LADD TAKES ON MITCHELL CASE AFTER GHOSTLY VISIT
Actress DIANE LADD has spent years and a small fortune on a campaign to f ind out the truth about apparent government whistle blower MARTHA MITCHEL L after the ghost of the former U.S. Attorney General’s wife appeared to her minutes after she died in 1976.
The actress mother of Jurassic Park star Laura Dern had just visited th e Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. - one of the key locations in the b urglary scandal that brought Richard Nixon’s administration down - during the run of her Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander play at the nearby Kenn edy Center, when she first encountered Mitchell’s spirit.
She recalls, "It was Memorial Day weekend and I was in the apartment…
It was exactly 4.45 in the morning and I was dead asleep. I felt someone shake my left arm. I was terrified.
"As I sat up, there was a gold vision… (and) I could see a person wit hin the gold vision." The spectre disappeared as Mitchell got out of bed, convinced there was an intruder in the house.
Then she was haunted by whispering voices throughout her performance on stage that night.
She adds, "The third act comes and I’m now on this huge stage alone… and just as I’m about to speak I feel someone walk up beside me and there ’s nobody there. I’m so thrown because I feel somebody’s there… but I c an’t see anybody there.
"There’s 1500 people there, waiting for me to speak my lines, so I take a breath and before I can speak, someone else speaks. She says, ‘Chose y ou… Must… Martha…’ Then silence, and everybody out there’s waiting for me to speak so I had to go on with the play.
"I didn’t deal with it and the very next morning I had to do a televisi on show… The show went great and at the end of the show, for some reaso n, I say (to the host Maury Povich), ‘Maury, do you know anybody named Ma rtha?’ He said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, you’re the one. You’ll tell the tr uth’.
"I said, ‘Who’s story?’ ‘Martha Mitchell’. I said, ‘Martha Mitchell, At torney John Mitchell’s wife, the crazy old alcoholic?’ (Povich said), ‘Sh e’s the one who brought them all down. She’s the one who did it.’ "I’m going, ‘Alright, Maury, OK, I’ll meet her.’ (He said), ‘You can’t meet her; she died… yesterday morning at 4.30am.’" The whole experience made Ladd compelled to find out more about Mitchel l - and she told the whole story for a recent taping of U.S. TV show Cele brity Ghost Stories, insisting Mitchell was held captive by government of ficials after she threatened to go to the press with what she knew about the Watergate Scandal.
She adds, "Martha Mitchell was Watergate and she had something to tell us that hasn’t been told. All the congressmen and representatives mocked her, called her a dirty, crazy alcoholic, called her insane, but she was a truth teller.
"Martha Mitchell, you were a great lady and I know you went through liv ing hell, you were held down, you were kidnapped, you were given a shot a gainst your will. That should not happen in my country."
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