Characters / The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

Character sheets for Netflix's series The Haunting of Hill House. Spoilers are unmarked.

The Crains

In General

The Crain Family

• Aloof Big Brother:
  • It's notable that Nell, the youngest sibling, is The Heart. The rest all tend to be aloof as a defense mechanism for their previous experiences at Hill House.
  • Played with when the Crains were kids: Steven and Luke are shown to be pretty close, considering their age gap, and in the earlier episodes Shirley seems to spend a lot of time with Nell.
• Big Brother Instinct: Pretty heavily averted. Steven and Shirley, the two eldest siblings, have a tendency to be absolutely awful towards their younger siblings. Nell very explicitly and publicly shouts Steven down for this in Episode 5.
  • This was notably not the case when the Crain siblings were kids, however, particularly for Steven and Theo.
• Big Brother Worship: All of the siblings, but especially Luke, have this for Steven during their childhood. Getting traumatized by the events in Hill House, and general growing up, turn him into the Disappointing Older Sibling, with both Shirley and Nell angrily accusing him of not doing his "job" as the eldest.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: There are two parents and five kids, and all of them have serious problems.
• Break the Cutie: Every single Crain. None of them escaped Hill House unscathed in 1992.
• Color-Coded Characters: It's subtle, but Hugh, Shirley, and Luke are prone to wearing blue; Liv, red; Steve, brown; Theo, green; and Nell, pink/white.
• Composite Character: Of the Crains and Vances from the original novel.
• Dysfunction Junction: With the exception of Hugh, none of them are exactly estranged, but their relationships with one another are fraught with tension.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: All of them except older Hugh, especially the women.
• Five Stages of Grief: Each one of the Crain siblings is meant to represent a stage of grief according to the creators. Steven is denial, someone who believes in nothing at all and discredits his siblings' theories about what happened; Shirley is anger, being a temperamental and controlling person who easily explodes when things don't go her way; Theo is bargaining, a level-headed woman that tries to not deal with things; Luke is depression, someone who is constantly trying to cope with his sadness by doing drugs; and Nell is acceptance, the only one willing to face and accept what happened.
• Poor Communication Kills: Each one of them is keeping a secret, or secrets, that are slowly destroying their lives. If they were to share these secrets with one another, they would make things a lot easier on themselves and others, but the damage inflicted by Hill House has made them construct walls around themselves. This fear of communication and vulnerability only hurts them in the long run.
• Psychic Powers: In Episode 3, Liv mentions that her mother's side of the family had 'special gifts'—a trait that she herself inherited and managed to pass onto her children: Steve, although he denies it, has always been able to see ghosts; Shirley has prophetic dreams; Theo has Touch Telepathy; and Luke and Nell have Twin Telepathy, with Nell in particular being more sensitive to the supernatural than her brother.
• Related in the Adaptation: Almost all characters were from different families in the original and other incarnations of the story, but in this version, they're all part of the Crain family.

Hugh

Hugh Crain

Portrayed By: Henry Thomas (past) / Timothy Hutton (present)

The family patriarch, Hugh is a caring and level-headed parent whose job involves renovating and selling old houses with his wife Olivia.

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• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: In the present, he comes across as quiet, distant, and odd, and is constantly muttering under his breath. He isn't crazy, though; they're actually coping mechanisms to deal with Olivia's death, the trauma of living in the house, and the bargains he made afterwards.
• Calling the Young Man Out: Constantly on the defensive whenever Steve lashes out, being usually too crushed by his past failings to retaliate against his eldest son's constant skepticism; plus, he's more interested in protecting his adult children from the Awful Truth than winning any kind of debate. However, in the episode "Witness Marks," Hugh finally shuts down Steve's endless dismissals by providing incontrovertible proof that Hill House is a very real threat to the family, and refuses to let Steve interrupt him this time. For once, the professional debunker has nothing to say.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: He comes across as one in the present day, seeming rather spacy at points and muttering to himself (or rather, to a vision of Olivia he talks to in order to cope) often. Given that he's been dealing with being the Secret-Keeper of the family for so long, it makes sense (though he does sharpen up when his kids are in trouble).
• Family Man: It's extremely obvious that Hugh has so much love for his family, both in the past and the present. It's just that the Crains never really had a chance while they lived in Hill House.
• Give Him a Normal Life: Hugh's rationale for withholding information about what really happened that final night at Hill House. Deconstructed in that while Hugh's heart was in the right place, his inability to explain to his kids (and the public) what happened meant that he lost custody of his children and then grew estranged from them, and wasn't able to help any of them cope with the trauma that had already been inflicted on them by the house. As a result, most of his kids have ended up worse off than if he'd just explained the truth to them in the first place.
  Hugh: I was holding a door. Holding a door closed. I had my back against it, and my arms out wide, because I knew there were monsters on the other side, and they wanted what was left of our family. And I held it so hard, I didn't have arms left for the kids.
• Happily Married: His marriage to Olivia was a very loving partnership, despite a brief two-week snag.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the final episode, he commits suicide by pill overdose to placate Olivia and free his surviving children, becoming another ghost of the House.
• Madness Mantra: "I can fix it/this." It's especially heartbreaking when he discovers Liv's corpse and it's the only thing he can say, over and over again.
• Mr. Fixit: See his Madness Mantra above. In Episode 7 onward, Hugh has his hands full trying to keep up with the amount of damage a passing storm has dealt to the house, such as broken windows, water damage, and worst of all, black mold that just won't stop spreading no matter what Hugh does. It's also reinforced that Hugh has to do everything himself because the Crains' budget is strained as it is, and to hire extra hands would mean stretching it even thinner.
• Keeping Secrets Sucks: Hugh is estranged from all his kids in the present because of losing custody of them and refusing to tell them the truth about Hill House.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Throughout the present-day storyline, Hugh quietly attempts to reenter his surviving children's lives, but for the most part respects their independence and doesn't cross boundaries when they are set, instead playing sidekick to the kids while they handle their own problems. When he realizes Luke has gone to Hill House not to commit suicide but to burn it down, he immediately takes charge and starts issuing orders, despite Steven's protests, because this threat is far too dangerous to let them handle on their own without knowing the truth.
• Outliving One's Offspring: He's unable to stop the house from murdering his youngest daughter. However, he is able to stop it happening with any of the others.
• Papa Wolf:
  • He manages to get all five of his children out of Hill House alive and (physically) unscathed. When he learns Nell's in trouble as an adult, he doesn't hesitate to take action.
  • In Episode 7, a ghastly apparition appears to him and Theo in Shirley's office. When Theo is too stunned to move, Hugh grabs her at once and shields her until it disappears.
  • In Episode 8, when Luke goes missing, Hugh immediately snaps into action and does everything he can to find his son.
  • In Episode 10, Hugh and Steven finally return to Hill House, upon which a frightened Steven realizes all at once that the ghosts are real and he can see them. When the Bowler Hat Ghost attempts to take a closer look at them, Hugh doesn't even flinch. He simply tells Steve to "look at me" and keeps an arm anchored in front of his son until the ghost moves on.
• Parents Know Their Children: While all of the Crain siblings flake on Nell in the run up to her death, when she calls Hugh, he is immediately able to tell that there's something wrong and jumps out of bed to get to the house, even though she tells him she's in her other house in California. He's too late, unfortunately.
• Phrase Catcher: Olivia frequently refers to Hugh as her "kite" and her "anchor".
• The Scapegoat: He willingly accepts the blame for Olivia's death towards the kids in order to protect their memory of her.
• Secret-Keeper: He is this in present day about Abigail's death and Olivia's suicide.
• Supernatural-Proof Father: In the past, he was one of those least affected by the house and the effects he did feel he dismissed with reasonable explanations. Very much averted in the present day, where he's become the Secret-Keeper.
• Take Me Instead: He asks Olivia to do this in the final episode instead of harming their remaining children. She does — probably.
• Technicolor Eyes: Young Hugh has almost unnatural lightning-blue eyes. It's the result of his actor having to wear contacts match Old Hugh's blue eyes.
• Unfazed Everyman: Hugh was this in the past, which backfired on him badly when he and his family encountered Hill House. He is especially calm when Olivia holds a screwdriver to his throat.
• We Used to Be Friends: A familial version of this trope. Steve and Hugh used to be quite close when the former was a child, with preteen Steve often following Hugh around the house and trying to help him out in any way he could. However, after Hugh starts keeping secrets from the family, the two become estranged and in the present, Steve can barely stand to be in a room with his father for longer than five minutes without sniping at him.
• "Well Done, Dad!" Guy: Hugh has transformed into this in the future, when he is incapable of communicating properly with every one of his kids, but especially Steven.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Hugh attempts this several times, with mixed results.

