the stormy Australian tour, the awkward moments come thick and fast—but arguably the most horrifying of all comes in the season's penultimate episode, "Avalanche."

On the couple's seventh wedding anniversary, Diana announces she has a surprise for Charles. This is immediately alarming both to the viewer and to Charles, since Diana's last surprise for him—that unforgettable "Uptown Girl" dance—didn't go over so great. But Diana is nothing if not optimistic, and seems genuinely excited as she unveils this year's gift, which is… a videotape of herself singing a song from the musical The Phantom of the Opera. Charles grimaces through the performance and pretends to enjoy it, then immediately runs off to complain about it to his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles.

You might think this moment is simply way too out-there to be true. But as is almost always the case with the royals, you would be incorrect. Here's the truth about Diana's Phantom moment.

Diana really did record herself performing a song from Phantom of the Opera for Charles.

Yup. And a faintly devastating 1988 Washington Post column by Chuck Conconi recounted the whole thing, noting that Diana, a Phantom of the Opera superfan, chose this "unique" gift to celebrate the couple's "seven-year itch anniversary." According to the Post, the video played very much like it does in The Crown: Diana rented out the show's real set in London's West End, hired the show's real choreographer Gillian Lynne to direct her, and performed the song "All I Ask Of You." "Diana didn't settle for second best," Conconi noted, suggesting that Andrew Lloyd Webber himself was even present for the recording—although the man himself denied this in a later interview with The Telegraph.

"Phantom is fact," Annie Sulzberger, head researcher for The Crown, confirmed in an interview with The Telegraph. "We did not make this up. There were a number of [press] reports on this, enough to make us feel comfortable including it in the show. It's a story that pre-existed the writing of the script."

In real life, Diana may not have actually sung.

Regrettably (or maybe thankfully?), the tape of this performance has never been made available to the public, so details around it are scarce. According to Sulzberger, Diana singing the actual song might have been stretching the truth." She could have mimed to the song," Sulzberger explained. "The reports suggest performance and dancing. To minimize the number of witnesses, there is a chance they played a recording.” But the Washington Post column does specifically note that Diana sung, so draw your own conclusions.

Diana really was a Phantom of the Opera superfan.