Family & Grief
The Haunting of Hill House
The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix) begins on “the last night,” when Hugh Crain gathered up his five children in the middle of the night, bundled them in the car, and drove them to a hotel, ignoring their questions about where Mommy was.
Instead of remaining with his children at the hotel, he leaves, telling Steven, the oldest, to take care of his siblings while he goes back for Mommy. When Hugh comes back the following morning, only Nell, the youngest, is awake. She asks her father what is all over his shirt. “Just paint, honey.”
As we come to find out, it’s not paint at all, and there are some serious questions about what really happened to Mommy and what Hugh knows about it.
The limited series captures not only a ghost story, but the underlying horror we all feel at a number of things: dying, mental illness, losing someone we love.
The mystery of Hill House is just the backdrop the wreckage that has befallen the Crain family since that night in 1992.
No one knows what happened to Oli…