Olivia

Olivia "Liv" Crain

Portrayed By: Carla Gugino

An architect and the matriarch of the Crain family. She and her husband repair old houses together. Before the House managed to get the best of her, she was shown to be a very loving and kind person. Due to her mother's side of the family being 'special,' Olivia has a connection to the supernatural—a gift she has managed to pass on to her children, in varying degrees.

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• Affectionate Nickname: Hugh calls her "Liv."
• Bait the Dog:
  • She kisses Nell on the forehead before pushing her off the landing.
  • She gathers Nell, Luke and Abigail Dudley to have a friendly tea party. The tea is laced with rat poison, which kills Abigail before Hugh can intervene.
• Bookworm: Implied, what with the Red Room taking the form of a reading room when 'feeding' on her.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. Her head is left visibly mangled after committing suicide by jumping from the landing.
• Driven to Suicide: One interpretation of what happened after the house manipulated her into trying to "wake up" her children.
• Easily Forgiven: The Dudleys have surprisingly zero anger towards Olivia for killing their daughter. Admittedly, Olivia herself was dead by the time they found out, and they knew she’d been under the influence of the house the entire time. That said, they do tell Hugh that they won't tell the world about what she did, as long as he doesn't destroy the house like he was planning to. The fact that they can physically see and interact with their daughter's ghost instantly probably helps, too.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: It's subtle, but her hair starts out glossy, immaculate, and curled, and grows frizzier and less styled as she gradually loses her mind.
• Happily Married: Despite a brief two-week snag, Liv and Hugh were very much in love even through five kids.
• Headache of Doom: Liv had migraines all her life, but while staying at the eponymous house, the "color storms" became much more intense. As the flashback sequences make clear, her growing pain seemed to coincide with her escalating Sanity Slippage; Olivia suffered hallucinations, sleepwalking, and odd fits of possessiveness as the migraines turned agonizing.
• Heel–Face Turn: An Implied Trope, though somewhat zigzagged. In the final episode, Hugh pleads with her to open the door to the Red Room and let their remaining children live, and she seems to come around, but we never actually see her fully agree with him or open the door. Additionally, part of her apparent bargain with Hugh was that he would agree to die and stay in the house with her, and given that he was probably already a ghost by the time the door opened, it's unclear how much, if any, of the rescue was aided by Olivia.
• Ignored Epiphany: As Hugh rescues his children from her clutches, Olivia briefly returns to her senses and rediscovers Abigail Dudley's corpse, leading her to sob over the body in horror... Until Abigail's ghost appears, looking healthy and perfect. This causes Olivia to slip back into madness, since Abigail is proof that her children will be preserved forever after death.
• Knight Templar Parent: All she wants is to protect her children. Her perspective gets twisted by the House, to the point that her idea of "protecting" them is to kill them so the world outside the House can't hurt them, waking them] llcup.
  Olivia: Nothing bad will ever touch them ever again.
  Hugh: Nothing good will, either.
• Ms. Fanservice: Due to being played by Carla Gugino and her tendency to wear silky pajamas.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Olivia's reaction after finding Abigail's body after the "tea party."
• Offing the Offspring: Attempted and portrayed tragically rather than maliciously (on Olivia's part).
• The Ophelia: Tragically beautiful? Check. Gradually goes barefoot while she descends into madness? Check. "Crazy"? Check - though not in the way Steve means. Due to a need to rationalize everything, Steve often says that what Liv, his father, and his siblings experience are actually hallucinations caused by mental illness. In reality, Hill House really is haunted, and through a series of experiences that fuel her worst fears (e.g. her children's safety, especially Luke's and Nell's), the house eventually manages to drive Liv insane.
• Parental Favoritism: Olivia dotes on Nell and Luke above all her children. This had the dual unfortunate outcomes of brewing resentment in her older offspring and making the twins her primary filicide targets when she goes mad.
• Parent-Induced Extended Childhood:
  • Early in "Screaming Meemies," Olivia absently wishes that she could keep Luke and Nellie frozen at their current age. Over the course of the episode, Hill House uncovers the hidden anxieties behind this innocent wish, tormenting her with horrific visions of what might happen to her children when they grow up. Eventually, Olivia is manipulated into taking drastic steps to keep her youngest children safe and young - namely by killing Luke and Nellie with rat poison at a tea party in the Red Room so that they can live forever as ghosts. Hugh is able to stop her from completing the attempt and flee the house with the children in tow before she has a chance to try again, prompting Olivia to kill herself... but unfortunately, her efforts to "preserve" her children continue as a ghost - eventually resulting in the death of an adult Nellie.
  • Crops up again in "Silence Lay Steadily": the Red Room is revealed to be a Lotus-Eater Machine for mortals and ghosts alike, so Olivia can live out her fantasy of keeping her sons and daughters as children forever once they're dead. This is aptly demonstrated when Luke is reunited with the ghosts of his mother and little sister in the Red Room, where Nellie has been made to look like a six-year-old again and Olivia is trying to get Luke to join them at another deadly tea party, even baiting him with the "Big Boy Hat" he loved wearing when he was six.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: A very tragic example. She just wants to take care of her family, but the house, on top of her already existing mental issues and frequent migraines, slowly starts to drive her insane. She eventually snaps and decides that the best way to shield her children from the evils of the world is to kill them with poison, so they will live forever as ghosts within the house. And when they all return years later, she plans to let the house kill them so they will remain there with her. Hugh has to convince her to let them go, partially by promising to stay with her in their place.
• Psychic Powers: She has minor visions during her migraines.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: After seeing visions of Nell and Luke speaking of depression, drug addiction and death, she becomes madly determined to protect her children from the outside world. However, her efforts to do so lead directly to the trauma that causes her children to be so miserable in adulthood.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Olivia dresses like a typical 90s mom for the first couple of episodes (tank tops, shorts, mom jeans and skirt), but then she shifts to wearing long, flowing dresses and 1920s-style robes to reflect Poppy's influence over her.
• Tragic Villain: She's a lovely, creative woman with a family she dotes on, but the House manipulates her into committing murderous actions. She tries to fight Poppy for as long as she can...but loses.
• Wandering Walk of Madness: Flashbacks reveal that one of the earliest signs that the House was starting to get to Olivia was her increasingly confused habit of wandering the building - most notably displayed in "Two Storms," when she abruptly strayed away from trying to find Nell and began drifting aimlessly through the corridors, often taking shortcuts through Alien Geometries before Hugh could catch up with her.
  • The first indication that something is wrong when she's on those walks comes in "Two Storms," when Olivia encounters a ghostly child in a wheelchair while roaming the house, and instead of reacting, she calmly stands aside and allows him to pass.

Steven

Steven Crain

Portrayed By: Paxton Singleton (past) / Michiel Huisman (present)

The serious and no-nonsense eldest child of the Crain family. He writes books about the supernatural, with his biggest hit being about the events of Hill House. This leads to him being somewhat estranged from Shirley. He doesn't believe in anything supernatural, always believing that the strange events happening to the family must have a rational explanation.

