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CMLawLibraryBlog

The CM Law Library Blog seeks to inform the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law community about key legal education, research, practice, and law library news, with a particular focus on Cuyahoga County and Ohio as well as faculty research interests.

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When Your Client Says She's Seen a Ghost

Amy Burchfield, Access & Faculty Services Librarian amy.burchfield@law.csuohio.edu | October 29, 2009 - 17:13

That’s what happened to John Alfred Preston, local prosecutor in Greenbrier County, West Virginia in 1897. His client, Mary Jane Heaster, the mother of Zona Heaster Shue, claimed that the ghost of her murdered daughter appeared to her over the course of four nights. According to the story, the ghost of Zona Heaster Shue, aka “The Greenbrier Ghost,” revealed to her mother that her husband, Edward Shue, had been a cruel man who murdered her in a fit of rage because she had not cooked meat for dinner.

Wanting to avoid this otherworldly testimony at trial, Preston stuck to the facts in examination, but the attorney for Edward Shue pressed Mary Jane Heaster in cross examination on the apparitions. The judge was unsure as to how to instruct the jury on the ghostly testimony, and many of the locals seemed to believe the spectral account. (A quick search in the West Virginia jury instructions on Lexis indeed shows no results for spectral evidence.) Following an autopsy on the exhumed body that substantiated the testimony of the ghost, Edward Shue was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

A historical marker erected by the state of West Virginia reads: “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 a ghost helped convict a murderer.”

Read more about the Greenbrier Ghost on the site American Hauntings: Where Dead Men Still Tell Tales.

While spectral evidence may have had its heyday during the time of the Salem witchcraft trials [extensive site on the trials from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law], it probably saw its last day in court in the Zona Heaster Shue case. Modern-day judges and scholars can debate a similarly tricky type of psychological evidence: testimony of “recovered memories.” Recovered memory evidence sometimes comes to light in cases involving child sexual abuse. Detractors of this theory of evidence point to something called “false memory syndrome.” See for example, From the Couch to the Bench: How Should the Legal System Respond to Recovered Memories of Childhood Sexual Abuse? 5 Am. U. J. Gender & Law 207 (1996).

Inspiration for this blog post comes from the charming Candlelight Ghost Tours of Historic Lewisburg – historical and fun!

Image sources: www.ferrum.edu/applit/studyg/West/htm/grghost.htm and www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11917.


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