The Haunting of Hill House was genuinely terrifying, but spiritual follow-up The Haunting of Bly
Manor is a slower-but-still-spooky burn, with some major twists. So here's what you need
to know about what actually happened. This is the ending of The Haunting of Bly Manor,
explained.
In the second-to-last episode of The Haunting of Bly Manor, we finally learn the truth about
the Lady of the Lake. In a black and white flashback set in 1676, we learn that a widower
the narrator calls "Mr. Willoughby" lived in Bly Manor with his two daughters, Perdita
and Viola. If the name Viola looks familiar, it's the name Flora was etching on the chapel
floor in Episode 4. After the widower dies, the daughters are at risk of losing the estate
and their financial inheritance.
“Women in that time had nothing. No present, no future, without a tie to a man."
The women have to pick a suitor, but they decide that Bly Manor must stay in the family,
so Viola invites a distant wealthy cousin named Arthur to the estate. Viola is out when
Arthur arrives, so Perdita takes it upon herself to make him feel welcome - and quickly falls
for him.
But once Viola makes her dramatic return home, everything changes. She had already decided
that Arthur would be hers, not Perdita's, and that they'd marry to save the estate.
Perdita, knowing what's at stake, accepts this, keeping her love for Arthur a secret.
Viola and Arthur have a daughter named Isabel, and the household is happy for a time, but
Viola then falls deathly ill with a disease a local plague doctor refers to as "The Lung."
"It is not the plague."
"Oh thank God."
"But it is not good news. She has The Lung."
After a series of failed treatments, a vicar visits to read from the Book of John as a
rite meant to ease Viola's journey into the afterlife. The vicar asks her to repeat the
rite, but Viola refuses, denouncing God in the process, a decision Perdita supports.
"Just tell your god that I do not go."
Viola somehow wills herself to survive, despite her severe illness, growing increasingly miserable
and increasingly jealous over the years of her healthy sister Perdita's friendship with
her husband Arthur. One night, with Arthur away on business, Perdita, no longer able
to bear the burden of caring for her sister after six grueling years, decides to put an
end to her suffering, covering Viola's mouth until she stops breathing.
After a period of grieving, Arthur marries Perdita, but they find themselves in a difficult
financial situation, which puts a strain on their marriage. Before she was killed, Viola
left her finest gowns and jewels in a trunk for Isabel to remember her by, and made Arthur
promise not to give the key to the trunk to anyone but Isabel. Desperate to fix their
money problems, Perdita, on the six year anniversary of her sister's death in 1686, decides to
go behind her husband's back and opens the trunk holding Viola's riches.
When Perdita opens the trunk, Viola's spirit kills her. It's then revealed that after Viola's
death, her spirit was trapped in a kind of purgatory. She's stuck in her room, filled
with her fancy belongings, but all she can do is sleep and pace the floor. The narrator
reveals that this purgatory is just a "construct," and Viola's spirit is in fact trapped inside
the trunk, waiting for Isabel to one day open it up. Perdita opens it first, and Viola gets
her revenge, before returning to her purgatory to sleep.
As Arthur and Isabel are leaving the manor, Arthur decides to throw the trunk in the lake
on the grounds so his daughter won't suffer the same fate as Perdita. Viola is heartbroken,
but, in a callback to her refusing to succumb to her disease, she determines to escape the
trunk.
"With every ounce of her considerable will, as when she was sick, and against all probability,
Viola would not go."
At night, a now-free Viola leaves the lake and walks to the manor, regularly visiting
her old home in search of Isabel, over and over, killing anyone who gets in her way.
The manor is eventually used to quarantine those with the plague, leaving many potential
victims at Viola's disposal. Anyone who dies on the manor's grounds is left in purgatory,
a "strange phenomenon" that begins when Viola kills the plague doctor. Over time, Viola
and her victims' memories begin to fade - and so do their faces.
One such victim is a faceless boy - the same boy we see Flora interact with in Episode
6. We also learn that Perdita is the faceless woman trapped in the attic, with no memory
of who she was or how she died, per the narrator. Viola suffers the same fate for centuries,
endlessly searching the house at night for Isabel, but not knowing why.
In the final episode of the series, back in 1987, The Lady of the Lake, who we now know
is Viola, attempts to drag Dani the au pair into the lake. Hannah, the housekeeper and
a Bly Manor spirit, urges Viola to let Dani go, to no avail. But once Viola finds Flora,
she experiences faint memories of her daughter. Flora pleads with her to let Dani go - and
Viola takes Flora instead and heads to the lake, believing she's Isabel.
