SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Thursday night’s episode of Ghosts.
Yet another ghost in Woodstone Mansion has discovered their power.
Thursday night’s episode of CBS‘ Ghosts, aptly titled “St. Hetty’s Day,” reveals that the Gilded Age aristocrat’s power is tied directly to her Irish ancestry. As it turns out, Hetty has quite a powerful ability, albeit only on one day per year. On St. Patrick’s Day, she can be seen by the living.
“I love that you don’t know just how powerful or not it is until the end of the episode,” Rebecca Wisocky, who plays Hetty, told Deadline. “I love that there’s a theme in the episode [about] the power of being seen, literally and figuratively. It’s, I think, one of the things that all of the ghosts are really craving is to be known, is to be recognized, to be seen all these years after they’ve been sitting in Purgatory. So that really resonated for me.”
Hetty, in particular, has long craved to really be seen, even by her fellow ghosts, whom often misunderstand her. In life, she was often cast aside by her horrendous husband and, in death, her haughty personality often gets in the way of forming deep connections.
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So, when Jay’s cousin Sunil visits Woodstone and, thanks to Hetty’s newly discovered power, he can not only physically see her, but he seems to understand her loneliness, she jumps at the opportunity to connect with him, however unpractical it may seem.
“It might affect her relationships in the house. It might affect your relationship with Trevor in the house,” Wisocky posited. “Some of the most enjoyable moments I have as an actor playing this character are when she gets to be more innocent and childlike and eager and gets to experience new things, and this was a great example of that.”
While Hetty’s ghost power is impressive, it is also very limiting. After an entire episode of speculation, it’s confirmed that Hetty will only walk among the living for one day a year and, when the clock strikes midnight, she’ll disappear once again.
The Woodstone ghosts are quite obsessed with ranking their powers, and Wisocky admits that Hetty’s gift is “probably not as high as she would have hoped” among those rankings. After all, Trevor can control technology, which allows him contact with the outside world, and Pete can travel outside the property.
“But I think you can bet your bottom dollar that she’s going to be milking that one day a year worth,” Wisocky joked, adding that, while her character certainly was hoping for something more powerful, “the thought that she might actually not have a power was kind of delightful to me.”
“She thinks of herself as so high status, so anytime we can undercut that and make fun of her a little bit, I love doing that,” she said.
As for the rest of this season, Wisocky teases that we’re racing toward another cliffhanger to end the season.
“We’re staying on track with Jay’s restaurant, and the progression, or lack of progression, with Jay’s restaurant. There obviously was a wrench thrown in the works in the form of a dinosaur-loving stripper through the roof. So that’ll have to sort itself out in some way,” she teases. “I suspect we might not have seen the end of my evil, dastardly husband Elias.”
Ghosts was recently renewed for two additional seasons, which, in addition to being an incredible amount of job security at an uncertain time in the industry, also indicates there’s lots of runway to keep exploring the history of Woodstone Mansion through the eyes of its ghostly inhabitants.
“I think of the house itself as the 11th main character in the show. I think that it’s haunted, not just because it has ghosts in it. It’s haunted because of all of the people who have lived and died there and loved there and lost there,” she said. “Also, on a side note, Hetty Woodstone built that house…I’m interested in whether or not Hetty or her family had anything to do with locking Nancy and the cholera ghosts in the basement.”
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