I thought this was really weird and decided to tell about it. Back in 2001 when I was 11 I got really sick. I went to lie down and started to feel really hot, probably from the fever. Then suddenly I felt something very cold on my head like an ice pack or washcloth dipped in ice water. Then I felt a soft brush across my cheek. The words “Your Ok” passed through my mind and I felt very warm inside. After that I felt sleepy and nodded off to sleep.

Another night, about 3 months later, I was listening to my music, and I felt a brush across my cheek again. I also felt very warm again. The thought “Glad you’re OK now.” passed through my mind. I would say I was imagining things, but by that time I forgot I was sick 3 months earlier. I conjured up of the episode from 3 months earlier, as well as my courage, and asked, “Who are you?” The voice in my thoughts replied “Just call me an old friend for now.” Then all traces of this “friend” disappeared. Also all the thoughts that ran through my head were not my voice but the voice of a boy.

Other things like this have happened to me since then.

One day my friend, Mandy and I were standing outside on her porch watching the landlord mow the field. After she went inside I felt some sort of need to stay there. I looked over toward the well house and saw a little child. I don’t know if it was a boy or girl. Thinking it was one of the kids that lived nearby, I ignored it and looked away. I looked back 3 seconds later, and the child was gone. I ran over to see if there was anybody there, but no one was in sight. I told my friend and she said she felt that something bad was going to happen. It suddenly got stormy and the lights started to flicker a lot.

Later that evening, the phone kept ringing. When I went to answer it no one was there. It said: ” You have been called by a person on the same line.” They didn’t have another telephone line. It happened about four times. But the lights wouldn’t stop flickering. I called the neighbors to see if their lights were flickering but theirs weren’t. Shortly after the lights stopped flickering, the phone stopped ringing, and everything seemed normal. I went into the bathroom and I looked out the window and saw the child again. I called my friend over, and she saw it too. We decided that it was an omen for something bad to happen. Normally we aren’t negative, but we just had a feeling.

Later the night, my neighbors’ dogs took off running at something, which no one could see. Just as they were rounding the road leading up to the barn a speeding car came around the corner. I had never seen this car before, and there was no license plate. The dogs survived with out any permanent injury. I never saw the car again, or the child. Neither have any of the neighbors. After some research in the library, I found out that in 1965 or a year around there, a speeding car on the same road hit a young girl where I lived. The car had had no license plate. Could it have been the same car? Why had we had the bad feeling and who had been calling us? We might never find out.

My grandparents own the house that I have lived in my whole life because my grandparents rented it out to my mom. Weird things have always happened there. For example, when my sister was about twelve years old (she is now twenty three), she was dragged out of bed by her feet and down the stairs and passed my mom who was making breakfast in the kitchen. Then she was dragged outside and hung over our ground pool. Then was set down. My sister went inside and my mom asked her how she got outside and my sister told my mom what happened. At first my mom didn’t believe her but later my sister was complaining about her back hurting. My mom looked at it and my sister had bruises on it from the stairs. My mom started believing her and looked at my sister’s ankles and there were bruises of fingerprints on them. When this happened I was a baby so I couldn’t of done it. Mom was busy making breakfast and no one else was in the house.

Then when I was about nine years old I started waking up by falling out of my bed. Then one night I woke up and I was all the way across the room from my bed, which was about 10 feet away.

One day for haha’s my friends and I were trying witchcraft because we thought it was cool. We lit candles all in a circle in the center of the living room and we all left the room, at the moment I can’t remember why but when we came back in all the candles were knocked over but all facing outward.

We finally moved out because our cats started flipping in the house and we didn’t want to get rid of them. My grandparents are selling the house.

Mamie Thurman may not be known by a lot of people but there are several people like family members who do know who she was.

My name is Meegan Thurman and my twin sister’s name is Maria Thurman. We are fifteen years old and are the fourth cousins of Mamie Thurman. You people may not believe my sister, and me but it’s the truth. We were not born when she was murdered, but it’s a story that will go on for generations in our family. We don’t know who killed our lovely cousin but we hope to find out. We think it was Jack, our cousin Mamie’s husband, but nobody really knows the truth or even told the truth. We wish we could find out who killed her but we don’t know if we’ll live to be able to know the truth or if anybody will ever know. Mamie wasn’t really our cousin from our side of the family, but she was our cousin by Jack because he was our cousin from our actual family. We don’t actually know anything about her brother George Morrison but I don’t think he knows anything about us either.

