‘Ghosts’ Star Rebecca Wisocky Says Filming Scenes Revealing How Hetty Died Was ‘Really Intense’
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This week’s episode of Ghosts, “Holes Are Bad,” brought a major revelation about one of our favorite characters, Hetty, a ghost portrayed by Rebecca Wisocky.
Like another of Wisocky’s fan-favorite roles (the character Evelyn Powell in the 2013–2016 series Devious Maids), Hetty is a woman of society. The spirit of the 19th-century lady of Woodstone Manor is a fitting part for Wisocky considering that her hometown is none other than York, Pennsylvania, a place steeped in U.S. history (it was our nation’s first capital!).
This article contains spoilers for the CBS series Ghosts Season 3, Episode 8, and discusses a character’s suicide.
In the episode, the show finally reveals how Hetty died. In 1895, with her robber baron husband nowhere to be found, Hetty learns she will be held accountable for his crimes and, if convicted, will lose everything. Trapped, with police closing in, a desperate Hetty wraps the cord of her newly acquired telephone—one of the first in the county—around her neck and ends her life with one thought in mind: protecting her son by saving his inheritance.
From the beginning of the series, we’ve known that some ghosts bear the elements of their demise, but up to this point, Hetty has kept hers hidden—that is, until the cord is the only way to save her friend and fellow spirit Flower (Sheila Carrasco), who has been stuck in the bottom of an old well all season, before her fate is forever sealed in concrete (why can’t she climb out? you just have to watch).
There’s a lot to unpack from this episode. Good thing Country Living had the opportunity to ask Rebecca Wisocky all about it.
It’s a powerful moment when Hetty reveals her big secret. What was it like filming that scene?
Rebecca Wisocky: It was really intense, I’ll be honest with you. Our show is so interesting in so many ways. It’s a silly, screwball ensemble comedy on CBS, but it’s so clever and insightful and sensitive in the way in which it addresses profound things about human frailty and the human condition and indicts American history at the same time.
We get to do all these different things in these different styles, and the writers have been so skillful blending those things in and tweaking those little things. We’ve seen Hetty be a little bit vulnerable a couple times, but then, of course, she covers it up with all this bluster and propriety and orneriness. But, at the end of the day, she’s most terrified of being alone. You see that in a lot of her behaviors. The thing that prompts her to make this sacrifice and share this story is because she’s so concerned that Flower might be left alone forever, might be abandoned, and so she’s willing to reveal the secret that no one has known for over a hundred years. It’s so moving to me.
For me, as an actor, it’s intense to perform every day in a corset in a period-accurate costume, which is so beautiful but really, really uncomfortable. And then to add to that, for some of those days, I also had this telephone cord wrapped around my neck, which was even more oppressive. Just to think, that has been Hetty’s reality for 130 years. Everything she says, everything she does, she’s a little bit choked all the time, and that makes so much sense.
The writers have been so smart in seeding little story points before we even know they’re there. Now we’re in season three. We’re going to go back to Montreal and shoot season four, thank goodness, in the summer, and there’s just so many places the show can go. I think it’s a beautiful concept, which, of course, originated on the BBC, and they did similar things with British history and those characters.
Let’s talk about the telephone in the episode, because there’s a lot of layers there.
Rebecca Wisocky: It’s so appropriate and beautiful, you know. The telephone is tied to her sense of pride and privilege, of being the first person in the county to have a telephone, and it then becomes the means by which she kills herself. It’s so heartbreaking and also ironic. It could have been the way for her to reach out and get help and choose a different path and not be alone, but she didn’t know how to use it. The metaphors are endless and beautiful in the ways in which we’re all so interconnected.
One of the things we’re so grateful for about the show is that we’ve heard from our audience that they love it and it’s very funny and they love all the characters, but it also has brought people together. The characters are all representative of all these various foibles, personality traits, and blind spots that people may see in their own families, and we’ve heard from people that it’s been a way for them to come together and talk about really difficult things and kind of bridge gaps of opinion and prejudice in their own family.
So, my dear hope is that this episode, despite the fact that it’s a light comedy, can possibly reach someone who is despairing and that they can find a way to reach out and know that they are not alone and that their existence matters. That’s something that I think we all wanted to take very, very seriously.
Note: Find suicide prevention resources at 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
At Country Living we love small-town America, and your hometown has as very iconic main street. What was it like to grow up there?
Rebecca Wisocky: Ah, yes, York, PA! I am a very proud York, PA native. So many important historical things happened in York. The signing of the Articles of Confederation happened there.
Growing up there was great. I was a really shy kid, and there’s a local theater there that was called the York Little Theater that is now called The Belmont, and it was fantastic. I spent my entire childhood there, and it got me out of my shell and theater became my team sport, for lack of a better word. I learned a whole lot and learned that I wanted to make a life for myself in the arts in some way.
But, yeah, I love being a PA gal and a country-adjacent gal, and of course, I’m a big animal lover. We’ve got three big dogs. That’s a whole big cross-country experience to drive them from Los Angeles to Montreal [where Ghosts is filmed] and back every year because we take them with us. So that’s, that’s a whole to-do.
Okay, now we have to know more about your pups—and their cute dog names too!
Rebecca Wisocky: We adopted two puppies from the same litter from a rescue organization in Los Angeles called the HIT Living Foundation. Their names are Tank and Primrose, and then there’s Carlo, who I adopted in Puerto Rico.
I did a series about 10 years ago called Devious Maids that I loved doing so much. The first year of that series, I went down to Puerto Rico with [co-star] Roselyn Sanchez to do a charity event for the rescue organizations that do such wonderful work there with the satos, the stray dogs of Puerto Rico. One of the rescue organizations placed this 10-week-old puppy in my hand for a random photo op, and I just completely fell in love with him and brought him back to Los Angeles with me. He’s now 11 years old, so that’s Carlo.
Those are the pups, that’s the family—and the husband [Lap Chi Chu], who is a lighting designer for the theater. He has two shows that are running on Broadway right now, and I am so very proud of him.
We understand the tree in the photos you shared with us has a cool backstory.
Rebecca Wisocky: It is the tree in our front yard in Los Angeles. It’s this big, ancient sycamore tree that has two large twin trunks, and one of them has, some decades ago, fallen down and is laying down across the whole length of the front yard. It’s the reason we fell in love with house—it’s a 1925 Spanish. We found out later that many years prior, all the neighbors in that neighborhood had gotten together and landmarked that tree so that the house could never be torn down because a developer, I think, wanted to put up a couple McMansions or something. So we love that house and we love that tree, and we’re very grateful to be its stewards.
What can we expect next for Hetty?
Rebecca Wisocky: There are going to be a lot of ramifications from having revealed this secret, but there’s also a lot of big fish to fry. Hetty is, of course, related to all of these other storylines. We’re driving toward Isaac and Nigel’s wedding, and Hetty is their wedding planner, for better or for worse. And we’re going to have a new ghost power revealed, which really blew all of us away.
The ghosts are just also so deeply entwined in one another’s afterlives, and again, the writers are so smart. They’ve been so generous with the paths that they’ve taken us on, and the concept is so genius. There are any number of places that any one of us can go, literally over the course of thousands of years of history.
Ghosts season 3 airs on CBS on Thursdays at 8:30-9:00 p.m. ET/PT and is available to stream live and on demand on Paramount+.
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