The Neighbor is a sex trafficker.
Based on the voices of a girl and the woman in the Basement trailer
, it maybe possible the neighbor might be dabbling in human trafficking with his basement as "shipment area". Two of the women maybe slated for their fate as Sex Slave.- Jossed; however, he is kidnapping children and keeping them in his basement. It's entirely possible he's kidnapping random women and children in order to replace the family he lost in a car accident.
The neighbor is hiding the dead bodies of the girl and woman in the basement trailer
The main character is dyslexic.
While he seems to understand things when he focuses (he understands the eviction notice well enough to bugger off), every bit of text shown is messed up. The neighbor is an older Peewee Herman
It would certainly explain some of the bizarre things found in his home. As for the secret, it could be anything from kidnapped children to just him taking extreme measures to keep anyone from stealing his bicycle again. We'll never get to see what's actually inside the basement in-game until the game is actually released
Where would be the fun otherwise? The Neighbor had an amusement park/circus business, but something caused it to go under.
He has a fair-style shooting game in his house, and in the "How to hide" dream demonstration thing, you're separated from the Neighbor by a fair gate, with amusement park style signs and the Neighbor crying on the other side. The Neighbor owns multiple houses.
If we take into account the theory above that he ran an amusement park business, he may have made enough to buy 2-3 houses. Maybe he keeps extra spare items from the amusement park in the other houses he doesn't live in or go to often. The events of the alphas are consecutive, not Retcons.
One neighbor went and got caught, and subsequently buried alive. Then another guy shows up, and the cycle continues...- Or the first neighbor got unburied somehow and just kept trying?
The game is heavily inspired by real world cases of the Fritzl family and/or the Castro kidnappings.
These are two real world cases of someone keeping women prisoner. In the Ariel Castro case, he kidnapped women to sexually abuse, and kept them in his home for years, even fathering children with them. They escaped when one of the women managed to contact the neighbors for help. In the other case, Josef Fritzl kept his daughter in the basement for 24 years, while physically and sexually abusing her. This resulted in the birth of seven children, which eventually led to Josef's arrest; one of the children fell sick and had to be taken to the hospital, raising suspicions. and/or the Castro kidnappings.In Hello Neighbor, it's been implied that the Neighbor is keeping people in his basement. Based on the noises, we can conclude that there's at least two people down there: a mother and her child. It's entirely possible that the developers were inspired by real life stories like these, and the reveal that they're building up to is that the Neighbor has been keeping the mother prisoner for years, and the child is his, conceived in an unsavory manner.
The Neighbor's basement will be normal.
It will turn out that the player's desire to head into the Neighbor's basement is based on nothing but a false belief that there must be something in there. In the final game, the player will head into the basement and see that it's nothing but a regular basement with nothing out of the ordinary. And then the Neighbor will kill the player for repeated breaking and entering.- If Alpha 4 is any indication, Jossed.
- In the final game, the Neighbor's basement initially appears normal, though it turns out to be just as weird and crazy as the other versions showed once you find a secret passage in the washer.
The Neighbor is trying to get out of a Deal with the Devil.
In keeping with recent gaming phenomena, the neighbor is not keeping his basement locked up because he is an average everyday pervert trying to keep his secret hobby hidden from a nosy neighbor, sex trafficker hiding his 'products', or drug dealer trying to keep his meth lab from being discovered. Rather he is a family man. Who made a Deal with the Devil to keep his family happy/healthy/fed/whatever but with the eventual cost being exactly what he asked for. Now the time has come for the Devil to collect, and the Neighbor is desperately trying to get out of his end of the bargain. With the player character being an Unwitting Pawn in all of it, being manipulated as a gobetween to get the family exposed.- Jossed. The Neighbor's family died (except for possibly his son) so he couldn't have made a deal to protect them.
- That josses the specifics of the WMG, but the idea of a Deal with the Devil is still plausible, he'd just have to have asked for something else.
The Shadow Person is the Greater-Scope Villain of the game, or possibly the true Big Bad.
This has been one of the oldest theories surrounding Hello Neighbor, and I'm really surprised that nobody put this in here. But, essentially, this theory states that The Neighbor is trying to seal the Shadow Person in his basement, who is a force of evil that haunts his house, and is trying to ensure that it doesn't escape. On another note, the Shadow Person could be the spirit of the child heard screaming in The Neighbor's house. I just thought this theory should be mentioned. The Neighbor is preparing for the apocalypse.
Two of the more unusual things on the outside of the Neighbor's House are a water tank and a windmill. The Neighbor set these up to get clean water and power, both hard to come by in a survival situation. The Neighbor then kidnaps people and imprisons them to save them from what he believes is the end of the world. That's also why the neighbor's house is so big: to store everything needed (or that he thinks he needs) for the end of the world. Whether or not there is a real apocalypse coming will remain unknown. The player will turn out to be the villain of the game.
The player will turn out to be a serial killer that kills people because of shameful "secrets" they hide, typically totally fabricated by the player themselves. There's nothing sinister or horrible about what's in the Neighbor's basement, and there's no conveniently placed Satanic memorabilia littered about the Neighbor's house. That's all in the player's head, and why they're so determined to "expose" the Neighbor's secret. The player can only kill people who have "secrets", so the player is becoming obsessed with finding one for the Neighbor, repeatedly breaking into his house. The endings where you're buried alive? Just the neighbor calling the cops after catching you in his house, and you being thrown in jail. To the player, that's as just as bad.- Seems to be Jossed.
The Alphas and Betas are nightmares the Player has between Act 2 and Act 3
After finally escaping the basement for good, the game shows that the Player suffers enormous trauma from being kidnapped, seeing danger everywhere and having increasingly horrible nightmares about the Neighbor. The Alphas and Betas, instead of being retconned out of existence, actually happened - they're the nightmares the player has over the years that pass between Act 2 and Act 3, with the house slowly going from normal to completely nuts as the Player forgets more of what actually happened and his fears constantly get worse. The pre-Alphas are actually related to the lore of the story.
And the neighbour remembers them all. After each Alpha is made he takes the time to build more parts to his house, and he sometimes takes the opportunity to heavily downgrade the house of the player out of pure spite. The Shadow Man is Mephistopheles
Going off on Game Theory's theory on how the neighbor made a deal with the Devil and he's just trying to defend himself from the Devil coming to collect his due, and a video by Culture Shock which goes into more detail, explaining how it could be inspired by the version of Faust with Mephistopheles. And how the Neighbor seems to be defending himself against this Shadow Man. The Shadow Man's true name could be Mephistopheles.