Anyhow, to get to the point of the story, we were at twenty-two mountains to look around where her body was found. It was kind of late at night but we weren’t sure about what the time actually was. So we just kept looking around with our flashlights. We were about ten years old at the time. All of a sudden we heard a death defying sound like a gunshot or something and then a woman’s scream. It was a bloody scream, so screeching it sounded like someone scratching a window or something. Then Maria pointed her flashlight towards one direction and we stood open-mouthed staring at the man hovering above a big lump of something with a gun, knife, and gunpowder in his hand. He never saw us, but when he disappeared we went to see what the object he was hovering above was. It turns out, it was our lovely cousin who had been found dead at that very spot in 1932, Mamie Thurman, whom everyone says haunts that spot. We screamed to the top of our lungs and ran down the mountain to find where Dad was parked at the bottom of the mountain. When we told him what had happened, breathlessly, he thought we were crazy. We told him that he could go look for himself so he did. We didn’t find our cousin’s ghostly body, but found a dark pile of blood where we saw her.

Investigators have concluded, after months of research, that what we saw was a flashback of the death of our cousin Mamie Thurman. We have never, and probably never, go back on that mountain again after that terrifying night of murder of our cousin Mamie Thurman.

When I was twelve years old my parents informed me we were relocating due to my dad’s employment. I was scared due to a new school and new surroundings, and we were going to a property my mom inherited from her parents. It took several months to get ready, so long in fact that they decided to purchase a mobile home instead of building a house. My older sister had the perfect one for them and it had only been lived in a few years! Everything went as planned and my room was at the end of the hall from the kitchen and the weird thing is this didn’t scare me!

I would wake every single night at exactly 2:30 and look down at the end of the hall, I could see this old lady; her hair pulled up in a perfect bun, wearing a black knee length dress, and black dress shoes with gold buckles on top. She was a little heavy set with chubby cheeks, she stood just turned a little to one side with her arms folded and the look on her face was as though she wondered what we were doing in her home. I saw this lady for months before I’d say anything and when I finally did it really scared my sister because I described the lady who had owned and had died in that same trailer! My parents wouldn’t tell me because they figured I’d be afraid.

I’m thirty-six years old now and I can still see her in my mind perfectly.

It all started one night when I was in my room and all of the sudden something woke me. It was like a cold chill or feeling it was just something not normal, something not right at the time. When I was five years old, I opened my eyes and looked into someone else’s unfamiliar eyes. The person moved back and she wasn’t walking, she was floating. She was an older woman. The next day I told my mom and she asked what the woman had looked like so I described her. She just stared at me and said that I just had described my great grandmother, which I had never seen before or even seen a picture of before. I used to see her every night and sometimes her husband (my great grandfather), would be with her.

Years later I found out that my uncle had slept in that same room one night and the woman had went through the drawers making very loud sounds. And mom would be down in the basement and she would always hear footsteps but no one was home. Once she was in the basement and she heard dishes clanging and water running and she just thought that I was up there doing dishes. When she went upstairs all of the dishes were done and put up and I was never even there and no one but my mom had been there all day.

We moved and I haven’t seen her since I am now 14.

Around the year 1960, while attending the Marlinton Middle School, some classmates and I interviewed a local man about a ghost sighting he experienced.

The man told a story about when he used to drive a pulp wood truck to Covington, Virginia and back. Late one evening, something bizarre occurred on his return trip that would leave him shaken for life. He claimed that as he drove into the “Renick valley area” on the south side of Droop Mountain, he came upon approximately six horsemen in the road. They did not yield right of way for him and he had to completely stop the truck to avoid striking them. They were in single file formation moving at a slow pace, and he was able to see that they appeared to be dressed in civil war uniforms. He opened the driver’s side door and stepped out on the running board to tell them to move. That was when he noticed that the horses and men would utterly “disappear” when exiting the beam of the truck’s headlights. There was no one around after the last one exited the lit area.

I found the elderly man highly believable, and noticed how visibly distraught he became just retelling the story. I am guessing at the year because all of my notes from that interview burned in a house fire leaving me to rely on memory as to what all was said…

Besides being a unique case in the annals of West Virginia ghost lore, the story of the Greenbrier Ghost has made history in other places also, like in the documents of the American court system. It remains the only one of its kind… the only case in which the word of a ghost helped to solve a crime and convict a murderer.

