‘Ghosts’ star Rebecca Wisocky explains Hetty’s death revelation

“Ghosts” reached another milestone Thursday night, as this week’s episode of the hit CBS comedy revealed the truth behind Flower’s disappearance — while also exploring, on a much deeper level, the truth behind Dety’s death in 1895.

In the episode ‘Holes are Bad’, when Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) go away for the weekend, the ghosts are left alone – and they discover that Flower (Sheila Carrasco) has not been ‘sucked away’. to the afterlife as they thought. Instead, she was stuck at the bottom of a well and couldn’t get out.

While they were gone, Sam and Jay had hired a contractor to fill the pit with concrete, leaving Flower there forever. But unable to contact Sam and Jay (their attempts to FaceTime the living fail), the ghosts struggled to find another way to save her.

That’s when Hetty (Rebecca Wisocky) comes to the rescue and unwraps the telephone cord that – unbeknownst to everyone – has been wrapped around her neck since her death, but hidden under her garment.

Hetty reveals that she committed suicide using the cord after getting into trouble for violating child labor laws and facing legal trouble. (Her husband Elias, as viewers know, had already disappeared — and turns out to be trapped in a ghost-proof safe.) Previously, we also knew that Dety’s son was responsible for Alberta’s (Danielle Pinnock) death, and now we know that it troubled character also was influenced by the way his mother died.

We also discover that the other ghosts already in the house – Thorfinn (Devan Chandler Long), Sasappis (Román Zaragoza) and Isaac (Brandon Scott Jones) – were trapped in a hole until 1895 and did not witness Hetty’s death, which is the case. why they didn’t know about the details until now. (The show ended with a public service announcement card at the end for the suicide hotline: 988.

“This is something that our show does really well, balancing that wacky comedy with much more sophisticated jokes about the human condition,” says Wisocky. “When they approached me with this idea, I was completely surprised. It had never crossed my mind. But I feel like all the seeds were there. We wanted to make sure it could still be our show, but that it addressed something incredibly important and sensitive, accurately and respectfully, in a way that could start a conversation.

“It’s really my sincere hope that this episode in particular can reach someone who may be in despair, and let them know that they are not alone and that their existence matters,” she adds. “That’s honestly such a big part of the theme of our show. To be able to have the perspective of someone who has now been on the other side of her own mortality for 150 years and be able to reflect on that choice and make the decision to reveal it to save her friend from getting lost and left to be alone forever – it’s just incredibly moving and it comes full circle.”

Wisocky says she was struck by the loneliness Hetty must have experienced in the first year after her death, when Thorfinn, Sasappis and Isaac were not there. Sure, the ghosts of the cholera victims in the basement were there, but she definitely wouldn’t have been associated with them.

“I think loneliness is an interesting theme for her,” she says. “When she died, after a life of deep sadness and loneliness, she was alone for the first year of her afterlife. I look forward to that story somewhere on our show, of that full year of isolation. And she also showed how generations of her family made mistakes and were miserable in this house she built. I think she feels like she is responsible for that because she made this choice at the age of 25 to give up the love of money.

Wisocky also noted that as a character choice, she has always played with Hetty’s neck piece – making this reveal fit together.

“I think the public probably assumed she died of an overdose because she was so into cocaine,” Wisocky says. “I was glad they didn’t make that choice so we can keep the terrible evil joy of her as a drug fanatic.”

As for the sacrifice of revealing her secret to save Flower, it’s a sign that Hetty has really evolved as a character since the beginning of “Ghosts.” After years of trying to figure out what it takes to get “sucked off,” Hetty is more interested in sticking around. “The show is built around this concept that ultimately they’re all hopefully desperate to move on and get sucked away, but none of them really seem quite ready for that,” she says. “Hetty has turned to heaven for many episodes and said, ‘Oh, come on, really, right now?’ But not this time, because she is really there and really present. She really had a real cathartic human exchange with her friends.