Wandry Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Ghost Story ad-free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or an Apple podcast. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the bonus episode of Ghost Story. We've been blown away by the huge number of people who've enjoyed the show. It's been the number one podcast in five countries, and we've had thousands of people writing reviews and contacting us about it. But what we've loved most is getting to read the incredible theories our listeners have posted online and the thoughtful questions they've sent us. And we thought, let's take the time to answer some of these questions. So that's what Annie and I are going to do today.

Hello. Hello.

You remember, Annie Brown, my producer colleague.

I think let's just try and have fun.

And we have someone special to help us.

I'm already having fun.

Great. Perfect.

Perfect. Elizabeth Day is a hugely successful novelist and journalist in the UK, and she also hosts a massively popular podcast, How to Fail.

I'm actually fangoing right now. It's a very unusual experience.

For me. Elizabeth is a self-proclaimed Ghost Story fan.

Seeing the faces behind the voices is deeply thrilling for me.

Which is why Annie and I are happy to hand over the asking of the questions for once to our bonus episode host, Elizabeth.

I'm very very excited that I get to ask all of my unanswered questions and all of the listener questions too.

This is probably obvious, but this episode will be full of spoilers. So if you haven't heard the show yet, go back and start at episode one.

I think we should dive in.

Let's do it. Yeah, let's do it, guys.

What a life these celebrities lead. Imagine walking the red carpet, the cameras in your face, the designer clothes, the worst dress list, the big house, the world constantly peering in, the bursting bank account, the people trying to get the grubby mits on it. What do you want about? I'm just saying being really, really famous, it's not always easy. I'm Emily Lloyd-Taynie. I'm Anna-Leone-Browdy. We're the hosts of Terribly Famous from Wondery, the podcast which tells the stories of our favorite celebrities from their perspective. Each season, we show you what it's really like being famous by taking you inside the life of a British icon. We walk you through their glittering highs and eyebrow raising lows and ask, Is fame and fortune really worth it? Follow Terribly Famous now wherever you get your podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wandery Plus on Apple Podcast or the Wondry app.

Elizabeth, far away.

Well, Tristan, my first question is, where is your Danse Bere or Beret for American listeners?

That is a very good question. I should have worn it today. It's at home and I am not at home. I'm so sorry I forgot to wear it.

I apologize. It's fine. It's fine. Next time. But on a serious note, I mustn't be selfish because we do have questions from listeners that I'd love answers to as well. So let's kick off with those, and I'll ask you questions as they occur to me. We're going to start with questions specifically about the murder. There were a lot concerning that part of the story that you refer to as the locked door mystery. Before I read out one of those questions, can you remind me what that phrase refers to?

That was actually a concept that I was not even aware of in crime fiction until my brother-in-law, Hugh, pointed out. There's a, quote-unquote, locked-door mystery. What's a lockdoor mystery? It's when somebody dies inside a locked room. Is that a thing? Yeah. Okay, so the lockdoor mystery is the question surrounding the very center of the murder scene in the story, right? The lavatory, the toilets where Morris tribe is found dead with his throat cut, the door was apparently knocked down from the outside, and that's what the evidence suggests. So then the question around the murder became, how could Fathur have possibly murdered Morris if Morris died behind a locked door?

The problem with it is to work out how tribe ended up on the laboratory floor and it's locked from the inside. There's a lot of discussion about this on Reddit. People seem to be somewhat unconvinced that this was actually a lockdoor mystery, here is what one listener asked. Is there any evidence that the bathroom door was broken down after Morris died? The podcast makes a big deal about it being a locked-room mystery and guessing how Fathr could have gotten out after locking the door, but the door was open before anyone else came to the scene, right? Why doesn't anyone raise the possibility that Fathr just broke the door down to kill Maris? Over to you, Tristan.

Okay, I totally understand that question because it is possible, isn't it? In the narrative events that Morris might have been, say, fleeing Fathr, fled into the toilet, locked the door to stay safe inside, and then Fathur knocked the door down from the outside, went in and killed Morris. That's a possibility, right? But there are a few bits of evidence which strongly suggest that that was not the case. Now, one of them is a bit of evidence that we talk about in some detail in the show, which is there are no defensive wounds on Morris' body. So that means that if Fathr did kill Morris, Morris would have had to be unconscious, because if he's conscious when Fahd comes at him with a razor, he's going to fight back and you would see signs of a struggle. But the police report doesn't tell us that there are any signs of a struggle. So that means that if Fahd had done it, Morris would have had to have been incapacitated in such a way that he wouldn't have been able to run into the bathroom and lock the door behind him.

