5 Ghosts Who Solved Their Own Murders

5 Fisher’s Ghost

In 1826, according to friend and neighbor George Worrall, Australian farmer Fred Fisher left the country with no intention to ever return. Conveniently, he’d signed his farm over to Worrall before he left. Four months later, a local man named John Farley claimed he’d seen Fisher’s ghost, pointing to the paddock where his body was eventually found. Police figured the guy who stole his farm was probably involved, so Worrall was arrested, confessed and sentenced to death. It’s possible, of course, that Farley gleaned the information another way, but in the 19th century, “a ghost told me” was more credible than “I heard it at the pub.” It also might not have happened at all, since it wasn’t documented in police or court records, but that paperwork is tedious enough already. You can’t blame them for omitting the ghost of it all.

4 The Greenbrier Ghost

Just a few months after her wedding in 1897, Zora Heaster Shue of Greenbrier County, West Virginia was found dead of what was believed to be natural causes — so believed, in fact, that no one bothered to examine her body until her mother claimed she was visited by her daughter’s spirit and told that her new husband had killed her. It turned out she had indeed been strangled to death, and her husband was arrested. At his trial, the prosecution tried to downplay the whole ghost thing because, well, obviously, but the defense brought it up in an attempt to discredit Shue’s mother as a witness. It backfired because the jury totally believed it, and Mr. Shue was sentenced to life in prison. 

Again, it’s possible Shue’s mother simply thought correctly that her new son-in-law was an asshole and wanted an investigation, but you can’t argue with results.

3 Teresita Basa

In 1977, Teresita Basa was found dead in her Chicago apartment with a knife still lodged in her chest (so, you know, probably not natural causes). Four months later, a colleague at the hospital where she worked admitted extremely reluctantly to police that his wife had been experiencing trance states in which she was possessed by Basa’s spirit, who told her she was killed by an orderly who stole her jewelry and gave it to his girlfriend. This seems particularly fishy because everyone involved worked together, but however the couple might have been involved, it was apparently bad enough that “it was ghosts” was preferable in 1977. It wasn’t the 1800s, after all.

2 Maria Marten

In 1827, Maria Marten left her home in Suffolk to elope with her boyfriend, William Corder, and was never seen again. When Corder returned, he claimed they were living on the Isle of Wight, but she couldn’t travel because she was sick, and her letters must have been lost, and she also forgot how to read. Marten’s stepmother began having recurring dreams of her ghost in the barn where she knew Marten had met Corder the last time she was seen alive. That’s a pretty normal dream to have when someone has obviously been murdered, and sure enough, Marten’s body was found in the barn with Corder’s handkerchief around her neck.

1 Kristi McDougall

In 2010, an Aboriginal elder in New South Wales had a vision of a missing six-year-old and traveled with a friend to a local nature preserve, where they found a body… just not a six-year-old’s. It was actually Kristi McDougall, a 31-year-old woman who went missing two months earlier. You could posit that the elder had already stumbled upon the body, mistook it for a child (it was, let’s say, hard to recognize), and wanted to impress her friend or something, but we’re just getting needlessly cynical at that point. Isn’t it more fun to believe the supernatural wires just get crossed sometimes?