It isn't easy to explain the ending of The Haunting of Hill House, because Hill House itself—the daunting, ghost-filled mansion at the center of Mike Flanagan's Netflix series—doesn't end. That's one of the points of the show, the eternal nature of this multi-room monster sitting alone in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Like Shirley Jackson wrote in the spine-chilling intro to the original novel, "it had stood for 80 years and might stand for 80 more."

But overall, Flanagan's dark, sprawling story is less concerned with the ghosts inside the house and more with the people who made it out (mostly) alive. Namely, the Crain siblings, a much more fucked up version of Arrested Development's Bluths with horrific trauma replacing witty banter: horror author Steven (Michiel Huisman), mortician Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser), semi-psychic psychologist Theodora (Kate Siegel), addict Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and his twin sister Nell (Victoria Pedretti), who takes her own life inside the walls of Hill House.

Below, I'm going to try my darndest to make sense of all the horror, death, and mystery that befalls the Crain family, including what the hell is actually going on with Hill House itself, what happened to Olivia Crain (Carla Gugino) and why exactly Hugh Crain (Timothy Hutton) covered it up, what's inside the house's mysterious Red Room, and what were the true identities of The Bent Neck Lady and Luke's imaginary friend, Abigail.

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Hill House

Direct view of Hill House at night and covered in fog in The Haunting of Hill House
Image via Netflix

One of the best—and most horrifying—aspects of The Haunting of Hill House is the lack of a concrete explanation for how the evil inside this place came to be. It's the archetypal haunted house because it just is. Anyone who walks through the front door is susceptible to one hell of a paranormal mind-trip—hallucinations, delusions, lost hours, momentary jumps through both space and time—and if you die there, you belong to the house for good, as evidenced by the many wonderfully terrifying souls that pop up, often literally, throughout the series. It got most of the Hill family, most grotesquely William Hill, who bricked himself behind a wall in the basement in 1948.

Ultimately, that seems to be the house's goal, to trap as many wayward souls within itself as possible, feeding off whatever misery was within them in their final moments. They're like fuel for a fucked up machine. The house convinces you to take part willingly, persuading the living that reality is a dream and the only way back to waking life is through death.

Really, the house isn't so different from other iconic horror monsters; it's a zombie devouring brains, a vampire sucking blood, a shark chomping guts. Like the scariest creatures, the house is just hungry. Nell Crain describes her permanent residence best herself in the finale: "I’m like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside."

Olivia Crain

Carla Gugino in The Haunting of Hill House
Image via Netflix

The entire Crain family felt the effects of Hill House, but no one more so than matriarch Olivia Crain, who was extra susceptible because of her repressed psychic gifts. (She explained them away as migraines.)

Summed up, the house convinced Olivia that her family needed to die. But the show heartbreakingly sets this up as an extension of Olivia's genuine love as a mother. By the time Olivia has gone fully off the deep the house has convinced her that murdering her entire family is the helpful thing, the only way to wake them from this awful twisted dream they're all having at once. The series weaves the idea that the Craines are striving for their dream home, their forever home, which is twisted with the reveal that to die inside Hill House is to literally make it your forever home.

The night that The Haunting of Hill House returns constantly to in flashback, hints, and red herrings is the night Olivia poured rat poison into teacups and tried to take her children with her to whatever loopy other-side she already existed in. Hugh stops her, smuggling his kids to safety and kickstarting the modern day storyline of Hill House, and Olivia kills herself in the house, hoping to finally wake up.

Abigail and The Dudleys

Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House
Image via Netflix

Olivia did manage to poison one child on her way out the (red) door, Abigail, who it turns out by season's end is very real. The show paints the mysterious Abigail as Luke's imaginary friend (or ghost), just another delusion conjured up by Hill House. But the real answer is way more tragic than that; Abigail is the daughter of the Dudleys, Hill House's maintenance staff—"Dad says you and Mr. Dudley come with the house," a young Steven tells Clara Dudley (Annabeth Gish)—who live through the woods on the outskirts of town.

