:INFO
The Greenbrier Ghost
In January 1897, Zona Heaster Shue died suddenly at her home in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. The local doctor ruled a weak heart. Her husband Erasmus Shue buried her quickly and behaved strangely at the funeral, refusing to let anyone examine the body closely. For the next four weeks, Zona's mother Mary Jane Heaster reported that her daughter appeared to her each night and described being strangled. She told her mother to look at her neck.


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She came to me every night for four weeks. She told me he was cruel to her. She turned her head completely around and said look, mother, look at my neck.


:INFO
The exhumation and trial
Mary Jane Heaster pressed the local prosecutor until he agreed to exhume the body. The autopsy found a broken neck consistent with strangulation. Erasmus Shue was tried for murder. At trial, Mary Jane Heaster described the ghost appearances under oath. The judge allowed it. The jury convicted. It remains the only known case in American legal history where spectral testimony was entered into evidence and contributed to a murder conviction.


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The conviction rested primarily on the autopsy findings, not the ghost testimony. But the prosecutor credited the mother's persistence, driven by the apparitions, with forcing the exhumation that found the evidence.
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Erasmus Shue maintained his innocence until his death in prison in 1900. No physical evidence beyond the autopsy was presented at trial.


:POLL
What drove the conviction of Erasmus Shue?
The physical evidence found at exhumation
A mother's certainty that something was wrong
A ghost who would not let the case close
Keep it open

:LINK
https://www.google.com/search?q=Greenbrier+Ghost+Zona+Shue+West+Virginia+1897
Read more about the case