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• Affectionate Nickname: His family used to call him "Stevie" a lot when he was younger.
• Agent Scully: Despite being a best-selling author famous for his books about hauntings, Steven has zero belief in the supernatural. He dismisses the events that plague his family as hereditary mental illness, and believes he is starting to show symptoms himself when he sees both Nell and Olivia as ghosts over the course of the series.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Especially as he himself writes about hauntings.
• Big Brother Instinct: It isn't as pronounced in 2018, but flashbacks to 1992 depict Steve as somebody who clearly cares about his younger siblings, especially the twins.
  • Episode 1 starts with teenage Steve checking up on Nell when he hears her crying after yet another nightmare about the Bent-Neck Lady. He also takes the time to visit Luke's tree house, and is visibly touched when Luke tells him that they can hang out as much as Steve wants.
  • In Episode 6, when Luke can't even approach Nell's coffin without breaking down, Steve goes after him and kindly offers to go with him. During the flashback to 1992, Steve also takes it upon himself to comfort Luke, who is visibly frightened of the lightning and thunder.
• Bookworm: In his focus episode, Olivia states that, even at fourteen, he was already familiar with the Bible, the Talmud, the Tao Te Ching, the Torah, the Koran, Greek mythology, Carl Sagan, and Shakespeare.
  • During a flashback in Episode 9 to the family's first day in the house, Steve is visibly seen with a thick book in hand.
• Break the Haughty: He is introduced as an adult profiting off of the trauma and horror his family endured at Hill House (a fact which looks worse with each passing episode revealing how deep those traumas run), and seems to think everyone is being unreasonable about him basically selling their suffering. As the drama begins to build, he continues to lecture every other Crain about mental unwellness (despite not being learned on the subject at all, to the point where he talks about it more than Nell's therapist or Theo, who is, albeit for kids, an actual psychologist); he lashes out and blames everyone but himself for not picking up on signs that Nell needed help despite never listening to anyone longer than it takes to patronize them; he spends nine of the ten episodes doing every single thing possible to make the viewer hate him; and just as you think there won't be any time left to give him his comeuppance, the tenth episode delivers: inside the Red Room, a vision of his wife Leigh dismantles his entire world view and shitty treatment of his family, and how he refuses to understand others and only uses them to make a reality he thinks is comfortable, calling him out several times over on severe Moral Myopia. And unlike the times when Shirley or Theo called him out, he can't shout them down or override her.
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: A famous horror novelist who doesn't believe in ghosts or the supernatural.
• Disappointing Older Sibling: On separate occasions, his sisters angrily accuse him of not doing his "job" as the eldest.
• Failed a Spot Check: Invoked by Hugh in Episode 8 when he asks why, in all these years, it didn't occur to Steven that it was odd a family that was only planning to stay at Hill House for eight weeks to flip it would build a treehouse there.
• Gallows Humor: When he sees Nell in her open coffin, he says "That's her, detective!" like a character in a crime drama. It's not so much meant as a true joke as it is a knee-jerk emotional response to seeing his sister dead, and he turns and almost runs away before breaking down in tears.
• Gaslighting: Downplayed. He does this to all of his siblings, but rather than to hurt them, he does it to protect himself from the possibility that they're telling the truth. His denial over the existence of the supernatural has driven him to insist they all have a mental illness they inherited from their mother—a conclusion he uses to dismiss the validity of his siblings' feelings and perceptions quite frequently, especially when they conflict with his own perspective.
• Hypocrite:
  • He blames everyone else in the family for not noticing something was wrong with Nell, completely ignoring his own admission that he knew she was off her meds and acting erratically in the month before her death, and he did nothing.
  • At Nell's funeral vigil he blames his father for not getting his mother mental health help before it was too late, again despite knowing in the weeks leading up to Nell's death that Nell was in a bad place mentally and emotionally and he himself doing nothing.
• I Coulda Been a Contender!: Steve feels like he never reached his potential or wrote the stories he wanted to write.
• It's All About Me: As a child he averted this, being deeply concerned with and active in his siblings' wellbeing, frequently checking on them, validating their feelings, and helping them through any problems they had. As an adult, however, he's become much more self-centered. He does show concern for his siblings when he realizes there's a problem, but he blinds himself to the nuances of those problems.
  • His insistence that the family suffers from an inherited mental illness only serves to protect his own idea of reality, but his siblings suffer for it. He shows little empathy for their actual suffering when their perceptions conflict with or threaten his worldview despite insisting they're ill, up to and including doing nothing when he realizes Nell's off her medications and behaving in an unstable manner besides isolating her from him in her hour of need. He goes on to blame everyone else for not noticing Nell needed them.
  • He had a vasectomy to prevent him from having children in accordance with his self-serving delusion of inherited mental illness and never told his wife, even when the two of them began looking at expensive treatments to correct for her lack of pregnancy.
  • His bitter relationship with the rest of the family partially stems from writing a book about their traumatic experiences at Hill House and the following media circus against their wishes and airing their pains for profit, something he did because he personally needed the money and none of his other stories were selling. He offers them a cut of the profits, but publishes it without their consent anyways.
• Jerkass Has a Point: There was pretty much no way Luke was going to take Steven's warnings about his Love Interest to heart, given that Steven essentially phrased them as, "she's a junkie, you can't trust her. I know that, because you're a junkie and you've proven that I can't trust you." However, he's perfectly right that Luke is putting her on a pedestal and ignoring the fact that he wouldn't have met her in rehab if she wasn't as messed up as he is. To make things worse, Steve is actually right. Joey ends up relapsing, stealing from Luke, and abandoning him after he gave up his own place in rehab to try to help her get clean again.
• Kick the Dog: He has many small moments throughout the series of this nature, the most definite being his cruel speech to Nell after she crashes one of his book signings.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Steven is a bestselling novelist of ghost stories.
• Not Wanting Kids Is Weird: Although it was wrong of Steven to hide his vasectomy, his happy ending involves Leigh getting pregnant. Though admittedly, his initial desire to never have kids came from his fears about hereditary mental illness rather than any negative feelings towards the idea of kids itself.
• Oh, Crap!: In Episode 8, he gets this look on his face when Hugh reveals that the man working on the grandfather clock at the top of the staircase had been a ghost and that he'd never actually built Steve and Luke a tree house. He gets another one when the Bowler Hat Ghost reveals itself to him and he finally realizes that all the stories about Hill House are true.
• One-Hit Wonder: In-universe, everybody's favorite book by Steve is The Haunting of Hill House (his first).
• Poor Communication Kills: In an example specific to him, if he had told his wife about his vasectomy, their marriage wouldn't be on the rocks.
• Sanity Slippage: He believes that he is losing his mind when he starts seeing both Nell and Olivia after Nell's death, until Hugh convinces him that ghosts exist—and he was always able to see them.
• Secret-Keeper: He becomes this in the last act of the finale, with Hugh revealing to him what happened after he returned to Hill House 26 years ago, and tasking him with keeping the house standing but unable to lure anyone else to their doom.
• The Team Normal: The only one of the Crain siblings to (seemingly) not inherit any supernatural abilities from his mother. Fittingly, he's the biggest Agent Scully in the group. However, it's revealed in Episode 8 that Steve can actually see ghosts; he's just too stubborn and unyielding to believe it.
• What If the Baby Is Like Me: The reason Steven doesn't want to have children. He's worried about passing his family's predisposition to mental illness onto his children.
• You Should Have Died Instead: During a heated argument at Nell's wake, Steven says this almost verbatim to his father when discussing their last night at Hill House.
  Steve: I'm saying that the wrong parent died that night!

Shirley

Shirley "Shirl" Crain

Portrayed By: Lulu Wilson (past) / Elizabeth Reaser (present)

The second oldest child of the Crain family. She manages a funeral home with her husband Kevin and is quite forgiving with prices. She is controlling towards her siblings, who all resent her to varying degrees for this.