Yeah.

So that's the first reason. No defensive wounds, right? Now, there's a second piece of evidence, which is that there was actually another person asleep upstairs in the house, and that was the housekeeper. Now - What?

That was going to be one of my questions. Carry on. Sorry. This is major.

Okay, so the housekeeper, she was upstairs. We hear from her in the police report earlier in the day because Fethe goes to drop her off somewhere else in London. She's having an afternoon off or something. She comes back at about 10 o'clock at night and goes to bed. She does not play any role in the murder scene until after Naomi is dead. According to her testimony, she's woken up by gunshots. And at that point, Fahir tells us that he goes upstairs to wake up the housekeeper and bring her downstairs before he knocks the door down. So there's potentially a witness to his knocking the door down, right? Now, her statement is less clear. She doesn't mention the door being broken down. She just says, I came downstairs, and that's all she says. But it would be risky for Fahir to have told a lie about this because there would have been a witness to it, a living witness there in front of the police who could have contested what he was saying. But his timeline is that she has come downstairs and been present when the door was broken down, which would mean that it was a lockdoor mystery.

Does that make sense?

It makes total sense. It's just so fascinating because if one is to take the view that Fathr felt very clever and had plotted this to the extent that he was then going to tell Dorothy L. Sayers about it, it's then convenient for him to have a witness to his cleverness in having the lock door broken down in front of the housekeeper.

Yes, absolutely. And the housekeeper is not just any housekeeper, right? So she has been with the family for quite a long time. She has a nickname in the family. I think she's known as Door Mouse. She's basically raised the kids from quite a young age. And just before the murder, she has retired. So she's no longer the full-time housekeeper in the house. The full-time housekeeper is on leave when the murder happens. And Katie Brooks, the long time trusted housekeeper, has come back temporarily to backfill the normal housekeeper who is not there for a few nights.

And did you go down the route of seeing if Katie Brooks had any living relatives who might know something of how she experienced that murder?

I tried very hard to find if she had any living relatives. She had two twin sons who were born in 1908 and who I.

Believe - Your level of detail, Tristan, is unbelievable. I don't know.

I'm so into it. I'm so.

Into it. Just thinking of - I'm so into it. Twins. So this is also the experience of working with Tristan on this podcast. Amazing. He has memorized every detail of every single character who has ever been connected to this story. And so if you're like, Did you try and look for the housekeeper? He's like, Well, in fact, the housekeeper's grandmother was born in 1771.

So, you know. You're going to slash and burn that on you. Anyway, the kids, I think, died in the 1980s, and I wasn't able to find any other descendants. But there is an interesting other thing about this that I wasn't able to confirm, which is that I think we learned this from Bindle.

Bindle being the daughter of Naomi and Fathr.

Yeah. There is a bit of family law, which is that Fathr rescued Katie, the maid, from a embarrassing social scandal. She had an illegitimate child, supposedly, and had been cast out from early 20th century society, and she was rescued by Fathr. And so she owed a debt of loyalty to him. So, I mean, look, I don't know whether that plays into it in any way, but it's interesting.

And called Dormout, and wasn't Fathr's second wife called Mouse.

Mousie was.

Her name. Mousie. Look, I'm just seeing, just seeing conspiracies.

You are really just tuned in, which is great.

Okay, thank you. I really wanted to know about the housekeeper. Let's move on to the issue of Morris' eyesight. I was particularly disturbed by the fact that Naomi was shot through the eyes, because one of my somewhat gouldish questions was just how precisely the eyes were targeted. As we know, Morris was partially blind and getting worse. So I wonder how feasible it was that Morris was able to shoot with accuracy. I know that lots of listeners pointed this out as well.

It's a very good question because he was in a pretty dodgy physical state. He was losing his sight. He was having trouble walking as well. So could he have physically done that? The answer is that Naomi was shot at point-blank range. And we know this from the pathologist report because the Pathologist says that there are burn marks around the eyes. So, yeah, it's not like someone was taking aim from 10 feet away or anything like that.

That is just so horrific because, I mean, either way, it's horrific. It felt to me when I was listening to a ghost story that being shot through the eyes was almost slightly too obvious, a framing in the sense that Fathur seemed to have breadcrumbed this trail of Morris being so jealous of Naomi's eyes because he was losing his sight. And if it was Fathur who had framed Morris in this way, that seems to me so freakishly cold-blooded to shoot your wife at point-blank range through the eyes. Were there any previous reports of Fathur's aggression and any abuse towards Naomi? Absolutely not.

