I really enjoyed this mini series. The most fun thing about it to me was trying to piece together the history of the house from the tidbits we were given episode by episode. With that in mind here are some thoughts about the history of Hill House and how it went down.

SPOILERS (obvs)

At first we had the Hill family, who made all their money in bootlegging and then at some point the patriarch of the family died leaving his wife Hazel and son Walter with the house. Walter went crazy (more than likely caused by the house) and was institutionalized where he met Poppy (a special kind of crazy that turned malignant). Poppy and Walter had a son and a daughter. The story told by Poppy suggested that the daughter died of some respiratory ailment and the son of what sounded like some form of muscular dystrophy  (or they could have been ill and Poppy killed both of them which isn’t completely out of the question). Walter went crazier and walled himself in the basement after the death of the children and if I had to bet at that point Poppy killed herself. Hazel died of old age-itus and that was it for the Hills.

If Poppy killed both her kids and then herself there is a very good chance Walter saw all of it go down but for some reason felt he couldn’t do anything about it (from Poppy’s story – he found himself walled in with the sisters – shame and guilt) and it made him feel small. Which is why ghost Walter is so freakishly tall.

Poppy, dead and alive, was an awful type of evil, I think ghost Walter really is just curious about the living residents of the house, and dead Hazel seems down right helpful. We see ghost Hazel meeting the dead little girl in a ghost form that approximated her living form at the end for example.

As a side note, Hazel might have gone through a spiritualism phase where she was trying to talk to her deceased husband. There was a brief throw off line about the ouija boards etc. that were discovered in the drawing room. That may have been some more of Poppy’s crazy though. That one’s hard to guess. But there was a point of time where the dead weren’t quite as chatty in the house it seems.

Going by the number of ghosts standing behind Steven when he leaves the house as an adult, and counting the clock repair ghost there is a sense there were additional deaths at the House. Workers dying in “accidents”, kids in the community being drawn to and consumed by the house and so on.

As for the house itself it sounds like it was sort of a 1408/unhallowed ground sort of thing. It was just a bad place that gave birth to a bad building. Anything more than that didn’t really feel necessary to me.