For Diane Ladd, her particular ghost story — with a cameo from the Watergate Hotel for good measure — appears to have shifted the course of her acting career.
As Ladd told Entertainment Weekly, she was a rising star when she joined a stage play at Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center in 1976. While staying at the Watergate Hotel (post-Nixon scandal), she was awoken just before 5:00 a.m. by someone roughly shaking her arm. Only, when Ladd got up, she didn't see a fellow corporeal human, but the wispy silhouette of a woman in her bedroom which then disappeared.
When she went to the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater for her play, Ladd then heard a whisper while on stage. After the second occurrence, she thought it was the voices of bored ushers — only to find no ushers lingering backstage. Finally, again while in front of the audience, Ladd says that a disembodied woman's voice whispered in her ear, saying that she was named Martha and needed Ladd's help. Supposedly, talk show host Maury Povich rather dramatically told Ladd that it was the spirit of Watergate whistleblower Martha Mitchell, who had died in May 1976. Povich told Entertainment Weekly he didn't quite remember the exchange, though he knew both Ladd and Mitchell and both were on his show. Ladd went on to champion a Martha Mitchell biopic, though it hasn't currently come to fruition.
