The tragic story of the little girl who ‘haunts’ the Wednesday season 2 castle

The new season of Wednesday hasn’t even aired yet, but Ireland’s Charleville Castle has already welcomed avid fans of the Netflix show on a gothic pilgrimage to see the sets.

The second season – the first part of which arrives this Wednesday (!) –delivers the fandom a whole new batch of locations, after the production moved from Romania to Ireland. Albeit, with Romanian actor Victor Dorobanțu as the scene-stealing Thing still scuttling in tow.

Among the Irish locations scouted out for the new bundle of episodes is the gothic Grade I listed fortress Charleville, in County Offaly, whose crow and bat topped corridors have been walked by Jenna Ortega, Tim Burton – and us, as Metro was treated to a visit.

In many ways Charleville Castle is the ideal place to unspool Wednesday’s tale of mystery, mayhem and murder, because it’s a lore-laden place itself, where things are said to go bump in the night.

By things, we mean creepy ghost children. One of the spots the production used to film scenes was Harriet’s staircase, named after an 8-year-old girl who tragically fell to her death there.

The story goes that the youngest daughter of the third Earl of Charleville, who once upon a time owned the castle, was asked by her governess to go upstairs and wash her hands before a meal. On the way back down the gloomy three-story staircase, Harriet is said to have clambered up onto the bannister to slide down. 

She slipped and fell to her death on the flagstone tiles below. A brass guard was subsequently installed on the bannister to stop those who might have a similar idea. 

Since then, the staircase has become one of the castle’s hotspots for so-called activity, of the paranormal kind. The goings-ons are straight out of a horror film. Bonnie Vance, 75, who helped form a charitable trust to restore the castle after it fell into disrepair and lives there with her son, said she has only seen the ghosts ‘occasionally’, but often hears them.

What is it that she’s heard? Children giggling, voices talking, the scrapping sounds of furniture being moved in rooms that stand empty. She later learned the jangle of children playing was coming from a room that had once been a nursery.

Guests at the castle have heard who-knows-what move in the night and asked to switch rooms – which makes you wonder why they might have wanted to stay in the first place. Most of the spectral racket takes place in the small hours from 2am to 3am.

One unassuming bedroom – an imposing bed decked out in scarlet red covers, next to arched windows that don’t come with curtains attached – is supposed to be a hub of ghoulish hinjinks, with a door that has been reported to lock people in and out at will. Bonnie shut the door when we were inside, leaving everyone with a brief but queasy feeling before we were released.

‘My official statement on the ghosts is I don’t believe in them,’ says Bonnie’s son Jonathan, the only one of her three children who stuck around to help manage the castle, ‘but I won’t say it loud enough for them to hear me.’

Bonnie insists she isn’t scared of the ghosts (‘They’re friendly’) and speaks very tenderly of late Harriet. What the Wednesday cast made of all these eerie tales, we don’t know. They were spared an overnight stay, instead setting up in the nearby town Tullamore. But Ortega and co did get on very well with the castle’s black cat, Mirka, who was known to take up residence on their hot water bottles. (The castle has no central heating and hit-and-miss power supplies). 

The castle was one of the locations Wednesday director Tim Burton signed off on, as the production had the double duty this season of not only finding a whole new roster of Irish locations, but ones that would pass for their predecessors in Romania.

The reason for the swap? Locations manager Maria O’Connor, who’s been in the screen locations biz for over 30 years and worked with Wednesday’s showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar on Into The Badlands, said they chose Ireland because the creators have loved working there in the past.

The country isn’t spoiled for choice of gothic castles, so Charleville was an easy decision. As were many of the picks, Maria said, since the Edward Scissorhands director isn’t one to hum and haw.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it sounds like Tim’s company is not of the dull variety. When scouting out the building that would become Nevermore Academy’s exterior (with an ornate new canopy digitally plonked on top in post-production) Tim tasked Maria with scrambling up ladders to get onto the roof for a proper looksee.

This building sits within Powerscourt Estate, the other chief location used, beside Ashford Studios for the interior scenes, and owned by the Slazenger family (of the sporting gear). A mossy foliage-covered graveyard was one of the spots, with smoke machines pumping away during moody night shoots, just inches from the Slazenger family’s own private graveyard in the corner.

The 19 hectare County Wicklow estate has swanky gardens, a dramatic nearby waterfall and a 36-hole golf course – which avid golfer Catherine Zeta Jones made full use of while filming. There was less of a requirement for this part to fit into the mould of what had gone before, since it serves as the home of new cast addition Joanna Lumley’s character Hester. 

Whether the location changes will be picked up by ardent Wednesday fandom (of which suggested names online have included Woes, Outcasts and Thursdays – because it follows Wednesday…) remains to be seen. The episodes we have seen certainly look more lush than previously, but County Wicklow is referred to as the Garden of Ireland after all. 

The attention to detail has certainly been paid, down to replicating the exact same tree layout as that shot in Romania. Not that Maria overly hypes how hard it all was, simply describing it as ‘tricky’. 

But Wednesday is now in Ireland to stay. Filming for the third season kicks off this November and the Addams family car has stayed in situ in the meantime. As has the Nevermore Academy chandelier, with head-sized orbs of light that hang over the main staircase in Charleville Castle. It was a gift from the production. Although, you almost feel they’ve done enough. 

The castle might have claims of otherworldly visitations, but if anything, that will only make the curious Wednesday loyalists – who were devout enough to visit Romania in droves – even more eager to take a look in. 

Wednesday season 2 launches on August 6, with the second part arriving on September 3.

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