No, none. There is no suggestion anywhere else that we have seen that he was ever angry, abusive, violent towards her. And Bindol strongly refutes any suggestion like that as well. That's not to say that Fever could not be violent from time to time. He himself talks about his propensity to violence on occasion in his memoirs. There's a section at the beginning of the memoirs which he calls My Years of Violence, in which he writes about basically attacking people in the street in London. On one occasion, he tells a story of being propositioned by a man in the street in London, and he beats him up. There's a story told by his own son about Fever throwing a visitor to his house down the stone steps outside the front of the house. So he definitely has the capacity towards violence, mostly in his earlier life, though, when he was quite young in his teens and twenties.

And always towards men and these stories and nothing. There's no indication that he was aggressive towards Naomi. I mean, it's one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that he didn't do it because your point about the cold bloodedness and just the horror of having to get so close to the person that you ostensibly love in order to kill them is so great that you would imagine that there would be some indication of it beforehand.

When we were speaking to the detectives, at least one of them said that shooting someone in the eyes is an incredibly personal way of killing them.

It's like, what have you seen?

It's a message of some sort.

Yes. Okay, shall we move on to the next listener question?

Sure. Let's do it.

I had never come across the phrase hesitation wounds before listening to Ghost Story, and I don't think I've ever thought about something quite so much. So one of the things I kept asking myself was whether Fathr could have made the hesitation wounds on Morris' neck because he was hesitating. As in Fathr was hesitating.

It was such a horrific act that he pulled away or something.

Exactly.

It's something that one of the detectives we spoke to, Lloyd Stiger, touched on was he thought that they looked like attempts to cut the neck, as opposed to hesitation wounds of a suicidal person. So I guess that would maybe square with that. Mind you, I mean, the pathologist we spoke to was a very lovely man called Tom Andrew, and he thought that these seemed like absolutely classic suicidal hesitation marks. He thought it would be impossible to fake those. He said he is a surgeon and pathologist of many decades standing, wouldn't even know how to do that.

Very specifically, he said it's not impossible to fake them, but it would take someone rather diabolically planning it. And so I think the consensus was it's very hard to do this possible to have done it, but unlikely. I think that your question is a different one, which is like, were they not hesitation wounds? Were they attempt marks? And that's something that you just can't really tell from the pathology report because we have a very rough picture of it, and the pathologist describes the wounds, but obviously thinks that they're hesitation wounds. So you can't really get a second opinion.

So the picture, is that a photograph? No. Or it's a sketch? The sketch. So there's a sketch of them, and then they're described in the pathology report. Okay.

That's right.

There were photographs taken, but they do not survive. And that's not unusual, we're told. When things get transferred to a public archive, they take out the photographs because they are difficult for people to see. But I think it's also worth saying that Fevered was not only a physician, he was a surgeon.

Well, that actually leads us onto another listener question, which is about Fevered. Fevered, as you pointed out, was prone to embellishing his own life story. And this listener asks, Who was he really? Was he ever really a doctor?

Oh, he was definitely a doctor. There is no question of that. I mean, we know where he went to medical school, we know when he graduated. We know he's registered in the different medical directories in Britain between this year and that year. There are people who were treated by him. He was definitely a doctor. There's no question about that. That's not to say that he doesn't embellish some of the stories about his medical career. So he writes in great detail about his time at medical school. And there are some pretty tall tales in there, including one which really stuck out to us, which is a story he tells about breaking into the morgue of the hospital as a medical student in the middle of the night and tampering with evidence on a corpse, on a corpse's neck. Wow!

That is wild.

The story is that his friend is performing a tracheotomy on a young woman, and he screws up the tracheotomy because he's never done one before and she dies. Basically, he puts the trache... He does the tracheotomy in the wrong tube in the neck. So he does it instead of doing it in the windpipe, he does it in the gullet. The esophagus for Mary. In the esophagus, yeah. And there's going to be a medical investigation. So Fadher breaks into the morgue and he basically makes a hole in the windpipe, so that when the medical board investigates, they don't see that his friend put the hole in the wrong tube. So he cuts a hole in the neck and then he sneaks back out of the morgue and that's that, and his friend is acquitted. That's the story he tells.

What strikes me is not only the direct comparison of the neck issue, but the fact that he seems to be someone who made a lot of people grateful for something that he had done on their behalf. So a lot of people were, the phrase he used, Tristan, were in his debt and likely to be called on to repay the favor at some point. Is that fair?

I mean, he definitely tells a lot of stories where he is the hero and is helping some people out of a tight spot, for sure. That's a recurring theme.