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• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: At times, although she often tries to be less aloof.
• Break the Cutie: Shirley was a sweet girl with an interest in photography, but an extremely traumatic childhood event involving kittens has repercussions on her for the rest of her life. That and her mother's death influenced her decision to become a mortician.
• Break the Haughty: She's evolved into haughty since the experiences of Hill House, and it gets traumatized out of her for the most part.
• Camera Fiend: Downplayed. In Episode 2, young!Shirley carried a Polaroid camera with her everywhere she went and often took pictures of her family going about their daily lives. Hugh also mentions that in one of Nell's letters to Santa, she'd asked for a camera for Shirley because her sister had been wanting one all year.
• Control Freak: She's outright described as this by Steven, and he's not wrong: Shirley needs to be in control of her life and the lives of her siblings, due to being the oldest sister and Team Mom. When Steven offers a share of the royalties for his book, she rejects the idea and speaks for everyone without consulting them. The ones who do take the money keep this a secret from her, presumably to avoid her inevitable explosive reaction. She also has total control of the business which she shares with her husband, and tends to reject his advice. She's so controlling that she insists on preparing the corpse of her own sister for viewing.
• Cruel to Be Kind: She does some seriously cruel things (noticeably, throwing Luke out of Nell's wedding), but she really thinks she's doing it to safeguard them from being hurt by him. Seeing as it's implied that Luke had escaped from rehab and pretty much looked like shit, Shirley probably thought that his presence would take the attention away from Nell on her day, and considering how much Nell dotes on him, she might have been right; but it should have been Nell's choice on whether her own twin brother should attend her wedding.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: She goes from a frosty Control Freak to somewhat warm by the end of the series.
• Dreaming of Times Gone By: On two separate occasions, Shirley talks in her sleep about things her siblings have experienced, such as Theo dancing in the Red Room. On the night of Nell's death, she has a four-way Catapult Nightmare with her remaining siblings, and utters "Nellie's in the Red Room!" despite having no way of knowing just yet that her sister had gone back to the house.
• Hypocrite: She is extremely angry about what she thinks is Theo and her husband having an affair—never mind that she already knew Theo was a lesbian. When both of them individually try to talk to her about what happened, she flat out refuses to even hear them out—never mind that years ago she cheated on her husband (with another married man, no less). It's implied that she realizes that she's being a hypocrite, with her unreasonable anger towards them being mostly a cover for her own guilt.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Not to the same extent as Theo, but she can be a rather domineering and self-righteous presence at times. However, she's a very compassionate person who tries very hard to help her family, not to mention the families of people that require her mortuary services. She's also very understanding of children struggling with grief, as shown in her attempts to ease a young boy's fear of seeing his dead grandmother in her casket and explaining what happened with Nell to her young kids.
• Kick the Dog: Like her older brother, she has many small moments of this throughout the series, the worst being when she shoos Luke away from Nell's wedding despite Nell and Luke both desperately wanting him to be there. To make matters worse, she gives him money to take a cab back to rehab and even says she doesn't care if he uses the change to relapse.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: She discovers a bunch of kittens in a shed at Hill House and eagerly takes care of them. Unfortunately, all of them were too young to be without a mother, which resulted in them dying and the event traumatizing Shirley.
• The Perfectionist: Theo accuses her of being one in Episode 8. Considering she doesn't even deny it, coupled with her frequent need to control everything around her, it's all but stated to be true.
• Promoted to Parent: It's implied that after Liv died, she and Steve had to step up to the plate and help out, especially since Hugh became distant around this point due to his loss of custody of the kids - a sacrifice that came about from his need to distance them from Hill House and the trauma it embodied.
• Psychological Projection: Her lashing out about Theo and her husband's possible affair is the product of her own extra-marital affair.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Shirley repeatedly offers funeral services at a discounted rate to struggling families and refuses to take any cut of the earnings from Steven's book, calling it "blood money". This is deconstructed as due to the amount of charity she gives, her business is constantly struggling to stay afloat, something she refuses to face, and she not only speaks for herself in regards to Steven's book but for the rest of her siblings without their input. When she learns that Theo took the money so she could get her degree, Shirley acts personally insulted and takes it even worse when her husband Kevin reveals he also took the money behind her back to keep the family afloat. It becomes clear that while she is principled, it veers into straight up self-righteousness.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Young!Shirley mostly wore pink dresses and blouses, but starts to lean towards darker colors after the incident with the kittens. By the time she reaches adulthood, Shirley now wears nothing but practical, no-nonsense outfits. After she undergoes a bit of Character Development and finally deals with her trauma, she's seen sporting a formal, yet loose blue shirt at Luke's sobriety party in the finale and is visibly happier as well.
• Talking in Your Sleep: Does this a lot even in adulthood. Liv's conversation with Theo implies that the things Shirley sees in her dreams are actually visions, though this plot point is never explained.
• Team Mom: Shows shades of this. After her mother's death, Shirley, being the eldest girl, helped raise her younger siblings. She also pays for Luke's rehab without batting an eyelash at the large sum of money it would cost them and helps organize Nell's wedding and funeral. And despite telling Luke before Nell's wedding that she won't support him anymore, she confesses to Theo that she's terrified of the day he either comes back for the last time or doesn't come at all.
• Unwanted Assistance:
  • Theo claims to be helping Shirley by staying in the guest House - from her perspective, she's there to keep Shirl from losing herself in her constant work with the dead and the grief of other people. She doesn't do much good, considering that its major outcome is that she embraces Shirley's husband (although it's actually a major case of Not What It Looks Like).
  • Shirley really never wanted Steve's help, but Kevin took it for her — because they needed it due to Shirley's focus on charity (and spending a lot of money on Luke's rehab).

Theo

Theodora "Theo" Crain

Portrayed By: Mckenna Grace (past) / Kate Siegel (present)

The middle child of the Crain family. Theo always keeps her cool and is extremely level-headed, but is also sensitive to other people's thoughts and can be quite standoffish, especially towards her siblings. She often sleeps around with women and works as a child therapist.

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• Adaptational Jerkass: While sympathetic and more layered, she's by far the most actively churlish and unfriendly iteration of her character.
• Adaptational Sexuality: Subverted. She is introduced as a lesbian, as her equivalents in the novel and 1963 film are heavily implied to be, but she is later found apparently embracing Kevin, making her bisexual like her 1999 counterpart. However, it is later revealed that this was very much a case of Not What It Looks Like, and she is not shown to have any attraction to men otherwise.
• All Gays are Promiscuous: She tends to sleep around a lot, enjoying physical intimacy but fearing the emotional kind. Shirley even accuses her of acting like a frat guy, much to Theo's amusement. It's implied that she eventually grows out of it, as the final shot of her in the series shows Trish and Theo wearing wedding rings.
• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: To everyone, except her young patients.
• Basement-Dweller: She's a qualified psychologist and is working regularly enough to be able to afford a place of her own, but still chooses to stay in Shirley's guest house—a fact that both Nell and Shirley eventually call her out on. Ultimately subverted as during a fight, she loses her temper and yells that she's only staying there because she's worried about Shirley, not because she actually needs the help. In the finale, she finally moves out.
• Big Sister Instinct:
  • Towards the twins when they were all younger.
    • For example, when Mrs. Dudley grabs Luke and snaps at him for playing with the dumbwaiter, Theo coolly orders her to let go of his shoulders and points out she should have just said it was dangerous, while staring her down. She also goes to great lengths to prove that he was telling the truth about the unmapped basement.
    • When Nell is accused of vandalizing a wall, Theo tells Nell that she believes she didn't do it and even helps her clean up with no complaint.
  • Adult Theo, however, seems to have lost this, not having spoken to Nell in what seems to be months and talking derisively about her. It's later revealed that this was because Nell had tried to force her to use her gift to investigate Nell's husband's death, which doesn't work—but, as later episodes show, could've really hurt Theo if it had.
• Blessed with Suck: Theo has extremely powerful Touch Telepathy, a gift she often employs to help out her child patients. However, it also means she has to avoid touching other people at all costs, and is often seen wearing gloves as a result. In addition, due to her sensitivity to the supernatural, younger Theo was often cold and had to wear sweaters all the time, even though it was the height of summer during their stay in Hill House.
• Butch Lesbian: Downplayed because Theo is still quite feminine, but she also has a lot of the traits: she dresses androgynously, always in pants and usually in dark colors; she has a Gender-Blender Name (although her actual name is feminine, she rarely goes by it); and she enjoys a lot of stereotypical "masculine" activities like sleeping around with random women and heavy drinking.
• Cool Aunt: She's the fun aunt to her sister Shirley's children, especially Allie.
• Cool Big Sis: Theo was this to the twins, especially Luke, when they were all kids. She takes on a similar role with her young patients as an adult child psychologist.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Goes from "a clenched fist with hair" to an empath with a steady girlfriend and no need for her protective gloves.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Theo already has a reputation for being a bit of a Hard-Drinking Party Girl among her siblings, but her grief over Nell's death drives her to go on a truly massive bender. It's later revealed that after touching Nell's body, Theo lost all feeling in her body and, seeing as she didn't know how to turn it back on, turned to drinking as a way to cope.
• The Empath: She can feel people's emotions and learn things about objects and their history, so long as she touches them with her bare skin.
• Friend to All Children: Pretty much the only people that she doesn’t throw up an enormous shield against are her young charges, who she even deigns to grasp with her own naked hand in order to help them; and her young niece, whom she is seen having a wordless conversation with at the dinner table and whom has started to wear gloves indoors.
• Hard-Drinking Party Girl: Theo drinks the most of all five siblings, likes to go out and party, and sleeps around a lot.
• Hates Being Touched: Because of her ability to "read" the truths behind an object or a person, she is visibly uncomfortable whenever someone tries to hug her. This doesn't seem to apply to sex, but only if she kicks the woman out immediately after.
• It Was a Gift: Theo's gloves were given to her by Olivia when she was only a little girl.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Theo is abrasive and closed-off, with Steve outright describing her as "a clenched fist with hair", but she's still a good person with a strong sense of moral duty. Notably, she's a child psychologist who uses her Touch Telepathy to help her patients. That's about as heart-of-gold as you can get, and it's notable that her young patients are the only people she acts warmly towards.
• The Lad-ette: Theo drinks a lot, picks up a lot of women in bars, and sleeps with one of Nell's bridesmaids at her wedding.
• Ladykiller in Love: A lesbian example. Theo was well-known for having one-night stands, to the point that Shirl compares her to a "frat boy". This included Trish until Theo starts to shed her emotional walls and they becomes steady girlfriends. The finale implies that they are married.
• Lipstick Lesbian: She's an attractive and feminine woman who loves women.
• Middle Child Syndrome: By her own admission, she is very self-aware about the fact that she suffers from this — unlike her older brother and sister who turned to parent-esque control and coping mechanisms, and her troubled younger twin siblings, Theo has the most obvious mean streak and just wants to leave the past behind. She sees it as the reason for her difficulties with getting truly close to other people.
• A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: Theo's Touch Telepathy is powerful enough for her to learn and know a lot of things using it. However, some of these things are deeply traumatizing for her: outside of everything she had to deal with in Hill House, she ends up reliving the molestation of one of her young patients in her search to treat her, and when she touches Nell's body to try to understand why she killed herself, she experiences The Nothing After Death and ends up wailing and emotionally numb from the experience.
• Mundane Utility: As a child psychologist, she tends to remove her gloves and take her patient's hand whenever she thinks it will help her get a diagnosis to help them. This usually works—except when her patient happens to be just as fucked-up as herself.
• Nightmare of Normality: The crux of her experience in the Red Room is finding herself without her powers while trapped in the illusory realm.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: She's rarely referred to as "Theodora" and has seemingly always gone by "Theo" since childhood. It's only when she and Shirley are on the outs that her sister starts calling her by her full name.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: A situation is truly alarming when it's calm and collected Theo doing the panicking. Such instances include Theo finding out about and experiencing her patient's molestation via her powers, when she touched Nell's body, and when she and Hugh both encountered Olivia's ghost at the funeral home.
  • Whenever Luke is in trouble, Theo—who is normally more proactive than her siblings—tends to get paralyzed and can only watch on in horror with her hands over her mouth.
  • Another example is when she's caught embracing Shirley's husband, Kevin, after it has been repeatedly established that she is only attracted to women. Subverted with the reveal that the only reason they had been that close in that one instant was because Theo had lost all feeling after touching Nell's corpse and was therefore looking for anything to "turn it on" again; her grab for Kevin after being lost in the blackout without sight or feeling was much more akin to grabbing a lifeline while drowning, and the subsequent negative feelings in the situation brought her back to feeling and living.
• Saying Too Much: Has to cut herself off quick when mentioning to Trish that her young patient had repressed her abuse so deeply that Theo didn't even see it when she touched the girl's hand, like she would normally expect to.
• The Shrink: The "awesome" kind with her young patients. She is able to use her powers to intuit the causes of their problems.
• Tomboyish Name: Theodora nearly always goes by "Theo", which may be representative of her butch sexuality.
• Touch Telepathy: She's able to sense things about objects and people by touching them with her bare skin: it's the most active of the Crains' various Psychic Powers, to the point that she can't turn it off and has to wear gloves to block it out.

