The Haunting of Hill House ending explained: What happens to the Crain siblings?
The Haunting of Hill House, one of Netflix's most celebrated horror shows, follows the Crain siblings--Steven, Shirley, Theo, Nell, and Luke--as they attempt to navigate the trauma of living in a haunted mansion as children. What started out as a house flipping project for their parents, Hugh and Olivia, soon turned dangerous when mysterious paranormal occurrences began infiltrating their lives.
Created by Hollywood's horror movie expert Mike Flanagan and based on the novel by Shirley Jackson, the show incorporates jump scares, deeply disturbing plot twists, and gore. But at its core, it is a story about family dynamics and how trauma can affect every part of their lives.
By the end of ten episodes, the siblings enter the red room, AKA the stomach of the mansion, and face their demons while trying to save Luke. They find the truth about the mansion from Nell's ghost and reconcile their relationships, bonded by the trauma of growing up in the Hill House.
Here's the rundown of The Haunting of Hill House and the fate of the Crain siblings.
Disclaimer: All opinions in this article belong solely to the writer. Spoilers ahead.
How did the Crain siblings end up back in the mansion in The Haunting of Hill House?
Where are the siblings in the present day?
The show opens with Steven, the oldest in the family. He has successfully soured his relationship with his siblings after using their family trauma to become a famous author, all while not believing in any of their stories or the ghosts. Shirley becomes a mortician after witnessing one dressing up Olivia's body.
Theo uses her magical hands as a child psychologist, finding the horrors of the children's pasts with just a touch and putting child abusers behind bars. Luke's traumatic past has turned him into a drug addict, and Nell frantically tries to get the siblings together to save him before it's too late. In a tragic turn of events, her husband dies of what they claim is an aneurysm.
Consequently, Nell also dies, reuniting the siblings for the grand finale of The Haunting of Hill House.
Luke goes to destroy the mansion
Distraught about his twin's death, Luke steals Theo's car and races over to the mansion to set it on fire in the finale of The Haunting of Hill House. Of course, that goes about as well as one could hope, and Luke is held captive in the red room. The bickering siblings and their dad make their way to the house to save him.
The finale reveals that the red room, which remained locked for the entirety of the family's stay there, was in fact not locked at all. It is described by Nell's ghost as the "stomach of the house", morphing into any shape the family desired. This meant that it became the tree house for Luke, the game room for Steven, the dance studio for Theo, the family room for Shirley, and so on.
The giveaway? A long, rectangular window and individual red doors that remain constant throughout their illusions. The red room leeched off their emotions and continued growing stronger, taking their mother's life and putting them in jeopardy in the process.
Backing up a bit to the Crain siblings' past: Twins Luke and Nell experience paranormal activity
As a child, Luke is one of the Crain siblings who encounters and gets tormented by the most ghosts in The Haunting of Hill House. To his dismay and rage, nobody in the house believes him. He hangs out with his imaginary friend Abigail, gets confronted by a tall man ghost for taking his hat, and hides under his bed as a scary hand tries to get him.
As an adult, Luke struggles with sobriety, constantly begging his siblings for money, while being ripped off by his addict friend Joey. He even breaks into Steven's house to steal, only to be caught by him and given money. He has a bad feeling about his twin, but cannot quite place what's wrong in The Haunting of Hill House.
Nell, on the other hand, is haunted by something far more sinister: A woman called the "bent-neck lady", with her neck snapped grotesquely to one side. Even as an adult, she is tormented by her presence, giving her sleep issues, which eventually led her to a sleep technologist named Arthur. They fall in love and get married, only for the bent-neck lady to murder him. Slowly losing her mind over his death, Nell returns to the haunted mansion.
Nell sees a grand vision as she enters the mansion in episode 5 of The Haunting of Hill House and reunites with her dead husband, dancing the night away before her mother hands her a locket. It is the same locket she was promised as a kid, and Nell accepts it with open arms, immediately wearing it around her neck. However, it is not her locket, but a noose.
A disillusioned Nell hangs herself, and fans are in for the most disturbing reveal on The Haunting of Hill House: Nell is the bent-neck lady, going back in time to haunt her younger self into ending her own life.
The Crain siblings reunite at Nell's funeral
In episode 1, Steven sees Nell at his apartment, but later finds out she's dead. Turns out, she was a ghost. Shirley prepares her sister's body for the funeral while Theo touches her forehead and sees the horrors of Nell's past. The siblings try to mend their falling out in vain.
Their father, Hugh, experiences more paranormal activity at the funeral. As the siblings yell at each other's faces, Nell's coffin falls over, shocking them. She watches them as the bent-neck lady. Steven gets a rude awakening that what he is seeing are ghosts, and not a family mental health illness.
Olivia's actions leading up to the finale of The Haunting of Hill House
Flashback to the past, Olivia descends into madness after the ghosts of the mansion's previous owners haunt her. With paranoia from her ghost-manifested madness tearing her up, she decides to poison her children as a way of protecting them from the outside world. She almost gets away with it, but Hugh stops them, saving their lives.
However, Abigail, Luke's ghost friend, ends up drinking the tea and dying. Turns out, Abigail is the ghost of the caretaker's child, whose spirit is tied to the house. When Olivia's madness leads her to take her own life, Hugh and the Dudleys agree not to tear down the house to protect their loved ones' ghosts within it.
Now, back to the red room in The Haunting of Hill House
The siblings enter the red room to save Luke, but find themselves facing their worst nightmares. For example, Steve confronts not wanting to have a child due to his trauma, and Luke experiences his guilt over failing to rescue his friend Joey. Nell's ghost pulls them out to find that Luke is dying. Their mother's ghost, that continues to haunt the mansion, has no idea of letting them go.
This is where Hugh steps in and saves the day. He tells her he will make her a promise if she agrees to let her children go, and she does. Before that, the siblings reconcile their differences and apologize to Nell's ghost for not looking out for her. All is forgiven, and they realize that the ghosts represented internal demons. Confronting them and regaining their bond alleviated the grief of separation.
Turns out, Hugh's promise meant to join Olivia as a ghost that haunts the mansion in The Haunting of Hill House, and he tragically takes his own life. Nell, Olivia, and Hugh unite in the afterlife, while the siblings manage to save Luke by driving him to the hospital.
Flash forward, and Luke is celebrating two years of sobriety, with his siblings and their partners supporting him. The events of the past led to their irrevocable reconciliation, and they realize nobody would understand them like each other. The horror drama ends in a full circle, with Steven acknowledging the ghosts of his past.
The Haunting of Hill House used the mansion as a metaphor to show the entire spectrum of human emotions, from the hope of a better future by acting as a place of comfort (morphing into anything the family wanted it to be), to being a mirror that showed the true horrors of their mind. When the Crain siblings understood that, they regained their lost relationship.
Stream all episodes on Netflix.
