a noise. No knockings or rappings on walls, as mediums so often claim.
“There was a weird energy. A heaviness, really. Like there was somebody in the room with me…specifically, in the closet—and even more specifically, an old man who was really angry. Out of all the things that an eleven-year-old’s mind could conjure, I don’t why I felt that it was angry old man, but I did.”
He got out of bed and moved into his sister’s room for the rest of the weekend. Lambert didn’t speak of the event until college, when he made another visit to his aunt’s house. By then she had a dog. The pooch, like eleven-year-old Lambert, felt an uneasiness around the closet. He’d sniff at it and bark.
“You know we have a ghost in the house, right?” Lambert’s aunt told him. He explained that he couldn’t sleep in the guest room as a kid, and she responded saying that she couldn’t either.
“She had slept in the room once herself and had experienced an incredibly vivid nightmare that an enraged old man came out of the closet and was standing over her with a knife,” Lambert says. “She said it had felt so real that she immediately switched rooms and never slept there again.”
Another guest tried sleeping in the room and had a similar nightmare, claiming an angry old man was at the foot of his bed trying to pull the sheets off. He woke up and saw the comforter slowly being pulled off the bed. Not slipping off, but being slightly lifted and pulled.
Lambert’s aunt eventually learned from a neighbor that the previous owner was a “nasty old man who everyone on the street utterly despised.”
He had died of a heart attack in the house years before Lambert’s aunt moved in.
As imaginative as eleven-year-old Lambert may have been, the old man who multiple people experienced was no hallucination-like creation.
Hans Holzer, who’s been called the “Father of the Paranormal” and wrote 140 books on the subject, believed that oftentimes ghosts don’t realize they’re dead and have unfinished business on earth. Lambert’s angry old man may have been such a ghost. The living, however, can help a ghost resolve a conflict so it can get on with its afterlife. These types of cases show up often in movies, such as The Changeling (1980), in which George C. Scott’s character helps the ghost of a child murdered in the attic get the truth out. The aforementioned The Sixth Sense explores the same theme, with Haley Joel Osment’s psychic child helping Bruce Willis’s character eventually see that he’s dead.10 Sometimes, it appears they happen in real life, too.
Artist and spirit communicator Philip Wilson described his experience with helping a ghost in conflict find peace at his family’s Montana house. The phenomena began one night in the mid-1990s after his sister brought home an antique freestanding mirror covered with dark spots. His mother, who had exhibited psychic abilities in the past, saw an apparition of a woman in a ball gown walking up the stairs. The following evening she heard sounds of a party in the kitchen. Philip had yet to witness any of this until he looked in the mirror one day and saw a woman’s face in his reflection, albeit fuzzy and unfocused. The family got together to understand what was happening, when suddenly his mother and sister began channeling a conversation between the madam of a brothel in the 1800s and a woman who was her best friend. Adding to the bizarre scene were two antique dolls sitting atop a cabinet, which appeared to cry real tears as the story unfolded. As the conversation grew heated, the two women revealed that the friend had a lover in town and the madam became jealous. Soon after, the man was suspiciously crushed to death by a pile of wood. Before the friction began, the madam had given her friend the mirror, which Philip believes had entrapped the energy of both women.
