The Haunting of Hill House’s Bent-Neck Lady

I first watched The Haunting of Hill House in October of my junior year of high school. The story now rings famous amongst my hometown friends: occasionally, when we see each other again, the witness to this particular incident will chuckle and turn to me. “Remember when you watched that episode of Hill House during lunch? I asked you how your day was, and you burst into tears.” For both me and the onlookers, this was a jarring experience all around. I, in particular, was shocked—I’ve never considered myself easily affected by horror, and suddenly, I was crying on the Campus Ministry couch during sixth period study hall.  

The episode in question was “The Bent-Neck Lady,” the fifth installment in Mike Flanagan’s 2018 mini-series. Loosely inspired by Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name, The Haunting of Hill House follows five siblings haunted by their childhood ghosts. Split between two timelines, the series follows the Crain siblings’ tumultuous childhood in the titular Hill House, and the impact on the adult siblings’ lives after being reunited by the suicide of youngest sister, Nell. As the present-day Crains confront their ghosts—both literal and metaphorical—and return to Hill House, flashbacks gradually piece together the events leading to the climactic night the family fled the mansion, and their mother, Olivia Crain, committed suicide. 

The first episode, “Steven Sees a Ghost,” opens with an unseen narrator (later revealed to be Steven, the eldest Crain sibling) reciting the iconic opening lines from Shirley Jackson’s novel:  “Hill House, not sane…stood by itself against its hills holding darkness within. It had stood so for a hundred years before my family moved in, and might stand a hundred more…Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House. And whatever walked there, walked alone.”¹ Eerie, atmospheric shots mark the Crain family’s first night in Hill House, and within minutes, we’ve caught our first glimpse at Nell’s personal ghost. A horrifying apparition of a ghostly woman with a gruesome break in her neck and long, black hair obscuring her face, the Bent-Neck Lady proves particularly traumatic for Nell, torturing her throughout her childhood and eventually driving her to suicide. After four episodes dancing around the circumstances of her death, the fifth episode turns the attention back to Nell, and subsequently, the Bent-Neck Lady. I clicked play, expecting terror, discomfort, and all the other makings of a classic ghost story, and received just that. However, in the revelation of the Bent-Neck Lady’s origins, The Haunting of Hill House elevated a simple, albeit terrifying, ghost into something truly devastating, and delivered an emotional gut punch that solidified the series as one of the most well-crafted horror programs of recent years. 

“The Bent-Neck Lady” opens with a now familiar scene: six-year old Nell Crain (Violet McGraw) sits frozen, wide-eyed in bed. She stares, terrified, at the Bent-Neck-Lady. The ghostly woman screams—distorted and bloodcurdling—and Nell responds in kind. When she seeks peace by sleeping in the living room, the Bent-Neck Lady returns, hanging over a paralyzed Nell and uttering a strained whisper: “No, no, no, no, no.”² We jump to an adult Nell (Victoria Pedretti), as she recounts her experiences with sleep paralysis to technologist Arthur Vance (Jordan Christie). Their meet-cute launches into a surprisingly light montage of their relationship, leading to a glowing, joyful wedding. Unlike the fragile, fraught snippets of Nell that we’ve seen through her siblings’ eyes, we see her happy and healthy, and celebrating life. It all comes crashing down when Arthur, in the midst of helping Nell through an episode of sleep paralysis, freezes. His face contorts, and his neck bends at an eerily reminiscent angle before he collapses. Unable to even scream, Nell watches helplessly as her husband dies, and the Bent-Neck Lady returns. 

It’s ultimately revealed that Arthur died of a brain aneurysm, but Nell desperately seeks to place the blame on Hill House. Nell quickly declines into paranoia and fear, pushing away her siblings. Off her medication and following the misguided advice of her therapist, Nell returns to Massachusetts with plans to confront her past at Hill House. After stalling for a few days in a motel, a particularly visceral confrontation with the Bent-Neck Lady sends her over the edge, and she returns to her childhood home one final time. 

Finding the house in gorgeous condition, Nell warmly reunites with visions of her family. She dances with Arthur through the halls, and finds her way into the arms of her long-deceased mother, Olivia (Carla Gugino), who places a once-promised locket around Nell’s neck. These bright scenes are a welcome, but bittersweet, respite from the truth: Nell dances through the dilapidated house alone, hallucinating the happy life that proved ultimately unattainable for her. She finally snaps back to reality, finding herself teetering at the edge of a spiral staircase. As the locket becomes a noose, a final kiss from her mother sends her tumbling over the edge. Nell jerks at the end of the rope, and the show lets her linger for a painful, unrelenting moment—still alive. Suddenly, Nell drops. She falls again, and again, and again, violently jolting through moments of time: the motel hallway. The night her husband died. Hanging over the living room couch, uttering the same words of denial we heard before. As her broken neck twists more and more, Nell realizes the horrifying truth: she’s been haunting herself. The episode closes as it began: with the Bent-Neck Lady staring down six-year-old Nell. This time, her scream isn’t just horrifying: it’s devastating. 

From the first scene of episode one, the Bent-Neck Lady is hinted to be the series’ primary antagonist. Our first introduction to the Crains, and to Hill House, sees six-year-old Nell crying for her parents, tormented by the ever-appearing apparition. While we learn Nell has committed suicide during the first episode, the circumstances surrounding her death are largely left a mystery until the fifth. Her final phone call to her father hints at the series’ greatest villain: “Do you remember the Bent-Neck Lady?…She’s back.”³ The first four episodes, each told from the point of view of a specific sibling, offer hints—breadcrumbs—to the truth. We catch flashes of Nell through the memories of her brothers and sisters: Steven, Shirley, Theo, and her twin brother, Luke (played as adults by Michael Huisman, Elizabeth Reaser, Kate Siegel, and Oliver Jackson-Cohen, respectively). Each time we get a clue towards the truth, we’re jerked away into another story, leaving us at the edge of our seats as the fifth episode finally turns the attention to the youngest Crain. We watch, hungry for answers and our first real glimpse at the ghost that torments Nell.

Instead, when the credits roll, the Bent-Neck Lady emerges not as a villain, but a sympathetic monument to pain and anguish. The Haunting of Hill House turns the story inward, anchoring the horror on a much more personal plane. There’s certainly no shortage of elaborate, winding lore about its previous residents and their misdeeds. Over ten episodes, hauntings piece together the story of William and Poppy Hill, the house’s first owners and vengeful ghosts. (After the Bent-Neck Lady is unmasked, Poppy emerges as the true antagonist, having driven Olivia Crain to madness.) The easiest, and perhaps obvious, choice, would be to make Nell’s personal nightmare a similarly detached spirit, a true villain of the house. The story could be compartmentalized into a black-and-white narrative: it’s the Crains, as tortured as they may be, against the corrupting forces of the house. Instead, “The Bent-Neck Lady” narrows the spotlight on The Haunting of Hill House’s intended message: on the surface, it’s a ghost story packed with scares. At its core, it’s a complex study of depression, love, and trauma. 

Each sibling struggles to process their experiences at Hill House, carrying the trauma into their adulthood. Steven, the strongest skeptic, clings to the belief that everything that happened in the house is grounded in mental illness: 

Nell was delusional, depressed. Luke’s an addict, Shirley is a control freak, and Theo’s basically a clenched fist with hair. The whole fucking family is on the brink of a breakdown and seeing things that aren’t there, hearing things that aren’t there, and that shit happened after the house. It’s not the house. There’s something wrong with our goddamn brains.⁴

While the ghosts prove to be very real, Steven was correct, to an extent. Nell was a victim of her depression, and the rest of the siblings all developed their own unhealthy coping mechanism to the ghosts. (Steven himself fixated on the idea of mental illness to avoid confronting what he had seen as a child, going as far to temporarily sabotage his marriage rather than pass down his genes to children.) 

