Note: Below is the text of the story as told by Dewitt Wyatt in the audio. There are factual errors in this version of the legend that is based on a true story. For example, it is obvious in the photo of the tombstone (which was not erected until the 1970s) that Zona Heaster Shue was twenty-two, not fifteen, when she married Erasmus Trout Shue and died. Sharyn McCrumb and her assistants conducted extensive research on these events and all the people involved in the families and the court case, for McCrumb's 2017 ballad novel, The Unquiet Grave (Atria Books). Her novel tells the story from the point of view of Zona's mother and James P. D. Gardner, the first African American lawyer practicing in West Virginia, who was a young member of the defense team in Shue's case.
This account of the "Greenbrier Ghost" was compiled by Avis Caynor from accounts by Dennis Deitz, George Deitz, and G. S. McKeever, as recounted in The Greenbrier Ghost and other Strange Stories, by Dennis Deitz (South Charleston, WV: Mountain Memories Books, 1990).
![]() |
![]() |
|
Return
to "Ghosts" Menu |
Forward to Greenbrier "Ghost Activity" |
West
Virginia's Appalachian Music and Literature in AppLit
This page's last update: 10/23/17