Annabel Ward

*This article covers the person. For the case, see Annabel Ward Case*
**Annabel E. Ward** became a Type Two ghost after she was murdered by her former lover, the now-deceased John William Fairfax of Fairfax Iron. She was a socialite who also briefly dated Hugo Blake. She acted in several plays with Fairfax, such as *Hamlet*. As a ghost, Annabel has a deep, psychic connection with Lucy Carlyle through a necklace the two happily wear.

On the *Lockwood & Co.* TV series, the ghost of Annabel Ward is portrayed by Ishtar Currie-Wilson.

## History

### In life and murder

Annabel Ward was a socialite and actress. She purchased the house at 62 Sheen Road, not knowing that it would become her tomb. For a time, she dated a man named Hugo Blake, before moving on to another man named John Fairfax, with whom she acted in the play of William Shakespeare's *Hamlet*, portraying Ophelia while Fairfax portrayed Hamlet. At some point during their relationship, Fairfax commissioned a locket as a symbol of their love. The locket contained an inscription: "A W; H. II.2.115," a reference to Ward herself and the a particular passage within the play they both starred in "Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love." Below this appeared the Latin phrase "*Tormentum meum, laetitia mea*," which translated roughly as "My torment, my bliss."

Fairfax, the son of a wealthy iron magnate, disapproved of Ward's social circle, including Blake, whom she continued to socialise with despite having broken up with him and despite Fairfax forbidding her to do so. The two of them would often argue, their arguments steadily growing worse. One day, Fairfax caught Ward being dropped off at 62 Sheen Road by Blake. Having hidden in secret, he confronted her. They rowed, Fairfax eventually losing control, then striking her to the ground and snapping her neck in a single blow. He then secretly entombed her body within the house, the locket that he commissioned for her remaining upon her corpse. Hugo Blake was briefly caught and imprisoned for the crime, but as the authorities never actually found the body and had no proof against him, they were forced to let him go.

### In death and ghosthood

Following her death and entombment at 62 Sheen Road, Annabel Ward was seemingly lost to history. Her ghost, however, remained tied to her source, the locket which had been given to her by John Fairfax, waiting to be released and hoping for a person with the Talent to hear her plea and help her to get the revenge that she so desired. This day would not come until some 50 years later when the Lockwood & Co. agency was hired to investigate the haunting of Sheen Road by its owner, Mrs Hope, whose husband had already perished in a tragic accident precipitated by the ghostly activity on the premises.

The case was handled by the company's leader Anthony Lockwood and new agent Lucy Carlyle. The two were utterly unprepared for what awaited them due to Lockwood choosing not to wait for the information provided by their researcher, George Cubbins. They discovered Annabel Ward's ghost and tracked her back to her corpse, but were forced to use magnesium flares in the process, setting the house ablaze and ultimately resulting in it being burnt to the ground. They covered the body with a silver net, seemingly extinguishing the source, but Lucy, having formed a connection with with Ward's ghost through her talent of Listening, claimed the locket from her body.

Following this disastrous affair, Lockwood & Co. was slapped with a £60,000 fine and given two weeks to pay up or lose their agency and its home, 35 Portland Row. Meanwhile, Annabel Ward's ghost manifested in Lucy's bedroom late at night, the locket being the source and not her body. At first, both Lockwood and George were aghast at Lucy having brought such a dangerous object into 35 Portland Row. Lockwood, however, quickly saw Lucy's connection to the ghost as an opportunity. Following some additional research, he put the story of Annabel Ward out to the local papers, with the promise that Lockwood & Co. would solve the case, feeling that the publicity that solving such a high-profile could get them would attract cases of a caliber sufficient to clear up their fine. This, combined with Ward's ghost's reaction to a newspaper article regarding Hugo Blake led them to again implicate him, but they were unable to come up with any solid evidence and the authorities were again forced to release Blake.

Meanwhile, John Fairfax, having seen the coverage of the case in the news, realized that Lockwood & Co. might be in possession of a clue which could incriminate him. Disguised, he personally broke into 35 Portland Row in an attempt to steal the locket, but was stymied by the fact that Lucy had taken to personally wearing it upon herself as a necklace. Refusing to be deterred, Fairfax tried again, this time by making them an offer they couldn't refuse: clearing the hauntings at a property he claimed he was trying to unload, Combe Carey Hall, with the promise of £60,000 their entire fine, simply for showing up for the job, and an additional fee of twice what Lockwood claimed to be his standard charge upon completion of the job. He hoped that the combined hauntings of the property, the Red Room and the Screaming Staircase, would finish them off, and took measures to try to trap them within the property.

Fairfax was angered that morning upon discovering that the group had survived the horrors of Combe Carey Hall. Meanwhile, Lcokwood had worked out much of the truth of how he had murdered Ward and confronted him with this. Fairfax then decided to personally kill the group, but was determined first to know what happened to the locket, as he knew it could implicate him. He demand of them where it was and when they refused to reveal the information, he ordered his assistant, Percy Grebe, to shoot Lucy. Lucy then shouted that she would tell him and Fairfax, relishing the moment, stated that he thought she would be the one to crack. He asked where at Portland Row they had hidden it, but she told him she had it, revealing the necklace she had made and the locket contained in protective silver-glass. She deposited it into her hands, thus summoning the spirit of Annabel Ward. Fairfax felt upon for a pair of goggles, lent to him by the Orpheus Society. These allowed him to see the full horror of what was bearing down him, the ghost of Annabel Ward, but proved useless as a defence. Ghost-locked, Fairfax was drawn into Ward's embrace. Emitting a single cry, he fell to the floor, dead, Ghost-Touched. The light of the ghost went out, Ward's spirit departing the world for good. Lucy dropped the locket to the floor, shattering it, making Annabel finally rest in peace.

## Notes

In the Netflix TV series, Annabel Ward's locket is instead a ring. It is not clear why this change was made, but it may have simply been easier to depict Lucy removing a ring from the corpse in the heat of the moment. Additionally, there is no mention of the ring containing the inscription "*Tormentum meum, laetitia mea*" as in the novels. Whereas in the novel Fairfax states that he knocked Ward to the ground, snapping her neck, in the television series he is depicted as having choked her to death.