Mysteries and tales of the unexplained have long fascinated humanity, and one such enigma that has captured the imagination of many is the story of “The Woman in the Wall.”
This peculiar and haunting narrative has circulated in various forms, leaving people to wonder whether it is based on real events or simply a product of creative storytelling.
In The Woman in the Wall, the latest scary drama from the BBC, Ruth Wilson plays Lorna Brady, a woman who comes home to find a dead body. But because she’s been through a lot of stress and sleepwalking episodes, she has no idea if she had anything to do with the woman’s death or who the woman was.
It’s possible that the first episode of the six-part series made you wonder if it was based on a real story. In this article, we will delve into the origins of “The Woman in the Wall” and explore whether there is any truth to this eerie and mysterious tale.
Is the Woman in the Wall Based on a True Story?
The Woman in the Wall is based on real-life characters who were imprisoned in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.
Magdalene Laundries were Catholic nun-run institutions that admitted “fallen women”—a wide word used to characterize sex workers, unmarried mothers, battered women, and anybody else deemed ‘badly behaved’ or ‘difficult’.
Once admitted to the institutions, individuals were forced to perform physically hard work for lengthy periods with no pay, such as industrial laundry and cleaning floors.
Some survivors of these laundries have spoken out about being physically or sexually abused by those in authority, including Wilson’s character, Lorna Brady.
A young Lorna gives birth while kept in one of these buildings in The Woman in the Wall, but the baby is mercilessly snatched away from her. Wilson discovered that this does happen in some circumstances.
“In some of them, the girls gave birth, and then they had to nurse their child for two years, and then their child was taken away from them,” Wilson told BBC News.
“Things like that are horrifying—the fact that girls were not given gas and air or stitched up after birth.” They couldn’t because the nuns wouldn’t let them. Things like that just make you go, “Wow, it’s pure horror.”
Many women never left the Magdalene Laundries and died within their confines. This was the cause of their demise.
The nuns who owned the former laundry sold it to a property developer in 1993, who unearthed a mass burial of 155 women, some of whom were nameless and had not been certified deceased by the authorities.
In the aftermath, the Irish Catholic Church was chastised for its role in operating the facilities, and the Irish government was chastised for having contracts with several laundries.
Nevertheless, an 18-month investigation began in 2011, and according to The New Statesman, the UN Committee against Torture (UNCAT) found that the findings were “neither independent nor thorough enough.”
Nonetheless, it acknowledged “significant” governmental complicity in admitting women to Magdalene Laundries.
Two weeks after its release in February 2013, then-Taoiseach Enda Kenny apologized to survivors and established a compensation scheme to which no religious institutes affiliated with the Laundries contributed.
Read More: Is ‘May December’ Based on a True Story?
The last Magdalene Laundry closed in 1996. According to The Woman in the Wall, these are more modern injustices than some viewers may realize.
“Outside of Ireland, in my experience, this isn’t known about, and with the people who do tend to know about it, it’s because they’ve seen films like the Magdalene Sisters or Philomena,” series creator Joe Murtagh remarked.
“When you read into it, you realize how harrowing it was, how large it was, and how many tens of thousands of lives it touched.” It was a piece of history that piqued my interest and emotionally engaged me, but the driving force was just people not knowing enough about it.”
