Ghost of a Chance

Published Aug 1, 2024, 9:00 AM

The afterlife can hold some curious answers, if you know where to look. Here are two tales that explain what we mean.

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Chances are that you've heard of someone being visited by a loved one after they've passed away. Maybe your friend thought that he smelled the distinctive scent of his grandpa's pipe, or your sister swore that she could hear Grandma calling her inside. Maybe you yourself felt your childhood dog cuddling up next to you in bed years after they went to that great dog park in the sky. But whether you think it's your imagination or not, these visitations often feel like someone you love just wants to see you one more time. For Mary, seeing her dead daughter Zona at the foot of her bed was far from heartwarming, especially when Zona's ghost told her mother exactly who had killed her. On January twenty third of eighteen ninety seven, Erasmus Shoe was working in his blacksmith shop in Greenbrier, County, West Virginia. He asked a local boy to check in on his wife of three months, Zona Heaster's shoe, and asked if she needed anything from the market. To the boy's horror, when he opened the door of the shoe's house, he found Zona lying dead on the floor. The next few hours went by quickly. Erasmus rushed to the house as soon as he heard the news. By the time the doctor arrived to examine the body, he had already laid her out for a funeral. He dressed Zona in a long dress with a high, stiff collar and a long veil tied under her chin. When the doctor tried to unbutton the collar to examine Zona's neck, Arrasmus demanded that he and the examination. He rushed the doctor out before he could even determine the cause of death. By the next day, Zona was in the ground, and according to Erasmus, that was the end of it all. At least it should have been, but Zona had other ideas. A few weeks after her death, her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, was just getting ready for sleep when something appeared next to her on her bed. Standing in front of her, looking as solid and healthy as ever, was her dead daughter Zona. Over the next few nights, Zona continued to appear to Mary Jane four separate times. Although at first she seemed reluctant to answer questions about her death, she finally relented and spoke about it. She told her mother that Erasmus had been mad at her over the meal she had cooked, and that her neck had been and I quote squeezed off at the first joint. For weeks, Mary Jane begged county officials to reopen her daughter's case. Not only had Zona allegedly appeared to her mother, other townsfolk had been whispering about murder. After it came to light that Erasmus didn't let the doctor find a cause of death. To quiet down the rumors, the local prosecutor ordered that Zona's body should be exhumed. On February twenty second, nearly a month after Zona's death, she was exhumed for an autopsy. The doctor quickly found that Mary Jane was right. Zona's neck had been broken right between the first and second vertebrae, her windpipe had been crushed, and there were finger marks on her skin. Zona had been strangled to death. Erasmus was immediately arrested and four months later he was put on trial. The star witness was Mary Jane Heaster, who told the story on the stand of her daughter's ghost solving her own murder. While the defense attorney questioned her fiercely, hoping to make the ghost story and the prosecution sound a bit ridiculous, his tactic backfired. Mary Jane simply refused to admit any doubt that her dead daughter had appeared to her. In her opinion, it wasn't a dream or a vision or an overactive imagination. It was her daughter's ghost. Her unwavering account convinced many townspeople to believe her and likely helps way the jury to the prosecution side. During the trial, it also came out that Erasmus had a checkered past. He'd been divorced by one wife who accused him of being cruel. His second wife died mysteriously, just like Zona. In between Mary Jane's ghost story, Erasmus's history, and the circumstantial evidence, it only took the jury an hour to find him guilty. Erasmus Shu was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his wife, but only lived three more years before dying from the flu in nineteen hundred. Ane Zona's case went down in American history as one of the only known instances in which a ghost helped convict a murderer, giving a curious new meaning to the phrase the spirit of the law. Sister Francesca plunged the blade into the corpse, piercing flesh and then bone. It was difficult work. Her tools were poor and her training inadequate. This was, after all, her first autopsy. To make things even more complicated, the stakes were personal. The body on the table didn't belong to just any forty year old woman. She had been Claire of Montefalco, a prominent abbess renowned throughout the thirteenth century in Italy for her wisdom and her holiness. Before her death, she was the matriarch of the local Augustinian monastery, making her sister Francesca's direct superior. The nun worked methodically, taking great care not to damage the body more than absolutely necessary, and finally she managed to cut through Claire's ribs, exposing the chest cavity. With a mixture of apprehension and reverence, she reached into the cadaver and drew out the heart, placing it beside the Abbess Sister Francesca carefully sliced into the organ and then began searching through the folds of flesh for any abnormalities. She wasn't looking for evidence of murder. Claire had died after a prolonged illness, so there was no suspicion of foul play. In fact, the procedure was not intended to reveal a cause of death at all. Instead, Sister Francesca was looking for something even more important, physical proof that Claire had been touched by the divine. Her search was inspired by an event from fourteen years earlier. In twelve ninety four, while celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany, the Abbess abruptly fell into a state of spiritual ecstasy, a prolonged religious trance in which she lost awareness of the physical world. For several weeks. Claire was incapable of taking care of herself and would not to even eat. The nuns kept her alive by ladling spoonfuls of sugar water into her mouth. When she finally snapped out of it, she seemed changed. She told everyone that she'd had a strange vision in which Christ himself had asked her to carry his cross in her heart. Evidently he meant this literally. When Claire agreed, he plunged the cross directly into her chest, impaling her with it. Now it sounds a little intense, but the nun took the visions as per roof of Claire's great holiness, and this was seemingly confirmed in the years to come. After her vision, Claire experienced near constant pain, yet she continued to serve as abbess and eventually became famous for her wisdom and her charity. When she died in thirteen oh four, the nuns in her order hoped to see her officially recognized as a saint, but that wouldn't be easy. In the Catholic Church, canonizing typically requires evidence that the deceased has performed two verifiable miracles. Sister Francesca wasn't in the mood to sit around and wait for the abbess to bless her from beyond the grave. She believed that Claire's vision from years earlier would constitute a miracle if she could prove that it happened, So she took matters into her own hands and cut Claire open. She had only been examining the heart for a few minutes when she suddenly dropped her scalpel. She stepped back from the table in wonder, making the sign of the Cross. Within the heart, she had discovered the image of a crucifix, and as the autopsy continued, the nun uncovered more religious symbols, including a whip and a crown of thorns. Whether or not you buy that largely depends on your personal beliefs. At the time, a lot of religious people accused them of tampering with the heart and creating the symbols themselves. It's also possible that they were simply seeing what they wanted to see. The good news is you don't have to take Sister Francesca's word for it. You can decide for yourself. You see. It took a little longer than she expected, but Claire was eventually canonized as a saint, and because of that, her heart is still on display at the Augustinian Convent in Montefalco, which means that you can see it for yourself and determine whether you think the images are real, and by doing so, you'll be searching for the truth in Claire's remains. Continuing, the autopsy that Sister Francesca started seven hundred years Ago. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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