Carol Martino (played by Caroline Aaron) arrives in Ghosts (US) as a surprise guest from the living world — and quickly becomes a delightfully complicated addition to the dead. She is the widow of Pete Martino, the eternally chipper 1980s scoutmaster ghost. When she first visits the haunted Woodstone Mansion in Season 1, she seems like a warm, slightly scattered woman paying respects to a long-lost husband. But beneath the smiles, it turns out Carol has secrets of her own.
In her debut episode, “Pete’s Wife” Season 1, Episode 6, Carol reveals that during Pete’s life, she had an affair with his best friend, Jerry. She’s lived with guilt, and she wants to finally set the record straight. Pete, of course, can’t say much back to her (being invisible and dead), but his heartbreak lingers. In that moment, Carol is introduced not as a villain or saint, but something far more human: a woman who loved her husband, made mistakes, and kept living.
But Carol’s story doesn’t end there. In Season 3, during the Halloween episode “The Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave”, she returns — only to dramatically choke on a powdered doughnut hole and die on the spot. Now a ghost herself, Carol floats into the afterlife with the same stubborn charisma she had in life.
Once part of the ghostly ensemble, Carol wastes no time embracing her second act. In Season 3, Episode 8 “The Silent Partner”, Pete discovers to his horror that Carol has already slept with both Thorfinn, Nancy, and is planning a relationship with Baxer, a British Revolutionary-era ghost. While the show plays the moment for laughs, it also quietly affirms something significant: Carol is bi! Her intimacy with both a man and a woman is presented without judgment, fanfare, or even labels.
Carol’s bisexuality is never explicitly named, but her actions speak clearly. Her sexuality, much like her personality, doesn’t follow rules. She loves who she wants, when she wants, and doesn’t feel the need to explain it.
In Season 3 “The Traveling Agent”, Carol has moved into the garden shed and — rather hilariously — married Baxter. Carol begins building a new afterlife on her terms, far from the suburban image Pete once painted.
What makes Carol’s story compelling isn’t just the twisty romantic entanglements. It’s that she’s a bisexual older woman who’s given the space to be sexual, complicated, and entirely unrepentant. Carol loves men. Carol loves women. Carol does what she wants. And no one — not even her ghost ex-husband — is going to stop her. Her story highlights that queerness doesn’t fade with age, and that reinvention is always possible — even after death.