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novoki · 3 years

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The Ghost of Bluewater Marsh

So if y’all don’t know, there’s a ghost lady you can run into in Bluewater Marsh if you stick around long enough. Here’s a great video detailing all her appearances and a bit about her mystery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmegyeTzkis

I think I have a pretty solid theory of who she was, what she went through, and how she died that I think lines up with the evidence we’re presented:

1) She had a love affair

All the encounters with her (bar the last one) have her talking to either a mysterious lover, her mother or her father. Half the time she’s defending her lover (”Mother, you can be so unkind! So very unkind! It ain’t like that!”) and half the time she’s berating him (”You’re just hillbilly white trash like my momma always said.”) It’s pretty obvious that this woman was wronged on both parts: her parents didn’t let her be with her lover, and her lover somehow betrayed her.

My guess is that the woman had pre-marital sex with the man. Back in the 1800s, women were valued for their “purity” and virginity and were looked down upon if they had sex outside of marriage. The woman outright says “I gave you everything... no-one will have me now.” This reflects contemporary attitudes in the 1800s, where if word got out that you had pre-marital sex no man would want to marry you - even with the offer of a large dowry, which her family most likely had, considering her upper-class dress. The woman also says “And I thought you was a gentleman” and having sex with a woman outside of marriage definitely wouldn’t have been a gentlemanly thing to do.

It’s unclear what happened to the lover - the woman herself seems to flit between loving him and not. She insists “he’s going to come back to me” yet is also clearly angry at him (”I’m starting to think you never loved me.”). The lover at least got threatened by the father, as evidenced by the woman begging “Daddy, no, put the gun down, please!” but it’s unclear if he was killed or not.

The woman, on the other hand, has a much more obvious death.

2) She killed herself

Despite knowing the rough idea of her life, her death is still a mystery. Both how she died and why she haunts the swamps specifically. This mystery is answered by paying attention to where the ghost frequently appears: you can often find her standing under a dead tree which has both a hangman’s noose and a box to stand on.

The conclusion is pretty obvious: the woman likely hung herself on the tree. This is confirmed by your final encounter with her, which shows her hanging from the tree itself.

3) She’s Agnes Dowd

A popular theory as to the ghost’s identity is of Agnes Dowd, the owner of a gravestone that can be found near Shady Belle. Everything seems to line up: Agnes is 19, and the ghost both looks and sounds fairly young, and Agnes “tragically took her own life” in “1883″. So far, so good - we know the woman hung herself and the time line works for RDR2. Shady Belle itself is rich and lavish (or at least was) and matches up with the woman’s upper-class clothing.

The location is a snag, since Shady Belle is on the other side of Lemoyne to Bluewater Marsh, but there can be two explanations for this: one, this is where the ghost ran away to go kill herself, seeking some peace away from her controlling family and her traitorous lover; or two, the swamp is where the ghost and her lover met up during their affair, and is thus an appropriate location for her to hang herself in and then haunt. The video above also mentions that Reverend Swanson talks about seeing a “young woman” ghost in the swamps around Shady Belle, which could very well be the Bluewater Marsh ghost.

There is, however, one last mystery to it all: according to the gravestone, Agnes Dowd not only took her own life, but also “others”. Could this mean Agnes murdered someone else? Her lover, perhaps, or her parents? Unlikely, as we see nothing like that in her memories.

Instead, there is one piece of dialogue that I think splits this open. The woman, in one encounter, starts talking about how “He looks just like you” and “I left him... for you. I left everything!” For a second, the first line almost seems aimed at the player, but the second line shows this isn’t the case. Someone looks like her lover, and she left someone - perhaps her lover? if this is the same “he/him” - for them. I think that this is her talking to her son, saying he looks like his father and that she left him to preserve her and her son’s reputation. Either she broke off their relationship, or left him behind entirely - this would also perhaps be an explanation for why she’s in Shady Belle. She was sent there to be hidden away, now a shame to her family due to her lost status as a virgin. This is the “everything” she left.

This, then, would be the “other” the gravestone mentions - her son. Perhaps he was a child or younger, and she killed him when she killed herself; or maybe she was still pregnant, and instead was only imagining her son to look like his father. Either way, if the ghost truly is Agnes Dowd, this is the likeliest story behind it.

Let me know what you guys think!

#rdr2 #red dead redemption 2 #rdr2 bluewater marsh #bluewater marsh #bluewater marsh ghost #tw suicide #cw suicide #agnes dowd #rdr2 agnes dowd

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