I Can’t Stop Thinking About This Nancy Drew Ghost Theory

Move over, Riverdale: There’s a new mystery on The CW that’s so juicy, it involves a killer ghost. 

The television adaptation of Nancy Drew hit The CW on Wednesday, introducing us to a Nancy who is more Veronica Mars than she is the precocious sleuth from the yellow paperbacks. 

On the new mystery soap, Horseshoe Bay resident Nancy Drew (Kennedy McMann) is 18, and still reeling from her mom’s death months earlier. She’s working at a diner instead of heading off to college with her friends and, in her grief, is taking a break from her long-held hobby of sleuthing. That “break” ends when the wife of wealthy summer resident Ryan Hudson (Riley Smith) is found mysteriously dead at Nancy’s diner, and the ghost of Lucy Sable could be responsible. 

Lucy is a town legend. Rumor has it that 17-year-old Lucy won Horseshoe Bay’s Sea Queen Pageant, before mysteriously plummeting to her death off the bluffs later that night. No one knows what happened to Lucy or where her body went. The only thing they could find of “dead Lucy” was her Sea Queen crown. 

Until the pilot episode of Nancy Drew, that is. On Wednesday’s episode, Nancy finds a trunk in her attic that contains a bloody pageant dress. It is particularly disturbing because when Nancy was just a child, she witnessed her parents digging up that same trunk in the backyard. Nancy’s mother insists the memory was “just a dream,” but it stuck with Nancy forever. Did Nancy’s parents have anything to do with what happened to Lucy that night?

The real question may not be what happened to Lucy, but who Lucy was. My theory? Lucy Sable is Nancy’s biological mother. 

The timing checks out. Nancy is around 18 or 19 and, according to Lucy’s grave, Lucy died in 2000. It’s a little weird to make your central ghost someone who died fairly recently. Couldn’t Nancy just talk to people in town who knew Lucy and get more information? The year of her death is likely to be central to the story. 

Why would Nancy’s parents bury a bloody dress and hide it from Nancy? Maybe the bloody dress isn’t bloody because Lucy was murdered, but because she gave birth in it. Given Nancy’s naturally skeptical nature, her mind would go to the darkest place, seeing that blood, but that could be a red herring that will eventually give way to a more innocuous explanation.  

If Lucy is Nancy’s biological mother, how Nancy came to the Drew family is suspicious — clearly, it wasn’t a standard adoption. Lucy may be dead (perhaps after traumatic childbirth), and the Drew family covered it up to make sure they could keep baby Nancy. 

Then again, it’s also quite possible that Lucy isn’t dead, and instead is the ghostly figure that Nancy keeps seeing in the corner of her eye. Perhaps Lucy had a reason to fake her death and turned to Nancy’s father, a lawyer, for help. The Drew family got the baby they always wanted, and Lucy escaped town as a dead legend. 

There’s also another, extremely dark possibility: If Lucy is Nancy’s biological mother and is dead, the Drew family could be responsible. Would Nancy Drew destroy its protagonist’s world so soon after she lost her mom? Maybe, but until we learn the truth about what happened to Lucy, we’ll have to play detective ourselves.