Elva Zona Heaster was born in Greenbrier in 1873, although little was known about her early life, other than that she gave birth to an illegitimate child in 1895. A year later, in October of 1896, she met a man named Erasmus (also called Edward) Stribbling Trout Shue, an out-of-towner who had come to Greenbriar to work as a blacksmith. The two were attracted to each other and soon married, despite the animosity felt towards Shue by Zona’s mother, Mary Jane Robinson Heaster. She had taken an instant dislike to him and always felt that there was something the otherwise amiable man was hiding.

On January 23, 1897, Zona’s body was discovered inside of her house by a small boy whom Shue had sent to the house to see if Zona needed anything from the store. Zona was found lying on the floor, stretched out with her feet together, one hand to her side and the other stretched across her abdomen. The local physician and coroner, Dr. George W. Knapp, was quickly summoned to the house, although he didn’t arrive for nearly an hour.

By this time, Shue had carried his wife’s body upstairs and dressed her in her best clothing. A high-collared dress covered her neck and a veil had been placed over her face. While Dr. Knapp examined her and tried to determine the cause of death, Shue stayed by his wife’s side, cradling her head and sobbing. Because of his obvious grief, Knapp made only a cursory examination, although he did notice some bruising near her neck. When he tried to look closer, Shue reacted so violently that he ended the examination and left. Initially, he listed her cause of death as “everlasting faint” and then as “childbirth”. It is unknown whether Zona was pregnant or not, but for two weeks prior to her death, Knapp had been treating her for “female trouble”.

Zona’s body was laid out for wake and while many friends and neighbors came by the house, Shue allowed no one to get close to the body. He had tied a large scarf around her neck and told everyone that “it had been her favorite”. He placed a pillow on one side of her head and folded cloth on the other. He said that he “wanted Zona to rest easier”, but several people noticed the strange looseness to the corpse’s head. Needless to say, people started to talk.

There was one person who was convinced that Shue was lying about Zona’s death and that was her mother, Mary Jane Heaster. She claimed to have prayed that her daughter would come back from the dead and reveal the true facts behind her death. According to legend, four weeks later, her prayer’s were answered.

For four nights, the spirit of Zona Shue appeared at her mother’s bed side and explained how she had been murdered by her husband. He had been abusive and cruel, she told her mother, and in a fit of rage over the fact that she had not had dinner for him, he attacked her and had broken her neck.

Heaster went to the local prosecutor, John Alfred Preston, and told him about the visitations by Zona’s ghost. It is unlikely that he agreed to pursue the matter on the word of a ghost… it is more likely that he had heard the rumors that were going around about Shue’s strange behavior at the wake.

Preston ordered the girl’s body exhumed on February 22 and an autopsy revealed that she had indeed died from a broken neck and a crushed windpipe from being strangled. She was arrested and charged with murder. His last words on the way to jail were “they cannot prove I did it”.

While he awaited trial, information from Shue’s past began to surface… apparently Mary Jane Heaster had been right about him all along. He had served time in jail for theft and had been married twice before Zona. His first marriage had ended in divorce because he beat his wife and his second wife had died under mysterious circumstances. According to Shue, she had fallen and hit her head on a rock.

The trial began in late June and despite the fact that the evidence against Shue was circumstantial, he was quickly found guilty of murder. Numerous people testified against him although Mary Jane Heaster’s story of Zona’s ghost was ruled inadmissible. The defense attorney did bring it up while he was questioning her, trying to show that she was unbalanced, but this had no effect on the jury. In other words, they believed the story of the ghost…. they just didn’t want to admit it.

Shue was sentenced to life in prison but the verdict didn’t satisfy many of the townspeople. On July 11, a lynching party was formed but Shue was taken away to the state prison in Moundsville, just before the vigilantes reached the jail. Shue died in prison in March of 1900 from an undisclosed illness.

Did Zona Shue’s ghost really visit her mother to tell her of her murder? There have been many questions raised about the authenticity of the story over the years, but the fact remains…. according to the jury, the right man finally paid for his crime. Who are we to argue?

When I was little I lived in Oak Hill. The first dream (vision? experience?) I ever had occurred when I was four.

First I noticed two transparent white figures who paced and gestured like they were arguing, then a black tattered thing, like a live shadow hovering near the ceiling. Then the room just filled up with all sorts of strange looking creatures, some humanoid, some not.

I wasn’t afraid because a hooded woman in a gauzy green dress sat by my bed all night. When the sun came up, they all gradually faded away.

Anybody who has heard of something like this happening, or thinks they know what the Green Lady is, e-mail me at: Carrie3@care2.com.