BEDLAM: A Wychwood Ghost Story
An inheritance written in blood. A curse that crosses oceans. And a young woman whose sanity may be the only thing standing between the living and the dead.

London, 1895. When Emily Fairhaven opens her eyes in a silk-draped chamber, she believes herself a guest of the eminent Professor Wickens, her family's physician. But the illusion fades quickly. The windows are barred. The attendants wear pale blue coats. And the locks are on the outside.

Emily has been committed to Bethlem Royal Hospital?known to polite society as Bedlam. No explanation is given. Letters to her family vanish. Her protests are dismissed as hysteria. Only one other patient, a boy called Tink, believes her story. He knows the hidden ways of the asylum?the forbidden stair, the tunnels beneath the Day Room, the shadow in the east wing that is not entirely human.

As Emily searches for the truth behind her confinement, strange visions begin to torment her: an endless sea at dusk, a figure in white standing on a burning deck, a man who calls her by another name. These are not dreams, but memories?echoes from a life not her own.

Through the fragments, a pattern emerges, one written in the history of her bloodline. Nearly a century earlier, in 1810, George Compton fled Shipton Court, the ancestral estate in the Wychwood. Desperate to escape the family's ruinous influence, he took passage aboard The Ceylon, bound for Madras with his new wife, Maria Jane Hoskyns. Their voyage was cursed from the start. A mutiny erupted in the doldrums, led by a man named Pekoe Taylor, who vanished into the sea under circumstances no one could explain. Maria claimed she saw a sea-witch drag him down. George believed it was something far worse?something that had followed him from Shipton Court.

In Madras, the couple tried to build a new life, but the curse endured. The locals spoke of a pale woman glimpsed near the docks, her face obscured by seaweed and foam. The same apparition would later be seen in the mirrors of Bedlam, watching over Emily's every move.

Between the India of 1810 and the London of 1895, threads of deceit, spiritualism, and generational guilt weave a single tapestry of haunting. Emily's visions draw her deeper into the story of her ancestors?of the Reddys, the boatbuilders, and the "wraith bride" whose death bound the Compton family to a fate beyond redemption.

But the most terrifying revelations come not from the past, but from the present. Professor Wickens, her supposed benefactor, is not merely her physician. His interest in Emily is clinical, almost ritualistic. He seeks to prove that madness is inherited, that the mind can be mapped like a disease?and that the ghosts of Shipton Court are symptoms to be studied, not banished.

In Episode Six, Emily and Tink's friendship deepens into something defiant. Together they challenge the order of Bedlam itself. Yet as they plot escape, the Wraith appears again?this time visible to others. Mirrors crack. Lamps extinguish themselves. And one by one, those who betray Emily begin to vanish.

Duke Pierce Reade is an historian, futurist, researcher and writer living and working near the University of Chicago where songbirds are abundant, the trees canopy the streets, and the sunrise over Lake Michigan is spectacular.