This article contains spoilers for The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Mike Flanagan's Haunting series for Netflix may only be in its second season, but there's a pattern emerging. The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor clock in at nine and ten episodes long, respectively, but each season hits an emotional peak with its fifth episode. Sure, they're only the halfway point, but Episodes Five are the stunners, the ones that find the show operating at the peak of its spooky, emotional powers. In Hill House, Episode Five revealed the heartbreaking origins of the Bent-Neck Lady, the ghost who's haunted Crain family youngest Nell since childhood. In "The Altar of the Dead," the fifth episode of Bly Manor, we learn a tragic secret about housekeeper Hannah Grose, who's played to perfection by actress T'Nia Miller.

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The episode finds Hannah jumping between memories and visions of the past.

The episode features a dreamlike structure in which Hannah enters scene after scene from her memories and the lives of others at Bly Manor. But here's a general timeline: Hannah Grose was married and working as housekeeper at the Wingrave family's Bly Estate. After discovering that her husband was cheating (that's what caused her to let out those pained shrieks in the front garden), Hannah moves into the house full-time. Sometime later, her employers Charlotte and Dominic Wingrave die, and the home passes into the hands of Dominic's brother, Henry. Hannah and governess Rebecca Jessel become the kids' caretakers while Henry lives in London.

Hannah is fond of lighting candles for the dead in Bly’s chapel—but doesn’t yet know that she’s one of them.

Hannah is committed to her work and deeply loyal to her employers, and the episode reveals that she watched the romance between Rebecca and the Wingraves' valet Peter Quint with trepidation. She doesn't trust Quint and is scared of him, especially after catching him attempting to steal jewelry from the house after the Wingraves' death.

And it reveals one major—and tragic–twist.

In present-day Bly, where Dani is the governess after Rebecca's death by suicide and Quint's disappearance, Hannah hasn't been entirely herself. Throughout the early episodes, she pointedly never eats or drinks, while Owen, Jamie, Dani, and the kids all do. She's also distractible, and prone to looking off into the distance as if in a trance. Hannah also frequently touches a spot on the back of her head, and sees the same image of cracks in walls over and over.

Episode Five reveals the tragic explanation behind all this. Hannah is dead, pushed down a well on the property by little Miles. But the boy isn't truly to blame—he was possessed by the spirit of Peter Quint after his murder by Bly's most menacing spirit, the Lady in the Lake. Unable or unwilling to accept the fact of her death, Hannah's spirit has carried on as if she's still alive. She keeps on doing her job, remains visible to everyone at Bly, and even manifests different outfits and earrings, unable to accept that the crack she's seeing everywhere is actually in the well's wall, and was the last thing she saw before she died.

When Hannah catches Miles smoking, she thinks he’s emulating Peter Quint, but the boy’s actually possessed by the valet’s spirit.

The episode offers a glimpse at how Hannah managed to remain corporeal while Rebecca and Peter are more like your classic, intangible spirits. Immediately after being strangled to death by the Lady in the Lake, Peter's ghost appears to Flora and Miles for the first time. He's unaware of what just happened to him, and when Flora hands him the doll she made based on the Lady in the Lake, he's able to hold it. When Flora asks him if he remembers what just happened, the doll drops to the ground, and he's unable to pick it up for a moment. According to the rules of Bly's ghosts, spirits who don't know they're dead are able to keep a much firmer grasp on the real world that ghosts who do.

Throughout the episode, Hannah returns again and again to her memory of first meeting Owen when she interviewed him for the chef job. It's clearly a comforting memory, as she fell in love with Owen over their years of working together. It's a vision that makes her feel good, but, as Hannah told Rebecca in warning her to stay away from Peter, "There's a difference between feeling good and feeling alive." Hannah is far from alive—she's at the bottom of a well, with her eyes gazing emptily at a crack in the wall. She doesn't realize that she's dead until Episode Seven, when Miles, once again possessed by Quint, forces her to look into the well and see her own dead body.

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