Aside from Luke, and eventually her father, no one took Nell’s fear of the Bent-Neck Lady seriously. Unwilling to let their family’s perceived mental illness be mythologized any further, her siblings dismiss her as crazy, and her cries for help are ignored. She desperately craves connection and understanding, and for someone to recognize her fears as valid. This is explicitly visualized in a subsequent episode, “Two Storms.” Young Nell goes missing during a violent squall, and when she finally turns back up, she tells her terrified family that she was there the whole time: “I was right here, and I was screaming and shouting, and none of you could see me. Why couldn’t you see me?”⁵

The dismissal of Nell’s experiences and her haunting of herself add up to a powerful, gut-wrenching metaphor for depression. Nell’s mental health struggles are often referenced by her siblings, but the physical manifestation of her core trauma is repeatedly ignored. A different story might have found us in Nell’s siblings’ shoes. If we never saw the Bent-Neck Lady—if we never experienced Nell’s trauma alongside her—we might have doubted her, too. Instead, we understand her grief, depression, and fear. We see Nell’s ghosts, and when her siblings dismiss her as crazy, we feel the frustration on her behalf. 

The Haunting of Hill House treats depression like a monster of its own, as verbalized by Theo, the middle Crain sister. Burdened with an empathetic sensitivity that allows her to understand others’ feelings, Theo touches Nell’s corpse, hoping to understand something about her sister’s final choice. Instead, she finds an expansive, never-ending numbness. After Nell’s ghost surprises them and drives their car off the road, Theo gives a haunting speech to Shirley, finally breaking down: 

I was just this dark, empty black hole. And I tried to fill it back up—I tried to fill me back up…And I’m just floating in this ocean of nothing, and I wonder if this is it, if this is what death is, just out there in the darkness, just darkness and numbness and alone, and I wondered if that’s what she felt and that’s what mom feels, and it’s just numb and nothing and alone.⁶

Though Theo was describing death, her description is reminiscent of the symptoms of depression: the emptiness, and the Sisyphean struggle for happiness. 

Nell’s childhood in Hill House left her permanently scarred. In addition to the persistent hauntings and the mysterious suicide of their mother, we come to learn in the penultimate episode that Nell and Luke’s time in the house came to a particularly harrowing end. Olivia, in the throes of madness, plans a poisoned tea party to protect her youngest children from their nightmares forever. Their father, Hugh (Henry Thomas), intervenes before his children can drink the poisoned tea, but is unable to save Luke’s friend and the daughter of the house’s caretakers, Abigail. Nell’s last memory of her mother was quite literally a murder attempt, yet no one—including Hugh, the only member of the family who knew the truth about Hill House—talked about the trauma the entire family had incurred. Hugh (played as an adult by Timothy Hutton), in fact, intentionally chose to keep the truth from his children, preventing them from ever processing the trauma they’d incurred. 

Nell was haunted by her past, present, and future her entire life. Her entire existence is self-fulfilling, in a way: the Bent-Neck Lady looms over the most traumatic moments of Nell’s life, luring her back to Hill House before dispatching her to torture herself. The cycle continues, trapping Nell in a never-ending nightmare. The show offers both practical explanations—like Theo, Nell is implied to have a “sensitivity,” in her case, to time—as well as a more thematic message. A victim of her mind, Nell was own worst enemy. The idea that Nell’s fate was always predetermined is a particularly cruel blow, but the finale offers a glimmer of hope for the Crains, a final chance to atone, and say their goodbyes. Lured into the house’s Red Room by manifestations of their fear and guilt—visions of an affair, the death of a loved one—the siblings find themselves trapped in a space they’d been desperate to explore as children. Hill House, and Olivia’s ghost, have every intention of keeping them there. Luke is their first victim; he hallucinates a relapse. The syringe, it turns out, is real, but filled with poison. Though the surviving siblings work on a united front for the first time in years, Luke’s heart stops, and they’re unable to bring him back. 

A more superficial series might have let this be his ultimate fate. It’s fittingly tragic: an addict, finally stable and sober, killed by a needle in the same room he’d escaped decades ago. The Haunting of Hill House, however, would never let the end be so simple. Nell’s ghost drags Luke out of his near-death dream, and back into the real world. The Crain siblings are united one final time, with their historical roles reversed—this time, it’s Nell’s siblings that are unable to be heard. They can do nothing but listen as Nell speaks, reflecting on the Red Room and the decay of her family. Throughout the entire series, the Crains have been haunted by their grief, fear, and guilt. A harrowing concentration of all three, Nell could have delivered a devastating final blow to the survivors, lashing out for failing her while she lived. Instead, she comforts her siblings as they apologize, leaving them with a hauntingly beautiful final message: “It wouldn’t have changed anything. I need you to know that. Forgiveness is warm. Like a tear on the cheek. Think of that and of me when you stand in the rain. I loved you completely, and you loved me the same. That’s all. The rest is confetti.”⁷

