| “ | I know God makes no mistakes, but I believe he may have been drunk when he built Gertrude's personality. | „ |
| ~ An entry in Sir Aldridge's diary regarding his daughter's crime. |
Gertrude Aldridge is a minor antagonist in the 2016 Ghostbusters film. She is the vengeful spirit of a deranged noblewoman and the first ghost the protagonists face off against.
She was portrayed by Bess Rous and Chaunty Spillane.
History[]
Life and Death[]
Gertude Aldridge was born in the late 1800's as the eldest daughter of Sir Aldridge and lived with him and their family in the Aldridge Mansion. However, Gertrude became mentally psychotic in her adult years (likely due to her father's poor parenting but also underline mental illness). On the morning of October 25, 1894, Sir Aldridge was shocked to learn that all of his servants had been murdered in their sleep by Gertrude herself after he found no one prepared his breakfast. To avoid public embarrassment, her family locked her in the cellar behind a reinforced door and kept her down there for the rest of her life, feeding her through a slot in the door. Sir Aldridge believed his daughter's psychotic behaviors was a mistake by God.
At some point, Gertrude died while still trapped in the cellar, and when the Aldridge Mansion fell under new ownership, her remains were dug out. But when the new owner began to hear strange sounds emanating from the cellar, he became so terrified that he sealed it shut, and had not been opened since. The mansion continued to change hands until it belonged to Ed Mulgrave, Jr., who used Gertrude's story to turn it into a haunted house-style tourist attraction, with the tour guide Garrett telling the story to scare visitors.
Present Day[]
One night as he was closing up, Garrett saw that the doorknob to the locked cellar was turning on its own, which spooked him. He then became terrified when he heard a horrifying howl from behind the door, so he tried tried to flee, only for the doorknob on the front door to burn his hand, and then he was flung against the wall into a portrait. He then tried to use a chair to break a window, but the chair was flung back at him. Terrified, he fled back into the hallway where he found the cellar door suddenly open. Panicked out of his mind, Garret ran into the cellar, but then saw a glowing bluish-green ectoplasm seeping up through the floor. When he realized his horrible mistake of entering the cellar, the door closed shut and the ectoplasm began to rise up further. He tried to run for the door, but the old stairs collapsed under his weight. As Garret clung onto the ledge of the door, the ghost of Gertrude Aldridge herself appeared before him, causing him to scream in terror. However, Garret somehow survived and managed to escape the mansion, but was too terrified to approach it again.
The next day, Ed Mulgrave, Jr., having read a copy of Erin Gilbert's book Ghosts of Our Past, came to see her at Columbia University, hoping she could help. She along with Abby Yates and Jillian Holtzmann went to the Aldridge Mansion. Garrett, who'd survived his encounter with Gertrude, refused to go inside with him, giving them the keys and warning them darkly that they might die in there. Upon entering, Erin stepped in some slime on the floor and the cellar door opened. Gertrude floated out and confronted the three. Erin's efforts to talk to her yielded no results. Suddenly, she transformed into a hideous, corpselike monster and vomited ectoplasm all over a terrified Erin before flying out the window.
Much later, during the Fourth Cataclysm brought about by Rowan North, Gertrude, along with Mayhem and the ghost of an executed murderer the Ghostbusters had encountered in the subway and failed to capture, confronted the Ghostbusters again, and this time they defeated her.
Trivia[]
- Though Sir Aldridge tried to defer blame of Gertrude's crimes from himself, his own questionable history, such as sacrificing a Romanian mother and child just to save a grandfather clock from the Titanic's sinking, suggest that it was his poor upbringing that led to his daughter's insanity.
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