WMG / Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion

aka: Spookys House Of Jumpscares

Spooky herself will be a threat at the end of the game.

So far, it's implied that Spooky isn't as cute and friendly as she looks. She shows a degree of callousness towards her researchers, clearly doesn't want you to succeed, and shows an Ax-Crazy bent in the minigames. It's also been hinted at with Specimen 11 that the researchers need people to die in the house. Perhaps once you're almost at the end it triggers a Villainous Breakdown, and Spooky goes after you personally. The knife seen in the "Mall of the Spook" minigame and a update image◊ may be Foreshadowing on how she kills you.

• Jossed, Spooky is not the Final Boss.
• Also, Spooky apparently does want you to succeed - she just wants it to mean something and benefit her. One way or another.
• How does one kill what's already dead?
  • We have a trope for that.

Spooky is either an anti-villain/anti-hero or Villain Protagonist.

As of the ending of the first game, before the sequels Karamari Hospital and Spooky's Dollhouse, Spooky becomes an ally to to the protagonist

Having died as a ghost and with the protagonist joined Spooky's army at the end of the first game, Spooky became an unlikely ally towards the player where they both explore deeper into the mansion and learn more about Spooky's backstory and clues to help Spooky escape to the afterlife and move on.

If there is a moral to this game, this game's message to people is, do not let people judge you based on who you are on the outside and never let people bring you down.

Spooky personally hates it when people call her a cute ghost. Also at the end of the game, she's confident about standing up for herself and standing up to people who have previously shunned her out in the world.

If there's a moral to the sequel game, The Dollhouse DLC, the message to the players is to know when to let go of your past and move on

The Golden Ending of the game reveals that Spooky is able to move on and reunite with her parents in the aftermath, letting go of her Dark and Troubled Past for good.

The Brain in a Jar in certain rooms...

Is actually Spooky herself. She's projecting herself through a Hologram.

• Jossed, Spooky really is a ghost. The brain has a different purpose however, which can be found out very late in the game.

One of the future specimens will be a Sea Monster.

Two of the themes on the OST are called "Something in the Water" and "Fried Calamari". Neither of them are currently connected to any area or specimen as of yet. A future update may add a waterlogged area, where a monster swims rapidly towards you. Based off one of the titles, it may even be a Giant Squid.

• Confirmed! But it's a Siren, not a squid.

The binary that flashes during Specimen 10's kill screen is the player character attempting to resist the parasitic infections.

The translation is "You are more than just an animal. Use the soul you've been given. And be responsible for your actions." This completely contradicts the rest of Specimen 10's kill screen ("Now you have nothing to fear. Now you have nothing to think. Follow your selfish desires. Follow your natural instinct. After all you're just an animal. It's much easier than trying to think"). It's entirely possible that this represents the protagonist's mind attempting to resist succumbing to Specimen 10, and failing.

• Alternatively, this could be the last fragment of your humanity left trapped within your mind. It's in binary because you can't understand what it's saying anymore

Specimen 8 and Specimen 11 are connected somehow.

Notice in Specimen 8's kill screen it mentions "a son who waits weeping" when one looks at Specimen 11 they can see that Specimen 11 is "crying" tears of blood as it chases you. Not only that, but both Specimen 8 and 11 are animal like demons (8 is a deer while 11 is a cow or an ox) and despite one would think, are intangible (As in, not affected by weapons and able to go through walls) Additionally, both have been implied to have a reason to hate humans (People hunting Specimen 8's "children" and 11 possibly being butchered for its meat) With this stuff in mind, there could be some kind of blood relation between 8 and 11.

• There's an objection: 11 does feel the axe, backing off for one room.

Alternatively: Tirsiak (Unknown Specimen 4) was created by / related to Deer Lord (Specimen 8), and the former is adorable and soft-spoken to lure in unsuspecting travellers to to their doom, similar to a Siren

Think about it, in a mansion full of murderous monsters, demons and ghosts, seeming a cute, anime-like girl with a gentle demeanour would easily put travellers in a false sense of safety. She's then lure them to a area with a pack of wolves, and have them devour them. Plus, she has Deer-like qualities, so they have to at least be related.

GL Labs is a subsidiary of the SCP Foundation

It's quite obvious, considering they name Specimens, and that they have a bizarre layout. The fact that the rooms have different entities. And several expunged details on CAT-DOS, means they must be a subsidiary of the SCP Foundation.

• It seems more likely they're connected to the Chaos Insurgency, given that they use and create SCPs for hostile purposes and work under the supervision of an SCP, something the Foundation would never do. The Insurgency is a rogue cell of the Foundation, so the similar layout makes sense.

Alternatively, GL Labs was the organization behind The Cabin in the Woods

There were children in Cabin in the Woods in a japanese school, who managed to defeat a schoolgirl similar to Specimen 4 by chanting. The fact that a lot of the enemies are a Eldritch Abominations Counts.

