On the morning of January 23, 1897, an eleven-year-old boy knocked on the door of the Trout Shoe house in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. He had come to ask the lady of the house whether she needed anything from the market, as he often did. There was no answer. The door stood slightly ajar, which struck him as strange, because he knew she was always home at that hour.
He pushed it open and stepped into the quiet hallway. At the bottom of the stairs lay the body of Mrs. Zona Trout Shoe, motionless. The boy ran to fetch his mother, who sent for the local doctor, a man named Dr.
George Knapp. By the time the doctor arrived, the woman’s husband, Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shoe, had already returned home. He had carried his wife’s body upstairs, washed it, dressed it in a high-necked dress, placed a veil over her face, and prepared her for burial. When the doctor tried to examine the body to determine the cause of death, the husband refused to leave her side.
He became so overcome with grief that a proper examination became impossible. Dr. Knapp eventually left the house without completing his assessment, and he reported the death as an everlasting faint. He later changed this to complications due to pregnancy, even though Zona had told no one she was with child.
The young woman who lay dead at the age of twenty-three had been born Elvira Zona Hester in 1873, the oldest of three children. She had always been known by her middle name, Zona. In November 1895, unmarried and pregnant at twenty-two, she had given birth to a child. Around that same time, a man named Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shoe moved to the area.
He was more than eleven years her senior, born in 1861 in Virginia. He had changed his name to Edward at some point, but in Greenbrier County, everyone simply called him Trout. He was a blacksmith, tall, slim, handsome, and charming, and he soon caught the attention of the young ladies in the area. But he carried a mysterious past.
In 1885, he had married a woman named Eusine Cutlip McMillan, and they had a daughter, Gertrude Lucretia, before divorcing in 1889. After the separation, their daughter was raised by her grandparents. The rumors about Trout centered on his second wife. In 1894, he married Lucian Trit, a pleasant young woman of only sixteen.
Within months, she was dead, and the cause of her death was surrounded in mystery. One story claimed she was poisoned. Another said she was pregnant and slipped on ice. A popular version held that Trout accidentally dropped a large object, like a brick, on her head while working on his house.
No official cause of death was ever recorded for her. After she died, Trout was arrested for stealing a horse and sent to prison for a time. He came to Greenbrier County hoping to leave that past behind. In the summer of 1896, Zona Hester visited the blacksmith.
She soon became fascinated with the handsome man working at the forge, and she found excuses to return as often as she could. It became obvious to the people of Greenbrier County that she was infatuated with him, and a courtship followed. On October 20, 1896, just three months after they had met, the two were married. Zona’s mother, Mary Jane Hester, was deeply displeased.
The couple lived in a log house. Trout worked long hours at his trade, while Zona went to the markets, cooked, and cleaned. Trout hired a neighbor’s eleven-year-old son to help her with the chores and run errands. It was that boy who found her at the bottom of the stairs.
After the funeral, life for the people of Greenbrier County continued, but Zona’s mother remained suspicious of her son-in-law. She had never approved of the marriage and believed he knew far more about her daughter’s death than he admitted. The cause of death had apparently been established, and Zona had been laid to rest. Mrs.
Hester, a religious woman, began to pray every night that Zona would appear and tell her how she had died. A few weeks later, she started telling people that she had been visited by the ghost of her daughter. At first, her story was not widely believed. The idea that a dead woman appeared at night to tell her mother that her death was not an accident seemed absurd to many neighbors.
But as Mrs. Hester repeated her account, some began to believe her. One of them was her brother-in-law, Johnson Hester. Together they went to the Lewisburg prosecutor, John A.
Preston, and asked him to open an inquiry and confirm how Zona had actually died. Preston investigated the man who had not been long in Greenbrier County. He discovered that the first wife had divorced Trout due to his abusive behavior, and that the second wife had died under very mysterious circumstances. Preston then contacted Dr.
Knapp, who told him it had been very difficult to find the exact cause of Mrs. Trout Shoe’s death, because whenever he tried to examine her, the husband became emotional and asked him not to disturb his wife. The prosecutor concluded that a full autopsy was needed, and Zona’s body was exhumed. The autopsy was performed in a nearby schoolhouse.
It found that Zona’s neck had been broken and her windpipe crushed. There were bruises around her neck, which had been dislocated between the first and second vertebrae. Erasmus Trout Shoe was arrested, transported to a jail in Lewisburg, and charged with the murder of his third wife. The trial began on June 23, 1897.
Mary Jane Hester gave evidence. She told the court that her daughter had suddenly appeared to her and explained how she had died. According to Mrs. Hester, Zona said that her husband had returned home and was not pleased because she had not prepared any meat for supper.
She had prepared a good meal with bread, butter, apple sauce, preserves, and other things, but he became angry, came toward her, took hold of her neck, and strangled her. Mrs. Hester went on to describe the house and neighborhood where her daughter and the defendant had lived. The judge asked if she had ever been there.
She replied that she had not. The judge was surprised and informed the court that he himself had been there many times and could not describe the area in such detail as she had. Mrs. Hester also told a second story.
She said that Trout had placed a sheet under his wife’s head as she lay in her coffin. When the coffin was transported for burial, he removed it and left it for Mrs. Hester. She kept the sheet for some weeks, then decided to wash it.
When she did, it turned red in the wash tub. She washed it again over the following days but could not remove the reddish tint. The sheet was brought into court and presented to the jury, who all agreed that it had indeed become reddish. The defense questioned Mrs.
Hester at length about the vision she claimed to have had. Despite intense questioning, they were unable to discredit her. When they suggested it had not happened, she insisted that it had, and her sincerity seemed to resonate with everyone in the courtroom. On the sixth day of the trial, the defendant took the stand.
His appearance did nothing to convince the jury he was innocent. The Greenbrier Independent, reporting daily on the trial, wrote that his testimony, manner, and so forth made an unfavorable impression on the spectators. The trial lasted eight days. The jury was sent out to deliberate and returned after just over an hour with a guilty verdict.
However, two jurors voted against the death sentence. Without a unanimous decision, the judge sentenced Trout to life in prison. The decision did not sit well with many residents of Greenbrier County. On July 11, 1897, an armed mob marched to the local jail where Trout was being held while awaiting transportation to the state penitentiary in Moundsville.
The sheriff, however, had managed to move the prisoner. With Trout out of the way, he persuaded the mob to go home and let justice take its course. Erasmus Trout Shoe remained in prison until his death on March 13, 1900. Mary Jane Hester died in 1916.
In the years that followed the trial, she always maintained that she had indeed been visited by her deceased daughter. What is certain is that her insistence convinced the Lewisburg prosecutor to open an investigation, and without it, Trout may have gone unpunished. A historical marker in Greenbrier County commemorates the case and Zona’s death.
It reads: only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer.