And that was it. She was put in a casket and taken to her mother’s home for the funeral, during which Trout Shue remained inconsolable, jealously preventing anyone from getting near his wife’s body, according to Katie Letcher Lyle in the magazine Wonderful West Virginia.

But a month after the burial, the town began to talk. Her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, had been telling people that her daughter’s ghost was visiting her at night.

The ghost said she had been murdered.

Eventually, Heaster went to the prosecutor. She said that over a period of four nights, her daughter’s ghost appeared before her as she lay in bed. The ghost told her Trout Shue had grown enraged that Zona didn’t serve meat for dinner and grabbed her by the neck, squeezing until it broke between the first and second vertebrae.