Haunting of Hill House is haunted by details, and I think a huge overlooked statement was how the Crain females had gifts and or were sensitive. Some of them are blatantly obvious like Theo but others are more subtle and confusing/more complicated than others.

I will be only addressing Olivia and Nell’s gifts, as Theo is the most noticeable and Shirley is much different, seemingly taking on her father’s fixation of fixing problems and the broken.

The house goes out of its way to try and dull these gifts, with either using the gifts against them or suppress them by any means necessary like fear and delusion for their own selfish gain, like the kittens and Shirley’s obsession on fixing stuff.

Without further ado. Olivia: Her gift is concerned of deja-vus, since she sees these predictions as visions/flashbacks/day dreams of future events, and she sees the future through these indistinct images.

The house, as wicked and deceptive as it is, twists this power and force Olivia to see nitpicked pictures. Moreover, the house shows her depictions of the twins’ inevitable death and corpses when they go into the world, to pursue her goal of “awakening them” and keeping them safe

No wonder she was the first to feel the full swoop of the house’s evil, she is an adult Crain with developed, unknown powers, she was easy prey.

Moving on to Nell, who has the strongest and yet the most tragic gift. Nell’s gift is clarity. After she fist set foot into the house, she claimed the house was loud (crowded with ghosts and dead people) before anything started to happen.

In her letters to Santa, she was able to dictate all the things her siblings needed, even the stuff her parents were not aware of. So the house deems this power as dangerous, and once again uses her gift to try and break her.

In HH, death and clarity are integrated. Nell’s death was the biggest moment of clarity for her, “waking up” as her mom phrases it. she became aware throughout time. As a ghost, she obtains otherwise unattainable knowledge. While this was her saving grace, it was also her doom.

Since death and clarity are tightly connected, the house uses the personification of her death, the bent neck lady, to dull her clarity and suppress it to keep her quiet while it digests them, haunting her with her own death.

After the the tape rolls, she finally discovers the extent of her gift, kicking the insides of the house and saving her siblings and fighting off their mother, and ended being the hero of a horrific tale.

There are also more to the Crain gifts, as Steven was the only one who infiltrated and joined a red room that wasn’t his, the tree house, and Luke’s “twin thing” implying the gifts aren’t exclusive to the females, but I’m too lazy to explore them all in this thread :P

End.