12 Questions I Still Have After Binge-Watching 'The Haunting Of Hill House'

Where exactly was the red room?!

1. Who is the clock repair ghost?

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We see the clock-repair man who didn't exist, so we know he's a ghost. But why was he there? What did he represent? Was it just so that Steven would recognize that he'd been seeing the ghosts all along? Was it to prove that the 'witness marks' left on clocks were some kind of metaphor for the marks the house left on the family? Who was he?!

2. Did Olivia actually kill Abigail?

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When Olivia made her rat poison tea, was it the ghost of Abigail who drank it? Or was this Abigail an actual person who was just killed during the world's creepiest sleep over?

3. What exactly is a 'screeming meemie'?

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Poppy's terrifying flapper ghost refers to the terrible bad dreams in episode 9 as 'screeming meemies' (which is also the name of the episode) which I assumed was a term for nightmares or scary dreams from the 1920's when she would've still been alive. Turns out it is a real phrase and it refers to a nervous hysteria.

4. Did Steven actually unplug the fan?

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After Hugh stuck his hand in the fan while trying to fix it and it sliced him up, he yells at Steven who insists (and not in the way kids normally do to get out of trouble) that he did unplug the fan. Obviously, with the things these Hill House ghosts are capable of, plugging in a fan to hurt Hugh wouldn't be out of their reach. So did Steven mess up? Or was he telling the truth, and it was really one of the ghosts who mysteriously plugged the fan back in?

5. What happened to Shirley's kittens?

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Those little kittens looked perfectly non-possessed when Shirley found them, so was it natural causes that killed them or was it something to do with the house?

6. Did young Nell recognize that she was the 'bent neck lady'?

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We didn't really get a good look at bent neck lady ourselves enough to notice it was Nell until right before she died. But then we see that it was grown-up Nell all along. Did little Nell recognize that she was bent neck lady back then?

7. Who was the ghost in the bowler hat?

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We find out that Nell was the bent neck lady, that Poppy Hill was the flapper ghost and that the old lady in the bedroom was her mother. But who was the ghost with the bowler hat and the cane that haunted Luke his whole life? Was it the ghost of William Hill, who bricked himself into the basement? Or was the ghost of William Hill the one who went after young Luke when he went down in the dumbwaiter?

8. Was Hill House a maze?

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In the opening credits, there is an image of a maze within a house, and when Olivia draws the new master blueprint and copies that shape over and over, the blueprint ends up looking like a maze. We find out that the Red Room sort of changed itself into a different room for each member of the family, but where was it? How didn't they notice that it was always the weird room at the top of the giant spiral staircase?

9. Where was Nell during the storm?

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In episode 6 "Two Storms", Hugh and Olivia have the children wait downstairs in the entryway and Nell wanders off and goes missing. They search the entire house for her, and when they eventually find her back down in the entryway Nell insists that she was standing there the whole time and none of them could see her. So was she there? Was this foreshadowing that she would eventually be a ghost and no-one would see her? Or was she just stuck somewhere else in the house in some sort of a daze?

10. Why was the House seemingly more interested in Nell than the other kids?

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Though we can be pretty sure the house was set on destroying the entire family (Hugh refers to them all as 'an unfinished meal for the house'), it seems that in the flashbacks and the present day, it is more focused on Nell than any of the other kids. When they're grown ups, she is the only one (other than Luke) who still sees the ghosts on a regular basis. Why is she being more deeply haunted than the others? Was there some special reason that the house wanted her dead?

11. Why did all of the kids hear dogs outside?

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Early in the season it was revealed that all of the children would hear barking and howling dogs outside every night, but the Dudley's insist that there are and never were any dogs on the property. Were the Dudley's lying? Were there actually dogs out there? Or were the kids hearing something that didn't exist?

12. Who/What put the buttons on Nell's eyes during the storm?

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The rest of the family was together the whole time, so was it Nell herself who did it to send her family a message? Or was it Olivia? Or was it possibly one of the other ghosts trying to warn the rest of the family that they were to blame?