Luke

Luke Crain

Portrayed By: Julian Hillard (past) / Oliver Jackson-Cohen (present)

The (second) youngest of the Crain siblings and Nell's twin. The events of Hill House permanently scarred Luke to a degree that he turned to drugs. He is desperate to do right by his family, but the fact that he is always coming in and out of rehab has estranged him somewhat from his siblings.

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• Addled Addict: He is this in some flashbacks, but by the time the show starts, he has moved towards Recovered Addict territory. If he'll manage to stay there is the question that adds much plot tension over the course of the series.
• Angsty Surviving Twin: Nell's death understandably hits him the hardest of all the siblings, and his first action after her funeral is trying to burn Hill House down in an apparent attempt at revenge. Later, when the Crain children are reunited in the Red Room for the final time, he despairingly asks her ghost how he is supposed to go on.
  Luke: I don't—I don't know how to do this without you.
• Beard of Sorrow: His beard seems to indicate his levels of inner turmoil.
• Bespectacled Cutie: Six-year-old Luke wore thick glasses that took up half his face, adding to his adorable factor. He's stopped wearing them as an adult, however.
• Big Brother Worship: It's telling enough that the only person who could visit Luke's tree house wasn't Nell, but Steve.
• Big Little Brother: Despite being the second youngest member of the family, adult Luke towers over everyone else.
• Big Brother Instinct: To Nell. In flashbacks to their childhood, he comforts her after yet another nightmare, and even shares his coping mechanism of counting to seven with her. In Episode 6, Nell disappears during a blackout, and by the time they find her, she is understandably upset. An extremely worried Luke placates her by saying "I'll never let you go again. Never again. I promise." Additionally, it's all but said that the only reason Luke went to burn down Hill House in the first place was because it murdered his twin and he wanted revenge.
• Break the Cutie: Luke's life generally sucks. As a kid, he encounters ghosts, but none of the adults around believe him - plus, they think the one friend outside he makes outside the family is imaginary. Then he sees his friend get poisoned by his mother, but since no one save Nell and Hugh saw it happen, his siblings still believe she was imaginary; and after his mother appears to commit suicide, his father withdraws from the children, leaving them to be raised by their aunt. As an adult, he keeps seeing ghosts, can't get rid of his drug addiction, is belittled and dismissed by his siblings, is betrayed by his closest female friend, and finally loses his twin sister, whose death he experiences through their psychic connection. Whew.
• Death by Irony: Subverted. The house attempts to do this with Luke. After years of injecting himself with "poison" a.k.a his drugs, the house forces him to inject himself with actual rat poison. Fortunately, Nell's ghost brings him back and their siblings manage to bring him to a hospital in the nick of time.
• Gentle Giant: As an adult, he is the tallest of his siblings, but is the least aggressive and intimidating of them all, bar Nell.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Similarly to his twin, Nell, he has dark blonde hair and is a sweetheart despite his (many) troubles.
• Imaginary Friend: As a child, Luke constantly talks about or draws pictures of his friend Abigail, a little girl who "lives in the woods." Double Subverted. Not only is Abigail not imaginary, she's also not a ghost. At least, not at first.
• I'm Cold... So Cold...: Despite not actually nearing death himself, this happens to Luke when he unknowingly feels Nell's death and subsquenr cold storage through their Twin Telepathy.
• Love Makes You Dumb: With Joey. He runs after her after she tells him not to, wasting Shirley's money and giving up his own spot in rehab.
• Meaningful Name / Theme Twin Naming: Like his twin sister, Luke's name means "light" or "light giving."
• Not What It Looks Like: In the first episode, he says this verbatim when Steve catches him attempting to leave Steve's apartment with his ipad and old camera. Steve understandably assumes he has fallen off the wagon and was looking for drug money. While he really was stealing Steve's things, Luke was going to use the money to help his friend from rehab start over, not get drugs.
• Sibling Seniority Squabble: During his eulogy for her, Luke mentions that he frequently tried claiming older twin authority over Nell by pointing out that he was born 90 seconds before her, and that she would always let him, despite it being "a bunch of bullshit."
• Thousand-Yard Stare: During Nell's funeral, Luke has this look on his face all throughout. Considering she was his twin and they were extremely close, it's pretty understandable why. It's especially prominent when he and Steve leave for their hotel and he takes one last glance back at her coffin.
• Tranquil Fury: After Nell's funeral, Luke pours gasoline all over Hill House's foyer with a calm, determined look on his face. The only indication that he's even mad in the first place is how heavy he's breathing.
• Twin Telepathy: With Nell.
• Undying Loyalty: To Joey; when she falls back into addiction, he gives up his own place in rehab without a second thought and tries to find and save her. Even her stealing his money and abandoning him doesn't change this—instead of being disappointed, he is devastated he couldn't help her. It's implied that the reason he helps her so much is because she reminds him of Nell, and seeing as he couldn't help his twin the last time she needed him, he's trying to make up for it by helping Joey instead.
• Wandering Walk of Madness: Episode 4 ("The Twin Thing") features Luke being put through a Trauma Conga Line that features him being left homeless, betrayed and robbed by his only friend, beaten up by a gang of thugs, and mugged for his jacket and shoes. Worse still, he's experiencing phantom withdrawal symptoms that are actually due to him picking up on his beloved sister Nell's death via their Twin Telepathy and being actively haunted by the Bowler Hat Ghost. Teetering on the edge of a Despair Event Horizon, all he can do is pace aimlessly back and forth through the streets, reciting his Survival Mantra as he tries to ignore the ghost pursuing him.
• When He Smiles: As an adult, Luke doesn't really have a lot to smile about, especially when he's around his family. However, the bashful one he makes during his celebration for being two years sober is a thing of beauty indeed.