Nell gifts her siblings a final chance to make amends, and to free themselves from the same cycle of pain that ended Nell’s life. The siblings speak freely, openly for the first time. They apologize for ignoring Nell when she needed them, and for years of hostility towards one another. If the Crain family lifted their vow of silence, if they had listened to one another, and discussed their trauma, there might have been a life raft for Nell. She might have been able to reach out, rather than pull back, and the Bent-Neck Lady may have never come to be. It’s a sobering reminder of the isolating effects of mental illness, and the dangers of not talking about the impact. 

The surviving Crains emerge from the ordeal—for lack of a better word—successfully. Hugh cuts a deal with a lonely Olivia, offering his life in exchange for the childrens’ escape from the house. He overdoses, reuniting his ghost with his wife’s forever. Nothing will undo the horrors the Crains experienced, or bring back Nell, Hugh, or Olivia, but there’s a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. A quiet montage sees Luke celebrate two years sober, and Steven, finally willing to confront his fears about having children, reunite with his wife. Theo moves in with the girlfriend she’s been keeping at an arm’s length, and Shirley confesses an affair that’s been looming over her to her husband. The sequence is overscored by Steven, echoing the novel’s opening lines, with a notable twist: “Hill House, not sane…stood by itself against its hills holding darkness within. It had stood so for a hundred years before my family moved in, and might stand a hundred more…Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House. And those who walk there, walk together.”⁸ It’s a touching and fitting message of hope.

Like many great series, the conclusion of The Haunting of Hill House prompted theories beyond the explanations presented in the show: for example, Hill House’s black mold problem poisoned the minds of the Crains, or the events of the show were the invention of Steven’s new horror novel. A popular theory posits that it was all a result of mental illness. The Crains were prone to psychosis, and collectively hallucinated the hauntings. Personally, I like to believe that The Haunting of Hill House is truly a ghost story. I don’t think that the existence of Hill House’s ghosts negates the true horror of a family devastated by grief and torn apart by trauma. Any other explanation seems to undermine the carefully woven, devastating tale of the Crains and Hill House. 

I finished The Haunting of Hill House that October, and the Bent-Neck Lady now haunts me, too. Some of the best horror uses fear to say something—to disarm us, and shine a light on something more pervasive than the scariest ghosts and monsters. I often find myself thinking of the unexpected parable of Nell Crain, her emptiness, and the lessons learned. One visceral, unrelenting scene shook me to my core, and delivered an undeniable message on the impact of trauma. It was beautiful, devastating, and jarring, and started a cycle of its own. The Haunting of Hill House begs you to discuss the Bent-Neck Lady and necessitates a conversation about mental health. The possibility of openness and connection supersedes the run of the show, and the audience finds themselves fulfilling Nell’s ultimate wish: finally, we talk, and we listen.

1. Mike Flanagan, writer, The Haunting of Hill House. Season 1, Episode 1, “Steven Sees a Ghost,” Netflix, dir. Mike Flanagan, released October 12, 2018.
2. Meredith Averill, writer, The Haunting of Hill House, Season 1, Episode 5, “The Bent-Neck Lady,” Netflix, dir. Mike Flanagan, released October 12, 2018.
3. “The Bent-Neck Lady.”
4. Jeff Howard & Rebecca Klingel, writers, The Haunting of Hill House, Season 1, Episode 8, “Witness Marks,” Netflix, dir. Mike Flanagan, released October 12, 2018.
5. Mike Flanagan & Jeff Howard, writers, The Haunting of Hill House, Season 1, Episode 6,“Two Storms,” Netflix, dir. Mike Flanagan, released October 12, 2018.
6. “Witness Marks.”
7. Mike Flanagan, writer, The Haunting of Hill House, Season 1, Episode 10, “Silence Lay Steadily,” Netflix, dir. Mike Flanagan, released October 12, 2018.
8. “Silence Lay Steadily.”