There's so much there about surgeons, and there is this general perception, unfair or otherwise, that surgeons, and particularly male surgeons, because they have to be so dispassionate about operating on a human body, they remove themselves from natural empathy almost entirely in order to do their job. And it is a job that attracts a certain flavor of narcissist. But did you think about that in relation to Fathr, the fact that he strikes me as someone who can suspend his empathy for other people if he ever felt it, and he does have some characteristics of narcissism?

I guess the counterpoint to that is that would a narcissist be so loving and thoughtful towards his children, which he clearly was. The letters that he writes to his children are all about how much he wants to see them, how much he wants to help them, and his involvement in their lives is incredibly deep and committed. He knows every single detail of their lives because he cares. I struggle to square that with his other tendencies, which I do agree seem pretty narcissistic.

He was clearly a man who loved telling a story about himself and two others. And that makes me question what he says in the bulletins. It just sounds too good sometimes. It just sounds too sentimental. And it makes me question what Bindle told you too, because is this just a family that likes to tell stories about itself that wants to protect the family unit and maintain this communal identity and a belief about who they are. I know that's a huge question. I have to say all of the dance teas come out so well in Ghost Story. I think they seem utterly delightful. But I still want to ask that question about the story the family tells itself about itself.

Yeah, I would say that I think the idea that you're pointing to here, Elizabeth, the power, the attraction of telling a good story about your family and a good story about your life and where you come from, what interested us in the story was the way in which we all do that. The way in which it is so tempting to just tell the parts of your story that feel good and that paint you and your and your family in a positive light. With a little bit of distance, you can see like, Oh, you're actually leaving out all the bad things. But when you're in it, I think it's quite easy to do. Of course, this is a extreme example, but I think in many ways it's not unique.

Yes, I think that makes total sense. Actually, when I relistened to Ghost Story the second time, and you had that interview with that historian from Cambridge University, and he had that amazing image of history as a rolled-up carpet that you carry around with you. I am someone who studied history at Cambridge University, and also I have a relentless desire to reveal truth and just to be truthful. It really struck me during the course of listening to that interview that not everyone has that desire that some people are really resistant to it. I thought that that was one theme that you handled beautifully because the exchanges that you had with Mark and Johnny towards the end were very, very moving. You're confronted with this resistance.

I think, though, that your point about the rolled-up carpet, one thing that I hadn't really realized about that metaphor that is so powerful about it is that he says, Everything about the past is with us.

Everything about the.

Past is in the present.

It's all here.

We roll up the.

Past like.

A carpet.

And we bring it with us.

But the act of rolling it up, there are things inside that you don't look at as you carry it with you into the present. They're there. But you're not seeing the whole tapestry until you unroll it. And so there is a way that it's here, but you don't have to look at it all the time.

I started off this project thinking very much the same thing that what on Earth could be bad about shedding light on these things. And that belief has really been shaken throughout the whole process. And not everyone in the family is in agreement on that. Some people think very much that we should have just left all this alone. It doesn't help anyone. But that view is not shared by everyone either. I've spoken to other people in the family who've said to me that they believe that they find their family more relatable now because a family which is odd, imperfect, has this strange, bizarre story from the past, tragic story, is somehow easier to understand and to feel comfortable in than a family which is all conquering and triumphant, which is the story which lots of families tell about themselves, right?

I think one of the questions is, who benefits from not telling the story of the past the true story of the past.

And whose stories have been forgotten or sidelined, which again, was a very poignant aspect of Ghost Story, because you resurrect Naomi. The show does a beautiful tribute to Naomi in the final episode. But a bunch of listeners were wondering if there was anything else you could tell us about her that you learned in your reporting.

I mean, sure, there are plenty of things that we found out about her, but it's very difficult to find out as much as we'd like.

A hundred years down the line. She didn't write 3,000 pages about herself, for example.

Exactly. We learned a bit about her family and where she grew up. Basically, she came from a very religious family. Her father was a priest, was a vicar in Northwest London, and she had a brother and a sister. Her brother was obviously Morris. Her sister died relatively young, but they were very socially minded family. They became very committed to helping disadvantaged people in London, and I think they had very modest means as well. So, Naomi would not have been able to have gone to medical school if she had not got a scholarship, which she did. In 1908, she went to the London School of Medicine for Women, which is where women had to learn to be doctors. They weren't allowed to the same universities. And she started off relatively slowly. But by the time she graduated in 1914, she was wiping the floor with everyone else in graduating class. So she won prizes for pretty much everything going. And then she graduated top of her class. She graduated just before the war broke out. And at the time, she was not allowed to work as a surgeon because only men could work as surgeons. But that rule was relaxed as the war went on.