Nell

Eleanor "Nell" Vance (née Crain)

Portrayed By: Violet McGraw (past) / Victoria Pedretti (present)

The youngest daughter of the Crain family and Luke's twin. Since she was a little girl, Nell has been plagued by a ghostly apparition she calls the "Bent-Neck Lady." In the present day, she is the sweetest and most loving member of the Crain siblings.

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• Affectionate Nickname: Those closest to her call her "Nellie."
• All Girls Like Ponies: As a little girl, she had a toy horse named Mr. Bristle, and when she and Shirley try to unlock the Red Room, she excitedly hopes that there's a pony living inside. She keeps her equine enthusiasm even as an adult, telling Luke excitedly that "they have horses!" when he attempts rehab for the first time.
• The Baby of the Bunch: The youngest and sweetest Crain sibling, and she and Olivia seem to have a special relationship because of it.
• Big Good: After she becomes a ghost, Nell acts as this for her siblings as best she can, giving them valuable instructions and freeing them from the house's illusory traps.
• Broken Bird: By the end—hell, by barely the middle—of her focus episode ("The Bent-Neck Lady"), she's widowed, on the outs with some of her siblings, and haunted again by her childhood ghost.
• The Cassandra: She spends a huge part of the first episode telling everyone that she's worried about Luke, but since he is still in rehab, her siblings dismiss it as her being dramatic. Needless to say that she has seen his future...
• Break the Cutie: Everything just seems to go wrong for Nell. Ever since she was a child, Nell was tormented by the Bent-Neck Lady, giving her nightmares and sleep paralysis all the way into adulthood. After meeting her husband, Arthur, her life seems to get better for a little while ... until he randomly suffers from a brain aneurysm in front of her, with a sleep-paralyzed Nell being unable to help. Desperate, she forces Theo to use her powers to sense if he is still around—a deed that Theo attacks her for and drives a wedge between the two sisters. After this, she starts seeing the Bent-Neck Lady more often, and even though she tries to reach out to Steve, Shirley, and Hugh, all of them fail to give her any help in time. She then tries to face her fear alone and goes back to Hill House, only for it to distract her with illusions and ultimately drive her to her death, where she finds out that she was the Bent-Neck Lady all along.
• Demoted to Extra: In all previous adaptations of the story, she is the lead character. While she is still an important character in this adaption, and the dramatic focal piece, her screen time is severely lowered compared to other versions, due to her death in the first episode, giving more time to the character development of her siblings and father.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Eleanor in the books drives into a tree and breaks her neck. Nell apparently hangs herself. In reality, the house and Olivia's ghost tricked her by disguising a noose as a locket she'd always wanted, and Olivia pushes Nell off the balcony with a kiss.
• Driven to Suicide: Subverted. It appears to be what happened to her, but she was in fact manipulated and pushed to death by the ghost of her mother.
• Fate Worse than Death: After the House manipulates her into hanging herself and she begins falling through time as the Bent-Neck Lady—paralyzed and unable to take any action to prevent her fate.
• Gone Horribly Right: In Episode 6, Hugh mentions that Nell was always the one trying to get everybody to reunite. She succeeds on two occasions: her wedding ... and her funeral. Even Olivia's ghost was present for both.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Nell has golden brown hair and is noticeably the nicest person in the show.
• The Heart: She is the sweetest and most peaceful of the siblings, and the one who desperately wants everyone to get along—even after her own death.
• Meaningful Name: In Greek, Eleanor means "bright, shining one"—fitting given her kind personality and status as The Heart of her siblings. Additionally, her nickname Nell sounds the same as "knell", as in "death knell".
• No Medication for Me: She tosses her medication into the toilet after seeing the Bent-Neck Lady again in a traumatic moment. It makes her more reckless and unstable, leading to her picking fights with Theo and Steve, and finally deciding she needs to confront the house—at night and alone!
• Never Suicide: As her twin Luke immediately determines.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Throughout the series, her family only refers to her as "Nell" or "Nellie," but never "Eleanor."
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Theo and Steve really should've realized that Nell lashing out like she did was just an indication of how depressed she truly was after Arthur's death.
• Posthumous Character: Dies at the end of the very first episode, yet interacts with her family as she falls through time.
• Screw Destiny: Ghost Nell's reaction to the House trying to entrap the rest of her family.
• Tomato in the Mirror: When she falls backwards through time, and realizes that she has always been the Bent-Neck Lady.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: She desperately wants all of her family to be happy and is the kindest sibling, even after death.
• Twin Telepathy: With Luke.
• Unstuck in Time: After the House manipulates and forces her into "suicide".
• When She Smiles: During the brief moments on the show where Nell is seen happy, her smile—like Luke's—is enough to light up a room. Must be a twin thing as well.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: An intensely cruel one. In order to trap Nell in the noose it wants for her, the House shows her visions of her loved ones, including Arthur back to life, and shows everyone apologizing and allows her to dance with her late husband. At the last moment, when Olivia offers her a locket, Nell looks down to find that the locket is, in fact, a noose. Just as she realizes she's been horribly tricked, Olivia sends her off the balcony to a Neck Snap.
• Your Worst Memory: Any point where The Bent-Neck Lady shows up seems to highlight the fear and sadness in her life, but the death of her husband has to be the worst of all of them... making her eventual fate of becoming the Bent-Neck Lady and witnessing that moment again all the more painful.

The House

Hill House

Hill House

Built a long time ago, Hill House is home to a number of ghosts. It "feeds" on people by luring them into the Red Room, where it shows them visions of what they most desire.

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• Arc Symbol: The lion door handles and black mold, where most of it resides within the Red Room.
• Alien Geometries: Even putting aside the events of Olivia's and Nell's enigmatic disappearances and reappearances over the course of the series, there's the fact that, according to the blueprints shown in-series, there's no physical structure on the first or second story that would support a room where the door to the Red Room is. The second floor hallway leads to a dead-end with a stained glass window at the end, and we see no evidence of any way to get to the third floor aside from the spiral staircase in the library. Where else does that bend in the corridor by the Red Door lead to? And how is it that neither Hugh, a trained building contractor, or Olivia, a talented architect, noticed that lack of support, even though they both consciously know that the Red Room is there at the end of the third-floor corridor?
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: It's ultimately likened to an enormous, mindless organism that preys on its residents out of instinct than any active malevolence.
• Eldritch Location: The House seems to be a semi-sentient entity that works by its own rules, both structurally and architectonically.
• Genius Loci: Even leaving out all the ghosts inside of it, the house itself is alive...and hungry.
• Invincible Boogeymen: Not only is its power just about impossible to resist, but the building is seemingly indestructible. Trying to burn the place down only results in the fire instantly extinguishing itself. In the end, the only thing you can do is remain as far away from it as possible, and never visit after nightfall.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The Red Room. It is able to make people live a great version of something, but this is subverted in that it eventually turns those great scenarios into nightmares.
• Master of Illusion: The House is extremely talented at getting inside people's heads and manipulating them with illusions.
• Non-Linear Character: The House can play with time, doing things like showing visions of the future in order to create self-fulfilling prophecies.
• Nothing Is Scarier: It's never revealed why the house is the way that it is, it just...is. The lack of an explanation just makes it all the more eldritch.
• Offscreen Teleportation: What the House can do to people it has entranced, at least from various occurrences witnessed in-show: Olivia suddenly appearing in places she couldn't have reached without being seen during the storm, the Crain siblings being transported (one by one) into illusory and initially "perfect" scenarios inside the Red Room, and so on.
• Perception Filter: The house seems capable of creating one, mostly in regards to the Red Room. Not only do people not put together the fact that there's no support for it on any of the floors beneath it, but none of the Crain family notice or realize that each of their unique rooms (Olivia's reading room, Steve's game room, Shirley's family room, Theo's dance studio, Luke's treehouse, and Nell's toy room) are all the Red Room in disguise.

