The Ending of The Haunting of Bly Manor, Explained
Throughout its nine-episode season, The Haunting of Bly Manor teased audiences with a mysterious narrator: an older woman attending a wedding, and regaling guests with the ghost story that is Bly Manor. And in its finale, the show finally revealed who she was.
It was Jamie, the estate's groundskeeper (and Dani's eventual wife) telling a grown-up Flora, on the eve of her nuptials, about the terrifying things she'd experienced in her childhood and long since forgotten—all in the guise of a spooky tale. Others in attendance, of course, knew well that Jamie was telling a true story, including (aged-up) Owen and Henry Wingrave.
But the twists don't end there. The show closes on a bittersweet scene of Jamie in her hotel room, filling the bathtub with water in the hopes of seeing Dani, her long-lost Lady in the Lake, in her reflection, and leaving the door open, should her ghost wife finally return after all these years. And just when she settles in to sleep, a hand appears on her shoulder.
Dani, is that you?
Victoria Pedretti, the actress behind Bly Manor's hopelessly American nanny, told Town & Country that she doesn't think it's really her character caressing Jamie. "I don’t think it’s her actual hand," she said. "But I think it’s her presence. I think it’s her love. I think it’s her devotion."
In other words, we should presume that Dani is, indeed, still lying at the bottom of Bly Manor's pond, having taken the place of the once-murderous Lady in the Lake.
Pedretti adds that though Dani had to confront two specters—the image of her ex-fiancé, and the Lady in the Lake—she had to take a very different approach to defeating the latter. In the case of her fiancé, "There’s this moment in her where she has to confront it," Pedretti says, explaining that this specific "ghost" is a manifestation of Dani's guilt. "It’s just, 'This guilt is not serving me. It’s just fucking up my life. And I am a good person.' She actually confronts it and deals with it."
It's not so simple with the Lady in the Lake, who is an actual paranormal being, rather than what seems to be a psychological phenomenon. "She ends up having to take on the burden of this creature’s rage in order to free everyone else. She has to make a sacrifice in order to protect the children, so she accepts the ghost’s soul into her being... And then one of her eyes is a different color," Pedretti laughs.
Well, that's one mystery solved—only about a million hidden ghosts and references left.
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