My Own Experience with The Bent-Neck Lady
Written by Alysha Prasad
TW: Mentions of suicide and self-harm
I used to see myself die every day. I’m currently 23 years old, and I’ve been battling with depression and anxiety for years, but I was at my lowest point when I was around 15 years old. At that point in my life, I could barely get out of bed, and whenever I did, it didn’t even feel like the small victory that I recognise it to be today. I was self-harming, not eating very much, and isolating myself from my friends and family. Because of this, I thought about death a lot. I imagined what it would be like to no longer exist, and I would picture myself dying. I even wrote a note, one I kept under my mattress in wait, just in case, as I watched myself die over and over again in my mind’s eye. In this way, I could relate to Nellie Crain from The Haunting of Hill House, who was plagued by the dark shadow of The Bent-Neck Lady from her childhood, but what she didn’t understand until later on, was that she was seeing her own death play out.
In one scene, The Bent-Neck Lady lets out a blood-curdling scream upon seeing young Nellie staring at her from the comfort of her bed. Such a display scares Nellie so much that she runs to seek solace in her parents’ arms. We initially think that The Bent-Neck Lady was screaming in order to instill fear in Nellie, but we come to find out later in the series that she is Nellie and was instead screaming out of her own disbelief as she looked upon herself and saw an innocent child who was destined for so much suffering.“No, no, no, no,” The Bent-Neck Lady whispers to her younger self, wanting so badly for this to not be true. Nellie, with a noose tied around her neck, watches her life play out in front of her and we suddenly understand that no matter what avenues she tried to go down in order to change her cursed fate, she would always end up here. Nellie didn’t want to die, but her demons took her in the end all the same, just like her mother.
When I first saw The Haunting of Hill House, it was The Bent-Neck Lady that scared me the most, and I found myself thinking about why, which seems silly. It’s a horror series, of course there will be terrifying imagery in there meant to scare its viewers, and this is an aspect of the show that struck a chord with a lot of people, not just me. But this felt different somehow, and it wasn’t until now, as I write this very personal article, that I realised why that was: the same ghosts that surrounded Nellie Crain were the same ones that seem to follow me. In a way.
The specter in Nellie’s life can be compared to what it feels like to live with clinical depression. The story of Nellie Crain is a tragic one: she starts seeing The Bent-Neck Lady when she’s only six years old, and because of the events leading up to her mother’s ultimate demise, she and her twin brother, Luke, are the ones most affected by the trauma that took place while they were living within the treacherous Hill House. She tries to get help later in life, but no one will take her seriously, because who would listen to a grown woman cry out for help when the thing that she claims is hurting her is an old house that stands alone and abandoned like a skeleton out in the woods? Even her desperate attempt to connect with her family, calling out to them when she needs help the most, is eventually ignored because there’s only so much they can take.
As someone who has had mental health issues for so long, I understand what it’s like to deal with it, but I’ll never truly understand the effects it had on the people I love, who had to watch me wither away into a shell of my former self for so many years. Something this show does extremely well is showing the other side of mental health and how it plagues not only the person suffering from it, but also those around that person. It pains and scares and confuses them, and sometimes people have to pull away for their own self-preservation, much like Nellie’s siblings, who desperately want to help her and who have helped her in the past, but are dealing with their own personal demons from Hill House.
We see in the fifth episode of The Haunting of Hill house what Nellie’s life could have been. We see beautiful moments strung together like bright lights that beat back the darkness of her past. We watch her meet the love of her life and fall in love with him, we watch her get married, all without even seeing a glimpse of the horrid Bent-Neck Lady.
Now, I’m about seven years clean from self-harm and have since sought professional help for my mental health issues, and my demons don’t hang around as much as they used to. I no longer lay awake in the middle of the night and stare up at the ceiling, much like Nellie did when she lay frozen as The Bent-Neck Lady was suspended in the air above her, dark hair almost grazing her face. Too close for comfort. But I know that they will always be there, in my peripheral vision, and this is something that I still haven’t fully come to terms with if I’m being honest. Knowing there will always be those lingering shadows taunting me is hard to swallow at times, especially when I get to another really low point. I’m still here though, I’m alive, and I’ve experienced so many beautiful moments that I never could have if my life had ended when I was only 15. But the thing about depression is that there’s no permanent fix, there’s no exorcism that can fully free you, and sometimes it feels like when The Bent-Neck Lady finally makes a resurgence in Nellie’s life after she hadn’t seen her for so long.
I admire Nellie Crain as a strong, complex character with all my heart, and it’s kind of strange to admit that a show that is so scary at times has become one of my all time favorite comfort shows, but it has. And part of this is because of Nellie; I can see myself in her, although the Crain family is dealing with demons that are supernatural in nature, and I’m dealing with ones that are more like projections of my own mental state. She is a flawed character, and she was haunted up until the very end, but aren’t we all in some way? I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to properly express how much this show has meant to me, but it feels so healing every time I finish it. Just as Nellie said the last time she saw her family, “you have to live.” Those four words have rung in my ears again and again, long after the show ended, and it’s something I will keep repeating to myself during times when I can’t leave my bed. Like everyone else, I have my good days and I have my bad days, but this show has reminded me of just how beautiful life can be, and how choosing to live can be one of the hardest decisions to make, but it’s the right one. Because there’s good out there in the world once you step out of the dark that tries so hard to swallow you whole. And the rest is just confetti.