And I think in 1915, she worked as a surgeon for the rest of the war. But then when the war ended, that relaxation, the rules was rescinded, and she was not able to work as a surgeon anymore.

But a lot of the things she becomes known for after her death, she does after the war. She picks herself up and sets up a clinic of her own. She becomes the assistant officer of health for all of West London. So she's quite a prominent public health figure. And she's interested in radical things for the time. So she's doing family planning, sexual health. She's lecturing about how important it is to be honest with your children.

Yeah, and she spent a lot of her time helping poor families and mothers and children in East London, in particular. She's really a remarkable, forward thinking woman for the 1920s and 1930s. Yeah.

You spend time telling us about Naomi, but one person who doesn't have as much backstory in the podcast is Maris, her brother. And one listener asked that the area they were much more curious about was who was Maris? What was his life like that led to what happened? He was a war hero, but that's all that's mentioned. Tristan.

Well, that's a very good question. I'm absolutely fascinated by Maris because I'm a bit of a history buff of this time in British history. If you remember, Jackie Moulton, the Scotland Yard detective, said something really poignant about Maris.

Poor old Morris tried. His whole character destroyed. He's remembered as a man who killed his sister. I don't think he did.

We wanted to understand as much as we could about Morris to try and fill out his story so that he wasn't just a guy who had murdered his sister. We started off by trying to find out whether he had any descendants, and he died without any children. There was no one to tell us anything about him from that angle. But then we stumbled across this man called Bill Smith, a historian who happened to know everything about the regiment that Morris fought in the First World War. And he knew quite a lot about Morris, and he was really able to bring Morris alive for us.

Why did he know so much about Morris, Drison?

Well, he just knew everything about all the officers because he spent years and years studying this very regiment, and we were just so lucky to find him. And so he'd followed every single day of the regiment for the whole of the First World War. And he told us a bit about Morris. Basically, he described him as a impish, slightly naughty, energetic child. The way he described it was very vivid. He said, You know, when you're taking a photograph, like a panoramic photograph where you move the camera across and take a panorama, he said, Morris is the type of kid who would be in the beginning of the panoramic photograph, and then he would run round behind you so that he could appear in the other side of the panoramic photograph. That was his impression of Morris. He studied chemistry at Oxford University. He graduated like, Naomi, his sister just before the beginning of the First World War. He tried to join up quite early on in the war, but he was too small and they wouldn't have him as an officer. So he worked as a stretcher bearer for a bit, and then they relaxed the rules and eventually he becomes an officer and he's highly decorated in the Som, which is a famous, famous battle in which a lot of British soldiers were killed in 1916.

And he is decorated because he performs this exceedingly heroic act where he saves a bunch of his men who've been buried after a shell has gone off and he basically digs them out under heavy fire and saves their lives. Then a few weeks later, no one really knows what happened to him. He was basically blown up on the battlefield and left for dead and somehow miraculously survived, goes back to England, has this terrible recuperation. His face is partly blown apart. He's lost an eye. And after a few months, he goes up in front of a medical board who want to send him back to France to fight. And he says, I can't go. I've only got one eye. And one of the doctors says to him, one eye these days is considered a luxury. And so he's going to be sent back to France to fight. And he manages to find someone high powered to intervene on his behalf, and he's not sent back and he stays in England, the war ends, and he spends the 1920s, he's a political activist. He's involved with the Labor Party, he helps people out who have been released from prison, former convicts.

But his life starts to take a downward turn in the 1930s. I think his alchemy becomes a really big problem. I think by 1937, things are quite desperate for him. But until that point, he'd led a very promising career.

Yeah.

Actually, after Naomi dies, there's this amazing tribute that is published about Morris in the newspaper. Yeah. So just a week after her murder, everyone assumes that Morris has just brutally killed his sister. He's a monster in the newspapers. There's this beautiful letter written by someone who had been working with Morris. He's the commissioner of prison.

Why don't I read out a little bit about it? Yeah. Okay, hang on. Okay, so on November 29th, 1937, so this is seven days after the murder, the Commissioner of Prisons publishes this piece. So he describes all the potential that Morris has as a kid and how that's spoiled by his experiences in the war. He says, The war claims this clever, affectionate imp who had all the courage of Peter and the humility of Zakeus. What might have happened without the war to this small complex of scientific genius, capacity for love and service, fire of energy and devotion, God alone knows. And he writes, Who that has not been wounded to the edge of the brain can judge him? In the end, there came a crack. The law holds him technically a murderer, but a murdered man cannot himself be a murderer. He was a clever, willful child murdered by the war so that few can guess what man he might have been.

