The Evil Dead Easter Egg You May Have Missed In Red Dead Redemption 2
There are so many Easter eggs in Red Dead Redemption 2 that it's difficult to compile them all. There's Bigfoot, a Hobbit hole, aliens, and numerous Grand Theft Auto references. Some are good fun, like the vampire, or a nod to the previous game, like the Donkey Lady ... and some are downright creepy, like the Nite Folk, the giant snake, or Meteor House, where you can find the grisly remains of bodies destroyed by a meteor. But one of the most disturbing Easter eggs in Red Dead Redemption 2 comes in the form of a woman trapped in an outhouse.
Get close to the outhouse, and you'll hear a few phrases, like "Comb my hair...mother!" "Where are you?" and "I'll find a way home!" But who's in there, and what's her story? Is there a way to save the woman in the outhouse? Or is she doomed to stay locked up forever?
Where to find the outhouse
The outhouse can be found to the west of Braithwaite Manor. When Arthur is helping Penelope Braithwaite escape, he can take her to the outhouse, where Penelope will explain that the woman locked inside is her cousin Gertrude. If you go back to Braithwaite Manor as John in the epilogue, you will find Gertrude's skeletal remains in the rotting outhouse: There is no discernable way to save her as Arthur in the main game.
Gertrude is the child of Catherine Braithwaite. She has a cleft palate, a receding hairline, and sunken eyes and cheeks, and she's mentally unstable. Her family locked her in the outhouse instead of sending her to a mental institution because they "feared that the family name would be tarnished if word of Gertrude's health got out." It is speculated that her disfigured appearance and mental instability are the result of incestuous inbreeding and that she "may also possess albinism, severe asymmetry, and the infamous Habsburg jaw."
Gertrude was inspired by The Evil Dead
It is possible that Gertrude's predicament was inspired by events from Sam Raimi's classic horror film The Evil Dead. In the film, Ash Williams' sister Cheryl is possessed by a Deadite, or demon, and the characters lock her in the basement and chain the door closed, where she periodically shouts obscenities and taunts them, saying things like "Kill her if you can, lover boy" and "Soon you will all be like me, and then who will lock you up in the cellar?"
While Gertrude wasn't possessed by a demon, it was commonly believed from the late 1400s to the 1700s that mental illness was caused by demonic possession. In the 1800s, Dorothea Dix did the most for the mentally ill in America by investigating "how those who are mentally ill and poor were cared for, and she discovered an underfunded and unregulated system that perpetuated abuse of this population." While mental institutions were bad enough, Gertrude's family still chose to lock her in the outhouse, showing that the mentally ill were still regarded as outcasts in the late 1800s.