The Dudleys have experience with the messed up happenings of Hill House. Mr. Dudley's (Robert Longstreet) mother started acting "scattered" while working in the house, going out into the woods at night and giggling like a school girl. And then the Dudleys' first child died in childbirth (which explains why they kept Abigail under tight lock and key) followed by a very familiar cry echoing throughout Hill House. "We stopped coming here after dark," Mr. Dudley tells Hugh. "Once dinner is served we leave, come back in the morning for the dishes."

After the deaths of both Olivia and Abigail, the Dudleys demand Hugh Crain leave Hill House standing—Hugh wanted to burn it to the ground, very understandably—because as long as the house is there the Dudleys can interact with the ghost of their dead daughter. It's super depressing and kind of beautiful all at once.

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The Red Room

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Image via Netflix

The room behind Hill House's ever-locked Red Door is kind of like The Room of Requirement from the Harry Potter books, except for possessing your mind and driving you batshit insane. It's how the house keeps its residents complacent in the face of constant horror. It's whatever the residents need to stay sane as they slowly lose their minds without realizing it. It was a toy room for the young and rambunctious Nell. A family room for the lonely Shirley. A treehouse when Luke needed to get away.

It also effectively serves as a waystation between the living and the dead; it's where the house converts people into fuel. "Mom says that a house is like a body. And that every house has eyes, and bones, and skin, and a face," Nell says in the finale. "This room is like the heart of the house. No, not a heart. A stomach."

The Bent Neck Lady

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Image via Netflix

Time doesn't seem to matter much inside of Hill House. Olivia Crain sees her children grow into adults and ultimately lie dead on a mortuary table. Steven sees the events of his mother's death played over and over again in front of him. But the most tragic case is poor Nell Crain, who as a child was haunted by a specter she called The Bent Neck Lady, a horrific shadowy ghoul with her head twisted disturbingly to the side.

Hill House reveals that the Bent Neck Lady is Nell herself, decades in the future, hanging from a rope that the house convinced her to tie with her neck broken. When Nell jumped—or, more appropriately, was pushed—from the top of the spiral staircase, she fell through time and memory, one last-ditch effort to warn herself about the inevitable misery to come.

The End

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Image via Netflix

The ending of The Haunting of Hill House doubles as a beginning for the Crain family, both the ones who get out alive and those who wind up a permanent part of the house's black parade. The series climaxes with a horrific night inside Hill House that shows the Crain siblings the worst nights of their lives or the worst parts of themselves; the business trip where Shirley cheated on her husband, Luke's up-and-down addiction, Steven's inability to see the people who care about him right in front of his house, etc, etc. The show even makes this theme a bit too clear by having Steven voice-over the metaphor at the end: "Ghosts are guilt. Ghosts are secrets. Ghosts are regrets and failings."

But either way, being confronted with their own failures bonds the Crains, who escape Hill House one more time and resolve, once and for all, to maybe stop being so dang angry at each other. Except for Hugh Crain, that is; the father of the family, who didn't have much of a life post-Hill House to begin with, makes a pact with Olivia's ghost, who's trying to trap the siblings in the Red Room, kill them, and keep them with her in the house forever. Hugh downs the rest of his pills and dies quietly on the spiral staircase, spending the afterlife roaming a Massachusetts mansion with his wife and youngest daughter.

With Hugh gone, responsibility over the house falls to Steven, which basically just entails making sure nobody ever touches it. Hill House may be filled to the brim with ghouls but a good deal of those ghouls love each other. As long as Hill House, not sane, still stands those ghosts can be together forever.

We see proof of this in one last touching coda. An older Mr. Dudley carries his wife through the woods to die in Hill House so she can see her two daughters again; the one who died too soon and the one she never got to love at all. Netflix's Haunting of Hill House ends on a much cheerier update of Shirley Jackson's chill-inducing opening paragraph.

"Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet neatly, floors are firm, and doors are sensibly shut. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House," Steven says in voice-over. "And those who walk there, walk together."