Gosh, that's very, very moving, isn't it?

Yeah.

Paul Morris.

The end of that piece, This is a man who was murdered by the war, it's been like 20 years since the since the end of World War I at this point. But that is what's written about him. I think one of the interesting things about the whole podcast is just the way the specter of the First World War hangs over everything. Morris goes crazy because of the first World War. Fathr himself may have had PTSD from it. He comes back, he can't find work, he can't get it together. Naomi has her job because of it. She becomes a surgeon, she becomes successful because of the war. But larger than that, all of society is reeling from the massive death toll. That's part of why there's this obsession with detective fiction, that people want to have control over smaller traumas. They want to reestablish reason and the way that the world is supposed to work. It's also one of the reasons why people are obsessed with talking to the dead at this time. It's such a unique moment in history.

I think it's so fascinating, and you're so right, Annie, that attempt to find meaning in something that is so cataclysmically meaningless. The desire which you elucidate so beautifully through the Conan Doyle example, his desire to communicate with his late son lost to this terrible war. It reminded me of this anecdote from the beginning of the First World War, which Tristan, I'm sure you know about, the Angels of Mons. They were these supernatural entities seen collectively, I believe, by an entire British regiment, and they protected this regimen against a German attack. I am someone who I don't think we can possibly rationally explain everything that exists in our world. I know that you were a little bit resistant to that idea, Tristan, but I really want to ask where you're at with it now. I was fascinated by the psychic, Nicola. How much, Tristan, did you end up believing in his powers? And you have to be honest.

I am still very much a nonbeliever, I'm afraid.

Annie? What about you, Annie?

I'll let Tristan answer first.

Okay. I think through the process of making this show, I've learnt to be open minded. I wouldn't dismiss any of this stuff out of hand anymore. I'm prepared to listen and consider it and think about it much more than I ever would have been before. What about you, Annie?

I think that what I find is that I want to believe. I would be really nice to feel like there was something that I couldn't explain, that I couldn't understand that something had happened after we die. I would really like that. And so what I felt in these moments with Nicola or with the other mediums was just this desire for them to get something right. But I think one of the things that you started off the show with the sense of like, these are unexplainable coincidences, and I don't think that we explained them by the end.

There's still time, Annie.

There are some listener questions about the seance, and one of them is, Why didn't you talk to Morris's ghost before John's? John's ghost swoops in there hard with a specific neck wound proof. Me thinks the dead man doth protest too much. And what about John's second wife who died? Get that medium back in there and talk to Morris and Mousy, damn it.

Well, I thank you for the question. I think you are giving us too much credit in the seance environment, and it's very difficult to explain the seance environment unless you've been in it. And it's quite difficult to lead that conversation. But we did speak to Maris, didn't we, Annie? We did. We did. Maris was definitely there. In fact, he was lying on the floor in front of us.

He confirms to that he very much struggled to perform the act of suicide. But we did not reach Mary. She did not show up the second wife. So in some ways, I felt very little control over what was happening in that room.

Mary is an interesting one, so otherwise known as Mousie, because potentially could she be the abnormal, ghostly presence in Tristan's teenage bedroom. Because didn't she also die under relatively suspicious circumstances in the house next door?

Could she be the ghost? Everything is possible, isn't it? I mean, that's what we learn about ghosts. She did die in relatively suspicious circumstances or not properly detailed circumstances would be the most generous way of saying it.

There were a lot of listener questions about this, so we might as well, I think, actually just talk about it. Just everything that we were able to find out about her death.

Yeah. So, I mean, the story we were told about Mary from the family was that she had died in childbirth. That's what everyone thought. And we had no idea that it was anything other than that until we had that conversation with Bindle, in which she told us the story of Mary falling down on the landing in the middle of the night. So what did we do? We found her death certificate. Do we want to have a look at the death certificate, Annie?

We definitely do, Annie. More detail, please.

Yes.

What's that mean, the death certificate of the second wife of a person I've never heard of until a month ago? That's totally normal. Good. Okay, I've got it. Yes.

All right. Do you want to talk us through what you're seeing there, Elizabeth?