Spooky didn't actually plan for the protagonist to get crushed by the ceiling in one of the endings.

It was just an accident that she decided to take credit for.

A few of the note writers are part of Spooky's ghost army.

Seeing as quite a lot of them ended up tragically dying, this shouldn't be too far-fetched. The ones exempt from this are the Classroom notes, factory notes, restaurant notes (all are likely from before the mansion), and the Specimen 12 notes (seeing as the note-taker is implied to be the still living-but-possessed maniac). This pretty much leaves the Romantic victim, Trope guy, the workers in Spooky's labs, and the the dude from the forest.

• Confirmed in the case of the Romantic Victim with the July 4 update. A new set of notes details the fact that he's dead, and he doesn't realize it until Spooky takes away his pen and tells him to get back to work.

Specimen 12 is the man who shot Spooky.

Maybe after Spooky's death, she wanted to make the person who killed her suffer by turning him into a specimen.

• At least partially Jossed. Specimen 12 is the mansion itself. There's no proof that the current puppet of Specimen 12 is not the man who shot Spooky, but we know he's not the first or the only one, since he is implied to have killed the previous puppet only to be forced to take their place.
  • Fully Jossed by Dollhouse, as it's actually Spooky's Father

The Old Man is one of the Note writers.

Since Trope Guy and the Survival notes end without anything happening to them, either of them could have ended up being possessed by Specimen 12 and become the Old Man.

• It's heavily implied that the notes found in Specimen 12 are written by the Old Man before he was possessed. That pretty much rules out Trope Guy, since the notes in the mansion are not written in his style at all.

The rooms in endless mode are just the other thousands of rooms "seen" in Karamari Hospital.

During the intro sequence in the Karamari Hospital DLC, one may notice the room counter going up at insane speeds, eventually disappearing. These rooms might be other rooms, that you don't get to explore until you play endless. Additionally...

The Protagonist is not the same in endless mode.

Rather, they are someone else, going through many other possible rooms in the mansion. As stated in the above WMG, there are potentially thousands of other rooms in the mansion, so it's possible that many other people could be in the mansion at the same time.

Karamari Hospital takes place after the base game.

Spooky outright calls you a recruit in one scene of the DLC, which means she considers you on her side. This could apply to either ending.

• Ghost Ending: Spooky calls you a recruit in this ending, just like in the DLC. As for the ability to hold an axe or sword, a piece of official art shows Spooky herself holding a big knife. The reason you can die? You don't. Your soul just "wanders an endless maze" on the Game Over screen, and considering the occult, demonic properties of the hospital, it could be just as dangerous to wandering souls as it is to living bodies...
• Specimen Ending: The player is still wandering the mansion and can use the axe or sword against some of the monsters. Considering the New Game+ allows you to pick up the sword, and the Specimen Ending requires you to be aggressive towards the other specimens with the axe, the New Game+ could be post-Specimen Ending. Our violent specimen protagonist just wants to be more effective.
• A slight problem with the theory is that you start the DLC on Floor 995. This seems to imply you haven't fought Specimen 9 yet, and the endings couldn't have happened. Although we have seen there are other ways between floors than the elevators, and that room numbers don't have to only go up even for living guests; once the mansion's relationship with you is no longer about how many rooms you've passed through the room numbers could also have a more navigation-relevant meaning.

Spooky WAS aware of Karamari Hospital, but...

She literally forgot. If Monster 5's involvement with making all the hospital staff forget is true, then it could possibly mean that Spooky herself was affected by this power. After all, Spooky herself explicitly states that she forgot about the hospital's existence, and this could likely be literal.

• Considering that she's a ghost, this might be a small hint that she's starting to fade away/move on.

Spooky's Sword-Knife uses Soul-power to make the user more powerful, but requires a constant fuel to keep the user from becoming too weak to wield it

"Mall of Spook" requires you to constantly kill people to refill a "health bar", so it probably would be the case. She never uses it, however, as it would prevent her from having her ghost army.

Specimen 4 is genuinely trying to help you, in her own misguided way.

Think about it; when compared to the fates suffered at the hands of the other specimens(absorbed, torn apart, assimilated into an alien parasite, etc.), simply being swallowed whole sounds a lot more merciful. In addition, she doesn't speak aggressively during her chase, seeming rather motherly in tone, and her theme is a lot more melodic and somewhat less outright horrifying than the others. Could it be that she's trying to give us a safe haven from the other monsters and indeed Spooky, but doesn't realize humans aren't exactly stomach-proof and accidentally kills her 'victims'?

• Regardless of if you die or not from being eaten by Specimen 4, at least most Specimens just let you go in death. The implications of your soul being trapped in there for eternity isn't exactly the most keen fate for anyone.

Spooky and GL Labs have abducted hundreds of people.