Poppy Hill

Poppy Hill

Portrayed By: Catherine Parker

The wife of William Hill and a clinically insane woman. After her death, she comes back as one of the house's most unhinged ghosts.

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• Ambiguous Situation: In the supplementary stories posted to Reddit, it is rumored in-universe that Hazel is responsible for the untimely deaths of William and Poppy's children, in a bid to claim the family inheritance through her own son, Edward Hill. In turn, it's rumored that Edward's death was orchestrated by Poppy in retribution. In the end, neither of them were able to prove anything about the other.
• Big Bad: In light of the House itself being Demoted to Extra, she's the closest thing. She's the one who suggests Olivia kill her children in order to keep them 'safe,' and the one who helps take the surviving Crain family members one by one to the Red Room in the finale.
• Consummate Liar: Hazel claims that she's this, without elaborating.
• Evil Redhead: Her red hair thematically links with the house's association with the color red.
• False Friend: She befriends Olivia under the guise of being just as concerned for the Crain children's safety. Ultimately, Poppy is also the one who plants the seed of delusion in Olivia's head about killing them being the ultimate key to keeping them safe.
• Festering Fungus: She is associated with the black mold that grows throughout the house, particularly when it covers the inside of the Red Room. She can also Make Them Rot with it.
• The Flapper: Dressed in typical 1920s attire, Poppy looks like she stepped out of "The Great Gatsby".
• Glamour Failure: When she appears to Olivia, she looks like a beautiful young woman. However, the audience gets to see her as she really is: a mottled corpse with rotting teeth and dead white eyes.
• The Heavy: The House is evil, but it's really only Poppy who does any of their bidding.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Delivers one of these about a family being murdered, one by one, as a means of taunting a helpless Hugh. At least, until Ghost Olivia tells her to back off.
• Manipulative Bitch: She almost makes Olivia kill her favorite children, the twins, and succeeds with Nell.
• Master of Illusion: Her modus operandi. Plan A is to slowly twist at a person's psyche until they break and kill either themselves or others, which works with Olivia and gets close enough with Nell. If someone shows resistance to this or fights back? Plan B is to boink them on the head to trap them in a Lotus-Eater Machine until she can kill them another way, such as via syringe. And if you really piss her off? Plan C is to infect you with her black mold and take you out of the picture for an indeterminate amount of time.
• Metaphorically True: Her method of keeping Nell and Luke "safe" can be interpreted as this.
• More Deadly Than the Male: Although William is more creepy-looking than his wife, it's Poppy who continually schemes on how best to drive the Crains mad. Unfortunately, she succeeds with Olivia.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Poppy is an illusionist, and an extremely powerful manipulator who may be the key to the time warping that happens around the house. But, come the finale, she can also knock down the healthy, living Crain siblings with a single touch.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Supplementary lore reveals that she suffered the untimely loss of her two children. Her daughter fell into a vat of cement during the construction of the Hill House and suffocated, while her son succumbed to an illness that left him wheelchair-bound. Since their deaths conveniently left Hazel Hill's son, Edward, poised to inherit the estate, it was quickly rumored that Hazel had them murdered.

William Hill

William Hill

Portrayed By: Fedor Steer

Heir to Hill House, William spent his early years in an asylum due to being diagnosed as clinically insane. Here he met the similarly afflicted Poppy and fell in love with her.

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• Creepily Long Arms: He has an unnervingly long, stretched-out appearance.

• Driven to Suicide: He walled himself away inside the basement of the house, where he died.
• Ghostly Glide: The bowler hat-wearing ghost moves in this fashion, with a cane added for extra weirdness. In the past, its feet are clearly visible above the ground. The present version also moves this way, though its feet are motionless on the ground. It's a lot more unnerving than it sounds; he doesn't hover or drift, he just slides through the air.
• Signature Headgear: He first appears retrieving his bowler hat from the twins' bedroom, which then becomes his most identifiable feature after Luke keeps seeing him in adulthood. Supplementary materials reveal that it originally belonged to his father, Jacob Hill.
• Nice, Mean, and In-Between: Okay, so none of the ghosts are really "nice;" but Hazel is at least helpful on one occasion, and Poppy is outright evil. William, on the other hand, is just intensely creepy and nothing but, making him the Inbetween.

Hazel Hill

Hazel Hill

William's sister; the last person to own the house before the Crain family.

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• Ambiguous Situation: In the supplementary stories posted to Reddit, it is rumored in-universe that Hazel is responsible for the untimely deaths of William and Poppy's children, in a bid to claim the family inheritance through her own son, Edward Hill. In turn, it's rumored that Edward's death was orchestrated by Poppy in retribution. In the end, neither of them were able to prove anything about the other.
• Cool Old Lady: While she wasn't a particularly good person in life, Hazel Hill is the only ghost to offer an honest counterbalance to Poppy's manipulative evil.
• Kick the Dog: In the supplementary short story Master of the Pack, a former kennelmaster of the Hill family relates the tale of how Hazel resented her father's hunting dogs, and took a shotgun to them all shortly after his funeral. She did this to spite him for passing her over in favor of William.
  "Do you remember how he talked about these mongrels? Do you remember the words? Pure vessels? How he claimed them as his legacy, that he would walk the grounds as long as they did? I’m making sure he won’t."
• Outliving One's Offspring: Hazel's son, Edward Hill, died by immolation when she ordered her rumrunners to burn their basement stash to pre-empt a police raid. It's rumored that Poppy orchestrated the accident, to get back at Hazel for allegedly killing her children.
• The Queenpin: Downplayed, but Hazel used the House as the center of a bootlegging operation during Prohibition, in an effort to keep the family's finances afloat during the expensive construction.
• Token Good Teammate: The only ghost who tries to warn Olivia about Poppy.

Edward Hill

The son of Hazel Hill. After the deaths of his young cousins, he was poised to inherit the Hill House, but met an untimely death.

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• Body Horror: As a ghost, his body is nearly fleshless and missing one leg. Combined with how he shuffles madly along the floor like some feral zombie, Edward is by far the most frightful of the Hill House ghosts.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: When his mother's rumrunners were burning the basement alcohol stash and sealing it off to pre-empt a police raid, Edward was somehow caught in the blaze and burned to a crisp. He laid in the sealed cellar for years, being gnawed on by rats, before finally being discovered.

Jacob Hill

The original patriarch of the Hill family, father of William and Hazel, and the man who first ordered the construction of the House. Described mainly in supplemental materials.

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• Driven to Suicide: After losing his wife and his fortunes during the onset of the Great Depression, Jacob ended his own life by leaping from the tallest tower of the still-unfinished House.
• Heir Club for Men: He insisted on a male heir, leading him to pass over Hazel in favor of his mentally unstable son William. Hazel understandably resented him for it.
• Signature Headgear: According to supplementary materials, Jacob is the original owner of the bowler hat that his son William wears.

Other Characters

Kevin

Kevin Harris

Portrayed By: Anthony Ruivivar

Shirley's very understanding husband and business partner.

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• Exiled to the Couch: Or more precisely, the hotel: after Shirley finds out that Kevin took Steven's book money against her wishes and catches him in a compromising position with Theo, she makes him leave the house, and refuses to talk to him to let him try and explain the situation. She persists in this even after Hugh and Theo try to speak up in his favor,and only thaws towards him after the siblings return from Hill House in the finale.
• Happily Married: To Shirley. Most of the time at least.
• Mistaken for Cheating: TWICE: First, Shirley finds a second bank account checkbook and assumes he's seeing another woman, but it's revealed he just accepted the royalties of Steve's Hill House book to counter Shirley's generosity, which is threatening their struggling funeral home. Then, she witnesses Kevin and Theo seemingly about to kiss, when it was this trope, alongside Theo needing to feel another living soul after experiencing The Nothing After Death when she touched Nell's corpse.
• Nice Guy: Kevin is portrayed as a very loving, kind-hearted, and friendly person. Throughout Episode 6, he repeatedly tries to make the Crain family as comfortable as possible during Nell's funeral, mediates between Hugh and the siblings, and only gives up when Shirley blows up at him as well. He also forgives her even after she confesses to cheating on him.

Leigh

Leigh Crain

Portrayed By: Samantha Sloyan

Steve's wife.

