| “ | 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 lost soul and a minor antagonist in the 2016 Ghostbusters film.
She was portrayed by Bess Rous and Chaunty Spillane.
Biography
Gertrude lived in the Aldridge Mansion with her wealthy father, Sir Aldridge, until one day she went insane and murdered all of the Aldridge family's servants. To avoid public embarrassment, her horrified father locked her in the cellar, and kept her down there for the rest of her life, feeding her through a slot in the door. Years later, the Aldridge Mansion had changed hands until it belonged to Ed Mulgrave, Jr., who turned it into a haunted house style tourist attraction.
One night as tour guide Garrett was closing up, he heard terrifying howls coming from the cellar, and tried to flee, only for the doorknob on the front door to burn his hand. He tried to use a chair to break a window, but the chair was flung back at him, knocking him into the wall. Terrified, he fled into the cellar. Realizing his mistake, he tried to leave, but the old stairs collapsed under his weight, and glowing bluish-green ectoplasm began seeping up through the floor, before the ghost of Gertrude Aldridge herself attacked him. Garrett screamed.
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, Gertrude transformed into a hideous, corpselike monster and vomited ectoplasm all over a terrified Erin before flying out the window. Later in the movie, 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 Gertude'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.
 Villains
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