Spooky seems to have died in The '60s. Unless the game is set in the future (which is not impossible, considering we know little of what goes on outside the mansion), that would mean only about 50-60 years have passed between her death and the game. Even assuming Spooky was immediately turned evil upon her reanimation, she must have spent many years founding or taking over GL Labs, building the hi-tech mansion base and acquiring the Specimen. Yet, their body count is in the hundreds. Makes sense for Specimen 11, as it can leave the mansion at will, but it's not the only one with an impressive amount of fatalities. There's no way these hundreds of people all just happened to wander into the mansion within a few dozen years.

This means that GL Labs has probably been kidnapping hundreds of people or acquiring them from human trafficking cartels, all to fulfill Spooky's sick fantasies.

• There's an oddity about the tech levels incorporated into the mansion; some of the most futuristic things appear to have been developed first. While there are other explanations, it's possible that the temporal interface between the mansion and the rest of reality is doing weird stuff, and that Spooky's actually had a very long time to operate. If the mansion's been in the real world for a few dozen years with a dozen or so manifestations in various places, and has been around for all those multiples of its timeline internally, that could account for the discrepancies (and better explain some of the mansion's acquisitions).

Endless Mode takes place in an alternate timeline where the player died and just doesn't realise it.

The player was killed by a Specimen and forgot. They continue to try and find a way out only to die again and again. "Your soul wanders an endless maze."

Ume Ito, from the mini game Sunshine Academy, is Spooky's original self.

She was a Japanese student who could speak very good English. Ume, however, always wanted to scare someone, so she put on makeup/an Expressive Mask and hair dye to resemble a ghost. She never successfully scared anyone, of course. One day, a transfer student from America came, and they bonded. A few days later, she attempted to scare him- not realizing he has PTSD (and may have transferred for reasons related to that). He shot her, then after realizing what he just did, broke down and began violating her, trying to convince himself that nothing's wrong, and just lost it. Ume was brought to Karamari Hospital in a vain attempt to save her. When that failed, her parents tried bringing her back via occult ritual- resulting in the Spooky we know now.

Ume's story can be found in the mini game Sunshine Academy. The first play through retells Ume's actual experience, while all subsequent playthroughs are What Could Have Been. The second ending, in which Ume survives by leaving the creepy protagonist, is Spooky imagining what could have happened if she'd been smarter. Ume's original body, meanwhile, was turned by Spooky and the researchers into the secret specimen Paina.

Spooky is a witch.

She did not die immediately, acccording to the DLC; Karamari Hospital is where her parents took her, where they did the occult ressurection ritual, and where her Soul Gem subsequently shattered. The Specimens are either her familiars or fellow witches. This is also why she has a picture of Kyubey in Specimen 4's area. Her wish to Kyubey was to finally scare someone. And she did, resulting in her death, because Bunnycat's a dick.

• And the Cat is an Incubator. Specifically, the one she made the contract with.

Endless Mode takes place after the Specimen Ending.

After killing Specimen 9 and being made into a new Specimen by Spooky, The Protagonist now wanders their new home, similar to Specimen 9, who didn't have a designated area either. This is why they have the axe at the start of the game, and why they're still prone to attacks from the other Specimens. Because The Protagonist's particular trait that qualifies them as a Specimen is their relentless, violent nature, the other Specimens are actually simply protecting themselves from you.

The Demon Girl in Katamari Hospital is the good part of Spooky.

This theory has probably been done before, but it's not on here. The Demon Girl sounds a lot like Spooky when you listen to her, and she seems much nicer. Either it's Spooky messing with us (which is much more possible than this troper would like) or it's a part of Spooky that got split off from her when she was resurrected. As the notes in the Hospital suggest, Spooky's father tried to resurrect his daughter through occult rituals. But something went horribly wrong. And thus, his daughter was split into two spirits; the innocent and shy Demon Girl, and the psychopathic and narcissistic Spooky.

Spooky's Dad just wanted to say goodbye.

His own notes say as much and to accomplish that he performed a ritual that ripped his daughter back out of the afterlife. The idea was simply to summon her so that her parents could say goodbye one last time but they didn't really comprehend the forces they were tampering with. Her father poorly copied rituals without doing background research, like someone assembling a computer purely by instruction without actually understanding why the parts are assembled the way they are. Either by selecting the wrong ritual or substituting ingredients he managed to screw it up very badly and instead of simply summoning her he literally pulled her soul out of wherever it went leaving a hole in the wall between the mortal world and the hereafter. Spooky found herself barred from the afterlife and unable to find anyone who would take her seriously which combined with the emotional trauma of being pulled back to the living world lead to her monstrous behavior. The Hospital staff were exposed to whatever managed to find its way in from the hole left behind resulting in possessions and mutilations.

• Sorta confirmed, as one of the notes in Karamari Hospital says "I will turn [the device]^note referring to a machine he planned to use to tether Spooky to the earth off and let you return to heaven after your mother and I get to see you again." While he may have had other things to say to her, his goodbyes were not out of the question

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