Okay. So it's dated 1943, seventh of December. Her name, Helen Mary Dansey. Female, 36 years old. Wife of John Horace Dansey, MD. Okay, cause of death, one, syncopy. Acute hematologic anemia. Then we have the signature, John Dansey, widow of the deceased, present at the death. Oh, my God! The signature of the Registrar is Thomas Day. That is my dad's name. I mean, obviously it's not my father because he was born in 1946, but he comes from a line of Thomases. That's my dad's name and his dad's name.

Was your grandfather also a doctor?

I don't think they were. That's actually really freak.

Me out. Wow.

Wow. I will find out.

Well, will you let us know, please?

I'll let you know. Yeah, I'll be on the phone straight after this.

So should we tell you what we found out about this? Please do. The causes of death are given on the death certificate. There's a primary cause of death, a secondary cause of death, and then any other stuff, basically. And the primary cause of death is syncopy, which is fainting. Okay, that's a bit weird, right? How do you die from fainting? And then the secondary cause of death it gives. So the thing that brings on the fainting is something called acute hemolytic anemia, which is not an uncommon anemia in pregnant women, but it's rarely fatal, as far as we understand. And the death certificate is not suggesting that that's what killed her. The primary cause of death, according to the death certificate, is syncopy. I was a bit confused about that because, Bindle says she hit her head. Wouldn't that be the primary cause of death on the certificate? Wouldn't it say, like cranial trauma or something? I ended up speaking to several doctors about this, and they all said that if Mary had died of a head wound, they would expect there to have been a post-mortem and no post-mortem was done. One of the doctors I spoke to said it could be that the death certificate is absolutely coacia.

But it's also possible that if you did want to engage in foul play, if Mary died from hitting her head on the wall, having fainted, it would also be possible for the death certificate to look exactly the same as it did if she'd been hit on the head and killed. Basically, what we've learnt from this is that apparently death certificates are not very useful evidence because they're not very specific.

Do we know where she was found?

Yes, we do. She was found on the landing outside the bedroom, which is the same landing that the altercation between Fethe and Morris happened on.

That house, I mean, I was amazed that the current resident of that house allowed you in to perform a seance and knows all of this and continues to live there. I mean, kudos to her.

Well, they are some of my favorite people, and not just because they let us into their house to make a podcast, just because they were a real lesson about how to be open minded, welcoming, fun, open to new experiences, because I would not have allowed me into my house if I were them. They just seemed to be very at peace with it all.

What did that house feel like to go into, Annie? Was there any sudden drop in temperature when you reached the landing?

I wish, really. I was looking for that movement. I was really hoping for the creaky staircase and the twinkling of the silver as you walk across the hardwood floor. They had just renovated it. So it was all marble and white and completely soundless from an audio perspective. I could not get a single door to creak. There were no sounds going up the stairs. It was a totally useless, haunted house in that sense. So it was going to have to haunt us in a different way.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I relistened to Ghost Story recently. And the second time I listened, these bigger themes came out for me, and one of those themes is the nature of belief itself. The podcast asks fundamental questions about this, about wanting things to be true and getting distressed when how we believe the world to be is challenged. It's very nuanced in that way. And one of the things that struck me is that we live in an increasingly binary world, but Ghost Story doesn't offer any easy answers. And I wonder, Tristan, if you think that is part of its appeal.

Wow! For me, the show is about letting go of stuff when you can't find an answer. It's something that I'm very, very bad at. And it seems to me that the people in the show and that we've met along the way who are more content and less weighing on them, are the people who find it easier to let stuff go in the end?

I would say, Elizabeth, in terms of if I think that the appeal is that Ghost Story doesn't provide any easy answers, I would say the opposite. I think that's in some ways infuriating to a listenership that wants things to be decided. It really tickled me when we were talking to the younger members of the Dancy family, and said, If you don't find out who did it, that's so unsatisfying. Why would you read it? Why would you even learn about a story if you can't find the answer? And I think in some ways, that's how I feel how I think a lot of our listeners feel. But so much of our lives, we don't actually get those kinds of answers. And so part of the challenge of the show was trying to figure out how do you make meaning out of that? How do you still try and find something satisfying within it?

Well, I think that is what is so meaningful about it. And in a way, we have failed to solve this mystery. But I firmly believe that all failures, even if they don't have meaning in and of themselves, will end up teaching us something meaningful. Even if we don't know who did it, you have both done this generous act, this job of bringing people to life who had been forgotten about. Actually, what we do know is so much more about Fathr, Naomi, and Morris. That, for me, really, is the point of it. You might not have found out who did it, but you've done something that is more profound in my mind anyway. No question.

More of a comment than a.

Question here. More of a comment, more of an observation.

I'll take it. I'll take it.

