Netflix: The Haunting of Hill House episode 9 (Screaming Meemies) recap

— Courtesy of Netflix

Finally! We finally get to see what happened to Olivia on the Crain family’s last night at Hill House. But, oh, readers…it’s not a happy tale.

Olivia is lying on the couch, a sleeping twin on each side of her. Hugh wakes her up, and she says she wishes she keep her little ones like this forever.

Claire Dudley is cleaning up the broken window debris caused by the storm, and tells Olivia that she and Mr. D must have slept through the storm. She says her daughter is terrified of storms, and Olivia tells a story about her childhood.

Her father died in a car accident, and she couldn’t cry. One night, she was sitting in her Dad’s recliner when it hit her, and she started crying. She started hearing rain on the windows, and as she cried harder, it sounded as if the rain turned to hail. A window upstairs broke, and when she looked, she saw that it wasn’t hail, it was raining rocks.

Olivia says it has happened before in other places, and Claire says it happened in Revelations as well.  Olivia says she felt responsible, “when Daddy died, I made it rain rocks.”

Courtesy of Netflix

Olivia’s in her reading room, drinking tea when a headache comes on. She walks out of the room, past the clock repair man (who we now know is not really there). She walks in on Shirl and Luke arguing, Luke wants some of her clothes to give to his friend Abigail. Olivia doesn’t really pay attention, and mentions going to her reading room. Luke asks which room is the reading room.

As Olivia walks through the doorway, she’s suddenly standing in what we know to be the morgue. Adult Nell is lying dead on the steel table, and adult Luke is lying on the floor, dead, a needle in his arm. Nell sits up, and tries to speak to the horrified Olivia, but her mouth is sewn shut. She cuts the sutures, looks at Olivia with an anguished face, and says one word: “Mommy” (and my hearts breaks a little more).

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Olivia comes to back at Hill House. When she tells Hugh what happened, she says she knows it was the twins that she saw. Hugh insists it was a dream, and she says her dreams feel real.

Olivia wakes in the night, and sees a female ghost, who tells her to “Come on, shake a leg,” and they go into the reading room. The ghost is Poppy Hill, who says this was her dressing room originally, then a nursery, and points to where the crib was. Olivia asks if this is a dream, and Poppy says, “You’re a dream, and so am I.”

Poppy tells her that it broke her to see the crib empty, but you can’t keep your children safe forever. She says there is nothing worse than losing a child. Olivia says she dreamed Nell died, and Poppy says she dreamed her little boy’s legs stopped working, and he cried and banged on the walls, then died. She said it was the worst kind of dream, a “screaming meemie.”

As Olivia and Poppy stand in the twins’ room watching them sleep, she tells Olivia, “I bet you’d do anything for them.”

Poppy asks what Olivia would do if the twins were having a bad dream. She suggests waking them up. “I have a secret to wake ‘em up if they get stuck in that dream.” She whispers in Olivia’s ear, and Olivia wakes up, straddling Hugh with a screwdriver to his neck, as in the earlier episode. She agrees to visit her sister to get away.