Murdoch investigates the suicides of heirs to a great manor house and family fortune, but evidence begins to mount that it might be murder.
Tropes:
- Big Fancy House: Big, fancy, and spooky.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: The victim's family has to deal with suicide, murder, adultery... It gets pretty ugly.
- Faking the Dead: Timothy is still alive, having feigned death through voodoo chemicals, and is the one trying to kill his brothers.
- Fright Deathtrap: The killer poses as the ghost of the Victim of the Week's brother, hoping to either induce a fatal heart attack or drive him to suicide. Ultimately it does both, as the victim suffers a heart attack while climbing on to a window ledge.
- Half-Breed Discrimination: Timothy Beaton (whose mother was one of the black servants) suffered this greatly, including at the hands of his own half-brothers.
- Heel Realization: Byron suffers one at the end after realizing his actions drove his half-brother and wife to murder him and his other brothers. Ronald Beaton also seems fairly remorseful for what happened to Timothy throughout the episode, declaring that Timothy would be fully justified in haunting them after everything they put him through.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": Almost all of the conspirators in the murder plot have this reaction after Murdoch tracks them down in Belleville. The only exception is Timothy Beaton, who simply curses Murdoch for his cleverness.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Murdoch ascribes the "curse" on the Beaton family to a genetic predisposition to heart disease, compounded by bad luck and "the melancholy of having too much money and too little purpose." The haunting is revealed to be mundane trickery, but the end of the episode implies that the housemaid Claire used voodoo to give Byron Beaton a heart attack.
- Uncertain Doom: The murderers, at least one of whom is implied to have been hanged in a later episode, and the last surviving Beaton brother, who is having a heart attack as the episode ends after a voodoo doll of him is stabbed.
- Underage Casting: The actor playing Godfrey doesn't look nearly old enough to have an adult grandson.
