Nell Crain

The first night after moving to the Hill House, she awakens to find the "Bent-Neck Lady" standing over her bed. The next night, Eleanor sleeps on the couch to avoid the Bent-Neck Lady. Her mother hands Eleanor a locket which she promises to give her when she is older. She falls asleep on the couch with her mother beside her. When her mother wakes up and finds that she's asleep, she leaves. When Eleanor wakes up later in the night, she finds the Bent-Neck Lady floating above her and that she's unable to move. In 1992, she leaves Hill House with her siblings and father.[2] As an adult, she tells about her past to a sleep technologist, Arthur Vance, who explains that she suffers from sleep paralysis. He asks her for coffee and they begin dating. He proposes to her during a New Year's party, and they later move to Los Angeles together when he is offered a teaching position at UCLA. In Los Angeles, 8 months later, Arthur dies of an aneurysm. Right after he dies, she sees the Bent-Neck Lady. This makes her think the Bent-Neck Lady killed Arthur. Nellie picks up Luke. He asks her to pick up heroin for him, saying he needs to "Get well" one last time before going to rehab. She agrees and buys some for him from a dealer off the street. He shoots up in his foot, and she sees the Bent-Neck Lady. She drops him off at the center. She goes through withdrawal along with her brother, via "the twin thing". A month later, she throws her pills out. She tells Theodora Crain about buying heroin for her brother, and Theo reprimands her. Eleanor asks that she touch spots in her room to see if she could sense anything about Arthur's death, which makes Theo mad. Eleanor calls Theo a freeloader and she leaves. She goes Steven and confronts him, accusing him of not being the protective older brother he should be to her. He pulls her aside and accuses her of not taking her pills. She confesses her problems to her therapist, who tells her she needs to confront her past. He suggests that she returns to Hill House as a means of remedying her unresolved childhood trauma, proposing that once she sees how harmless the house is she'll be able to let go of her issues. In Massachusetts, she returns to the house and envisions it as it was when she was a child. She reunites with visions of her mother, siblings, and husband, who she dances around the house with. Eventually the visions fade away and she is left with the ghost of her mother, who convinces her to put a noose around her neck and pushes her off the stairwell, resulting in Eleanor's death. Her neck broken by the fall, she realizes that she is the Bent-Neck Lady.