Young Melinda on Ghost Whisperer grew up to become Shazam!'s Mary Marvel

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

Although Wonder Woman is more well-known, one of the first female superheroes to spin off from the comics world was Mary Marvel, a character whom many viewers met for the first time recently, catching Shazam! in theaters as the movie banks at box offices globally.

But if you're a fan of Ghost Whisperer, then Mary Marvel might've looked a bit familiar to you for a different reason. The actor cast as Mary, Grace Fulton, actually played a deceptively major role in Ghost Whisperer's first three seasons, starting with the very first episode.

The pilot episode of Ghost Whisperer opens on a scene where we see Young Melinda Gordon at a funeral with her grandmother. She sits next to an old man in the pew, then her grandma leads her up to the casket. Peering in, Young Melinda recognizes the man from the pew. "Grandma?" she asks nervously, only to be shushed and soothed. The man from the pew then approaches and reveals to Young Melinda that only she and her grandma can see him. Then, like every ghost Melinda encounters on the show, he asks for the young girl's help. In this way, we're watching Melinda go from an innocent young girl to a supernaturally insightful ghost whisperer through the eyes of Grace Fulton, not Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Fulton appeared as Young Melinda in five episodes, including the memorable "Melinda's First Ghost," where one of her classmates dies and nobody believes Melinda when she claims to have seen her. Her final appearance is arguably even more poignant. In the third season premiere episode "Underneath," we watch Young Melinda get visited by her dad, an emotional arc that carries past Fulton's work on the show.

After Fulton left the show, Kelly Gould appeared as Young Melinda in the episode "All Ghosts Lead to Grandview," then Haley Pullos made the character's last appearances in those back-to-back terrifying episodes "Stranglehold" and "Pater Familias."

Fulton moved onto movies, cast in her first movie Badland in 2007, but it was only in the past few years that she began to get bigger roles, although the supernatural still apparently stuck to her, featuring in Annabelle: Creation as a young girl tortured by a demon in a barn. But while her current role in Shazam! is her biggest yet, we know we'll always remember her as we first met her, as Ghost Whisperer's original Young Melinda Gordon.