I've received. Yeah. We did actually get a lot of listeners and questions about the family reaction and about whether you are still invited to Christmas with the dancees.

Well, very conveniently this year, it is a Redman Christmas, so I will be with my family this year, which is probably just as well because I think the dancees deserve to be left alone by me for a little while. But, I mean, the family reaction has been really incredible. They've been so supportive and so patient. Lots of people in the family absolutely love the show and have been super positive and excited about it and have really enjoyed finding out more stuff about their own family.

Have Mark and Jonathan listened to the podcast?

They have. Johnny is very supportive, loves it. Mark and I have had good discussions about things that he takes issue with, and we have agreed to disagree on some points, but he didn't have to do any of this stuff. And I think I have an awful lot of respect for him that he did. And if all else fails, we can always just be really British and pretend nothing ever happened and never talk about it ever again. And that's worked for centuries of Britons, and there's no reason why it shouldn't carry on working as a good technique.

I do have to end on a very serious question. Will there be a second Season of Ghost Story?

That is a very good question. I will make no promises. I have a very open mind to this question. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that if we were to make another season, it would not be about my family, because I'm never making another thing about my own family again. And despite what Nicola said at the end of the last series, that ghost in my old bedroom is not Naomi, but a totally different woman. We think we're better off leaving the Ghost of Queen's Road alone. Okay. But we do have to say that if anyone out there has got a really great ghost story or another idea for a really wild family drama, which could lead us into the same territory, twasty, strange, poignant as this first season, please tell us. Email us at ghostory@wondry. Com, or leave us a voicemail at plus 1-3-4-7-4-6-0-9-4-7-3, and share it with us. We'd love to hear.

Maybe the next season of Ghost Story is going to be about Thomas Day, my ancestor, on the death certificate of Mousie, Mary, the second wife. We need to investigate that. Are you up for it?

We have to know.

We have to know. We have to know.

We have to know. We have to know. And if it's not true, we don't need to know. We need to just assume that it's.

True, okay? I think as we've established, we can just tell the stories we want about our own families.

So it's a deal. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. That's perfect. Elizabeth, thank you so much. You've been amazing.

Thank you so much, Elizabeth.

Thank you for having me and indulging me. It has been such a pleasure. I'm off to read this now for a third time.

Follow Ghost Story on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondry. Com/survey.

Ghost Story is a production of Wondry and Pineapple Street Studios. It's hosted by me, Tristan Redman. Our lead producer is Annie Brown, and senior producers are Chloe Prasinos and Jess Hackel. Our producers are Zandra Ellen and Emerald O'Brien, and our associate producer is Natalie Peard. Our editor is Joe Lovel, with fact-checking by Maximo Anderson. The theme song and music by Darryl Griffith, supplied by APM Music. There's mixing and original music by Hannis Brown. Pineapple's Head of Sound and Engineering is Raj Makijah, with assistant engineers Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks. Senior audio engineer for Ghost Story is Davie Sumner, and the senior producer of Development for the show is Jess Hackel. The artwork is by Brian Klugee. Legal services for Pineapple Street by Rachel Strom and Sam Cate-Gumpert from Davis Wright-Tremaine, David Hears from Five R. B, and Crystal Tupia at Odyssey. The senior producer for Wondry is Michelle Martin with producers Brian Taylor White and Grant Rutter. The managing producer for Wondry is Rachel Sibley, and the coordinating producer is Sarah Mathis. Our executive producers at Pineapple Street are Maddy Sprung.

Kaiser, Max Linsky, and Jenna Weiss-Burman.

Our executive producers for Wondry are Morgan Jones.

Rich Knight, Marshall Louis.

And.

Jessica Radburn. Special thanks to Elizabeth Day and also to Chris, Jan, Justine, and Sophie Redman. Jonathan Oates, Eleanor Johnson-Ward,tonahull, Ed and Chloe Cezar, Jess and Johnny Bennett, Alexa Neel, nick Costoff, Richmond Local Studies Library, Soho Radio, Richard Quinn, Richard Moore, Chris Potter, Susie Grogan, Damian Allen, Calder Walton, Carol Senate, Matthew Lockwood, Barb Fisher, Jackie Vegas, Casey Kaufman, Fiona Colbert at St. John's College Cambridge, Dr. Sarah Hossain, Dr. Richard Underwood, Martha Dancy, Josie Rourke, John and Kirsten Howles, Dr. Peter Heinel, Henry Molowski, Grace Cone-Chen, Alexis Moore, Leah Rees-Dennis, Maggie Lang, Alison Vermulen, and Barney Lee.