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• Babies Ever After: She's shown to be pregnant in the Distant Epilogue.
• Nice Guy: Her in-laws all seem to love her and are greatly upset when it turns out that she and Steve have separated.
• Satellite Love Interest: She doesn't have much characterization other than being Steve's wife and wanting to have children. This is lampshaded in Steve's Red Room vision in the finale.
  Red Room!Leigh: I was always a supporting player in your story, if we're being honest. I would feed you, and fuck you, and pay the bills, while you squinted over some novel that nobody was gonna read or publish, but I paid you to write them, didn't I? I picked up the check for your dreams and said goodbye to mine, and not even that was enough, was it?

Arthur

Arthur Vance

Portrayed By: Jordane Christie

Nell's husband, a sleep technologist.

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• Ambiguous Situation: Whether or not his death was caused by The Bent-Neck Lady/The House or was really just a freak aneurysm is left entirely unclear. It does seem unlikely that Nell would kill her own husband after all.
• Happily Married: To Nell, but far too briefly.
• The Lost Lenore: Arthur's death throws Nell into another downward spiral, and when she visits Hill House on her therapist's advice, one of the people it uses to lure her in is a miraculously "resurrected" Arthur.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The cause of Arthur's death. His autopsy states that he died of a unexpected aneurysm, but Nell is convinced that the Bent-Neck Lady killed him, as she appeared at the moment he died. However, since it turns out that Nell herself is the Bent-Neck Lady, it puts how responsible she is for Arthur's death into question, since Nell would never have tried to kill Arthur on purpose. Then again, if Hill House could affect when and where the Bent-Neck Lady could show up, it may have used her to literally scare Arthur to death.
• Mythology Gag: His last name is the one Nell had in the original novel.
• Nice Guy: Arthur is possibly the only character in the show who is completely and unambiguously kind and loved by everyone he meets. While his relationship with Nell is mostly confined to one episode, not a single person questions their relationship and he's shown repeatedly helping her with her sleep paralysis through his therapeutic techniques even if they wake him up in the middle of the night. Much of the emotion of "The Bent-Neck Lady" comes from Nell being lured into a hallucinatory wedding and dance with him, because he's just so perfect.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Is married to Nell for a brief time and then gets killed by a freak aneurysm.

Trish

Trish

Portrayed By: Levy Tran

A graduate student who becomes more than just a casual fling of Theo's.

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• Asian and Nerdy: Downplayed, but she's Asian and the reason she was in town in the first place was because she was finishing up with graduate school.
• First Girl Wins: She is the first of Theo's Love Interests who gets introduced, and she ends up becoming her wife by the time of the Distant Epilogue.
• Lipstick Lesbian: She is a very attractive, feminine woman who loves other women.
• Plucky Girl: Reacts remarkably unfazed to Theo's mixed messages and occasional rudeness, weathering even a funeral to be with her.

Janet

Aunt Janet

Portrayed By: Elizabeth Becka

Olivia's sister, who ended up taking in the children after Olivia died, and Hugh presumably lost custody.

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• Attention Whore: A downplayed example. She grieves the loudest and is, by far, the most dramatic crier at Nell's funeral. Hugh is clearly annoyed by it, but his mental version of Olivia reminds him that Janet basically raised Nell for the majority of her childhood, making Janet Nellie's mother as much as Olivia.
• Parental Substitute: She raised the siblings after Olivia died and Hugh largely removed himself from the children's lives and clearly still dotes on them as her reaction to Luke at Nell's funeral shows.
• Small Role, Big Impact: She appears very infrequently but she raised the rest of the kids after Olivia died.

Mrs. Dudley

Clara Dudley

Portrayed By: Annabeth Gish

Clara is the housekeeper of Hill House, and a very devout Christian. She and her husband Horace refuse to stay in the house after dark.

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• The Fundamentalist: Played with. She is very religious and in her first scene proselytizes to young Steven about Jesus, but she is very respectful of the Crains' more secular beliefs and doesn't push the subject.
• Happily Married: To her husband, Horace, although they're rarely seen together on the show.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Did she need to grab and yell at Luke? No. Is she right that playing with the dumbwaiter is a very, very bad idea? Oh, yes.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She's rather stern and humorless at first glance, but she's still a good person.
• Letting Her Hair Down: Mrs Dudley is only ever shown with her hair up when she's working. In the final episodes—which really amp up her sympathetic qualities—it's worn looser.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Her first daughter was stillborn. To make matters worse, her only surviving daughter Abigail is murdered by Liv.
• Together in Death: In the final montage, we see that her husband Horace brought her back to the house just in time for her to die, so she could stay with her two children who died there as ghosts.
• Token Religious Teammate: More of a supporting player but otherwise fits the bill, giving young Steven a speech about accepting Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: She tells Olivia not to let anyone talk her out of feeling afraid for her children's safety. The fear, coupled with Clara and Poppy's validation, later ends up driving Liv to have a deadly tea party with the twins and her own daughter, Abigail.

Mr. Dudley

Horace Dudley

Portrayed By: Robert Longstreet

Horace is the groundskeeper of Hill House and, much like his wife, is a devout Christian. He was born in Hill House, and his mother worked there as kitchen staff.

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• Happily Married: To Clara, but they don't share all that many scenes together on the show.
• Nice Guy: He's a little quiet, but he's extremely helpful and bighearted. He gives Hugh some much-needed exposition about the house's deadly history, and even finds it in himself to forgive Liv for murdering Abby.
• Outliving One's Offspring: His first daughter was stillborn. To make matters worse, his only surviving daughter Abigail is murdered by Liv.
• Together in Death: It's implied that when his time comes, he'll go to Hill House to die to be with his family forever.

Abigail

Abigail Dudley

Portrayed By: Olive Elise Abercrombie

A little girl Luke befriends while playing outside the house. It later turns out that she is the sheltered and homeschooled daughter of the Dudleys.

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• Affectionate Nickname: Her mother tearfully calls her Abby upon discovering her corpse in the Red Room.
• Childhood Friends: With Luke.
• Death of a Child: During a tea party with Olivia and the twins, Abigail drinks her poison-laced tea first and ends up choking to death in front of them.
• Imaginary Friend: Doubly subverted. She is neither imaginary, as Luke's family believes, nor is she a ghost, like the audience is made to think ... at least not at first.

Joey

Joey

Portrayed By: Anna Enger

A friend of Luke's from his latest attempt at rehab.

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• Because You Were Nice to Me: Luke wants to help her because she supported him during the early part of his therapy, and was in his eyes the only person other than Nell who believed he could make it.
• False Friend: Inverted despite Steve believing that she's this from the start. The show takes the perspective that addiction is a "disease" rather than a moral failing, and Joey was legitimately sober for months when she helped Luke through withdrawal. When she relapses, she warns Luke not to come after her and is initially angry when he comes anyway. Her betrayal is an action she can't control.
• Karma Houdini: She's never seen again after running off with Luke's 200 dollars. Strongly downplayed, though, since those actions signify her falling back to addiction, losing everyone she met in rehab and possibly ending up on the streets, hardly a happy ending.
• Off the Wagon: She relapses after 9 months of being clean.
• Replacement Goldfish: Luke says she reminds him of Nell.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Possibly subverted. Everyone, including Joey herself, believes that Luke has a crush on her, while he insists that they're not a couple and that he's not interested. It could be true, seeing as he hardly reacts when she kisses him (to distract him while stealing his money) and seems more confused than anything else. Before that, he also tells her how much she reminds him of Nell.

Montague

Dr. Montague

Portrayed By: Russ Tamblyn

The therapist Nell starts seeing after Arthur's death.

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• Actor Allusion: This isn't the first time Russ Tamblyn has played an inept therapist for a troubled young woman in a story involving the supernatural.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Bless him he tried, but him telling Nell that Hill House is "just a carcass in the woods" plants a seed in her head that leads to Nell returning to said house which makes her commit suicide. Um ... whoops?
• Remake Cameo: Played by the actor who played Luke in the 1963 original.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: He just wanted Nell to finally face her past.

Paige

Paige

Portrayed By: Selena Anduze

Luke's tough but caring caseworker.

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• Pet the Dog: Paige has every reason to believe that Luke has relapsed and abandoned treatment, and is thus no longer her responsibility, but she still helps Steve find him.
• The Sponsor: The caseworker for Luke while he's in rehab, and presumably also Joey.