Uncle Henry, who we now know is actually Flora's father, arrives at the manor and distracts
Viola for a bit, before getting choked and briefly dying, appearing as a spirit. He is
later saved via CPR by Owen the cook, who arrived with Jamie the gardener, Dani's love
interest, after they both dreamt that the inhabitants of Bly Manor were in danger.
Meanwhile at the lake, the spirit of Rebecca, the children's former au pair, has Flora recite
"It's you, it's me, it's us," and promises to feel her pain for her by inhabiting her
body and "tucking her away" into a memory. This is a technique another Bly Manor spirit,
Rebecca's lover Peter Quint, developed in an attempt to fully possess the children and
escape the fading memories and face-fading fate of the other spirits at Bly. This also
happens to be the same phrase Viola once uttered to baby Isabel.
"It is you. It is me. It is us."
According to the narrator, Dani, without understanding what she's really saying, feels compelled
to say the same phrase she heard the children recite with Peter and Rebecca, in an attempt
to save Flora, who is safely "dream-hopping" as Viola walks her into the water.
Dani's gambit works, and Viola's curse on Bly Manor is finally lifted. Peter no longer
inhabits Miles, and Rebecca no longer inhabits Flora. The rest of the spirits are also set
free - including Hannah. However, per the narrator, a part of Viola is now trapped inside
Dani, since Dani "invited" her in. We even see one of Dani's eyes change from brown to
blue to signal the possession - the same thing that happened to Miles when he "invited" Peter
in.
After the children move out of the manor with Henry to find a new home in the United States,
Dani and Jamie leave the manor, too. While preparing to move out, Dani tells Jamie that
she can feel Viola watching her; she predicts that one day, Viola will take her. But Jamie
decides to take an optimistic approach, telling Dani that she'll stick with her until the
fate she fears eventually comes to pass.
The couple moves in together, spending years blissfully in love and opening their own flower
shop in Vermont. But over time, Dani begins seeing Viola's reflection. And at first, she
keeps it hidden from Jamie, but knowing that she only has a little time left, she decides
to give her a promise ring. At this point in the story it's the '90s, so they can't
legally marry; instead, the ring symbolizes that Dani is ready to spend the rest of her
life with Jamie - no matter how soon that life may end.
After seeing Viola's reflection in a pitcher of water and then once more while washing
dishes at home, Dani finally tells Jamie that she feels her time to become the Lady of the
Lake is coming. At one point, Viola's presence becomes even stronger, with Dani feeling possessed
by her to the point where she almost kills Jamie by pulling Viola's signature move and
strangling her. Knowing Jamie's life is now at risk, Dani travels to Bly Manor, where
she allows herself to become the new Lady of the Lake.
When Jamie realizes what's happening, she tries to stop Dani, but it's too late. The
magic phrase doesn't work this time, because now Dani is officially the Lady of the Lake,
and she doesn't want Jamie to sacrifice herself for her - nor does she want to claim any new
victims. Though Jamie is unable to reunite with Dani, she keeps an optimistic outlook,
always trying to catch Dani's reflection in the water, hopeful for a reunion.
Of course, it's not a Haunting story without a big twist - but this time, it's a very sweet
one. The Haunting of Bly Manor begins with the narrator telling her story to a couple
and the attendees of their wedding rehearsal dinner in 2007. The narrator gets very emotional
at the end and hints that she's speaking from personal experience, despite telling the story
in third person. After the narrator finishes, the bride-to-be tells her that she thought
her story was made up because it was too much of a coincidence that her own middle name
happens to be Flora.
At the wedding reception the next day, it's finally revealed that the narrator is actually
Jamie, and the bride is, in fact, Flora. She looks at Henry and Flora dancing and imagines
them as their younger selves, and we then see a shot of young Jamie. She also spots
Miles and Owen together and raises her glass at them.
So why didn't Flora and Miles recognize themselves from the story? Well, before Dani took up
residence at the bottom of the lake, she and Jamie learned from Owen, who is now a chef
in Paris, that Flora and Miles have no memories of their time at Bly. Another interpretation
is that Jamie's story is just a story, an allegory about depression, loss, and memory,
and Bly Manor never really existed, or it did, just without all the ghosts.
"I expect if you were to fly to England, you would find no such place by that name."
Once Jamie is back in her hotel room, she follows her routine of drawing a bath and
leaving water in the sink, hoping that Dani's reflection will appear. She also leaves her
hotel room door ajar in case her past love returns. As she falls asleep in front of the
door, we see Dani's hand on Jamie's shoulder, wearing the ring. It's an unexplained moment,
and it could be a dream, or the show's creators adding yet another layer of ambiguity, in
a nod to the famously ambiguous ending of the book it was largely based on. Or perhaps
love just finds a way.
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