Ghosts: Rebecca Wisocky Discusses Hetty’s ‘Devastating’ Cause of Death [Interview]

Warning: This post-mortem interview contains spoilers for Ghosts Season 3 Episode 8, “Holes Are Bad.”

The latest episode of Ghosts witnessed Flower’s friends rescue her from the clutches of that dreaded well. But at the cost of Hetty’s most guarded secret — her cause of death.

Despite relishing in her supposed overdose, Hetty chose to expose her self-inflicted wounds to retrieve the rope around her neck. It was a chilling feat for the comedy and poignant moment of vulnerability for Rebecca Wisocky’s Hetty Woodstone.

I recently spoke with Wisocky about her ghost’s darkest hour yet and that devastating reveal — one that would not succeed without the moving “connection” between Hetty and Flower. “Hetty is prompted to reveal the secret at great cost to herself to prevent her friend from being as alone for all eternity as she felt in her life. That felt incredibly powerful to me,” she revealed.

Wisocky confirmed that Sophia Lear, the episode’s writer, approached her a month before shooting and asked for her input. “I’m pleased with how they handled it. I was very surprised, I’ll be honest with you. But I’ve been surprised in the past, and then it ends up making perfect sense to me.”

While suicide feels a little dark for a sitcom, Ghosts encourages us to have those difficult conversations about death. That might just make it the ideal show for this subject matter.

“One of the reasons it’s such a devastating death is that it’s so delicate that people don’t talk about it,” Wisocky explained.

“People tell us they’re able to talk about delicate things with their family that they might not have talked about before because they watch the show together. So if this episode can reach one person out there who was in a dark, deep, well, and encourage them to reach out, that’s important.”

“The show normalizes talking about feelings, and that’s so incredibly healthy. So I’m very proud of that, and everyone involved took the subject matter very seriously.”

As for what she hoped viewers would take away from Hetty’s experience, Wisocky stressed the importance of understanding what Hetty got wrong about her time alive.

“We have the benefit of speaking to someone 150 years after the act. When do you get the opportunity to do that? And as she said, there are 150 years of retrospect and regrets, and only recently has she come to understand what she got wrong. She did not understand that her existence mattered inherently,” she explained.

“Hetty thought the only thing that was important about her was the wealth that she could give to her child. In addition to that, she was also deeply, desperately alone, and unhappy in the world. So it’s a wonderful lesson that your existence in and of itself matters. She never was taught that lesson in her life by her family, her father, her husband, her society and she paid the price.”

Even though greed and societal pressure led her down this path, Wisocky didn’t overlook the blame Hetty put on herself in this cautionary tale.

“The choice to abandon love when she was 25 — it began a life of misery and regret that culminated in her death. She believes that all generations of unhappiness in her family come back to her and wants desperately to break the cycle she feels she started.”

Costumes & Library of Congress

Speaking of Hetty’s past, this season has featured multiple flashbacks and costume changes for the Gilded Age socialite. Bringing that historical accuracy and detail to life on-screen was no small feat.

“Our costume designer, Carmen Alie, and my dresser, Sophie Godard, are geniuses — and so caring!” Wisocky gushed.

“That dress that I wore when I played 25 — God help me — that beautiful white dress took 260 hours to make. And it was on screen for maybe 45 seconds. So the art departments, the crew in Montreal, are so talented. So much of that detail elevates our show.”

Those details struck a chord with the Library of Congress, which recently invited Wisocky and her fellow Ghosts castmates to explore its archives. “They gave us a beautiful tour of the museum and did this lovely moderated panel. Their historians took weeks to curate selections of materials and artifacts from each of our time periods.”

“I didn’t even know that I wanted to go. And now I want to go back,” she proclaimed. “It’s a beautiful, architecturally important building filled with countless collections of things that you didn’t even know you wanted to look at. It felt very weird at first that they asked us to come, but then it made complete sense. History is our stock and trade.”

“They found two packets of cocaine in the collections, which they showed me photographs of. It was found in the collections of an ophthalmologist named Carl Koehler, who was good friends with Sigmund Freud,” Wisocky recalled. “There is actually cocaine in the Library of Congress, which everyone found really delightful.”

Additionally, Wisocky offered several readings that are perfect for any history buff looking to immerse themselves in Hetty’s time period.

“A book I read in high school that I can’t stop thinking about, especially after this episode, is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. It’s a really moving story about the psychology of a woman trapped by society and men’s expectations in the late 1800s — and that’s vastly underselling it.”

“There are lots of etiquette books primarily written by men in the Gilded Age period. But there was a writer named Eliza Barton Lyman, and I’m looking forward to reading her books.”

“There’s The Coming Woman and Hermaphro-deity: The Mystery of Divine Genius, which is a treatise suggesting that hermaphrodites were the most evolved form of human beings. It’s possibly some of the earlier writings about pro-trans writings, which I found exciting to hear was happening in the late 1800s.”

Flower Returns

Wisocky couldn’t think of a better episode for Flower to return in than one closely intertwined with Hetty’s struggle for happiness.

“The thing that was most moving to me was Flower coming in at the end and saying, ‘Guess what? I robbed the bank one time.’ She’s so herself — she’s so lovable. Flower is someone that she loves, and Hetty finds happiness in the fact that she is still here.”

Getting Flower out of that well also meant welcoming Sheila Carrasco back to the comedy.

“She was missed so deeply,” Wisocky confirmed. “This cast is incredibly close, and it was like we were missing an arm or something. She is a vital part of our ensemble and I think her absence was very loud. So we’re delighted that she’s back!”

“Now she gets to be presumably my roommate in Season 4, so I am particularly excited about that. I was so sad that we weren’t going to get the chance to play that this year.”

Looking to the Future

So what’s ahead for Hetty after such a traumatizing and emotional milestone?

“In true fashion, there’s a little bit of everything, but there are definitely some hilarious moments coming up in the next episode that are going to make you really happy,” Wisocky teased.

She also pointed out that Hetty’s death did more than fill in a few gaps. It exposed a year of solitude for the spirit that needs to be explored. “Loneliness is a deep theme and motivator for Hetty, for sure.”

“We fill in so many blanks about what happened in 1895. We understand why no one knew about Elias’ vault because Sas, Isaac, and Thor were trapped in a hole. That also means Hetty was alone as a ghost for the first year of her afterlife. Suddenly, three ghosts walk through the walls, and her afterlife begins. I’m interested to see what her first interaction with the basement ghosts was like, too.”

And on a scale of 1-10, just how unnerved was Wisocky to learn there’s a feral Protestant ghost wandering the property? “Okay, 10, 11, 12 — terrifying! I mean, the real question is, do you think that we’re gonna meet her?”

Maybe we can save the feral apparitions for next Halloween, Ghosts? We need time to recover from this episode first.

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Ghosts airs Thursdays at 8:30c/7:30c on CBS.

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