tw: parental death, suicide, drug abuse, supernatural occurrences
the ramsey's should have never moved to constance county. they'd be two more in numbers and could have saved themselves a world of grief. alas, the ramsey family nestled their roots in the pines of lake lenape and settled down with their five children. maura and nicholas ramsey were architects, a duo that bought broken down houses that still held onto an ounce of charm and breathed new life into these homes with stories to tell. they bought hillcrest manor` with the intentions of flipping the property, but wound up nesting instead.
there isn't a happy ending to this story. they're not your average quirky, large family. the ramsey's have a troubled history, one that's taken more from them than it's given. if you ask meredith, it's the house — the house has a mind of it's own, a life to itself, and it's the core to all of their misfortune. she's reluctant to admit it, but she's always believed her sibling, nell, who knows truths about the manor that the rest turn a blind eye to. steve will tell you that they're both misguided; what do they know? nell has always had her head in the clouds, and meredith will follow whatever they say without question. shirley has always been suspicious, wondering what's behind the things that go bump in the night, but like steve, she's skeptical. henry doesn't like to talk about it at all; meredith is sure that she believes it, too, that she knows the manor took their mother, and she's always wished henry would say something but she never does.
hillcrest manor has existed in constance longer than any historian can document, and it's origin is unknown. the house, large and ornate, gothic in it's exterior, sits on a large plot of land in lake lenape and has gone untouched for several years. it remained abandoned until the ramsey family moved in, and most days, meredith wishes it had stayed abandoned. there's no rational way to explain what lives in the manor, it's a collection of entities and occurrences that leave you with goosebumps and in some cases, drive you mad. meredith doesn't have enough hands to count how many times she's seen something that shouldn't be real; it's more than just a ghost story, it's real life, and it's terrifying in ways that are so surreal that with time, you grow numb, desensitized.
the long and short of what happened to maura is a deemed a suicide. her body was found hanging in a parlor, neck snapped and head lolling, and steve will never be able to unsee it. it doesn't make sense, even 18 years later, and to this day meredith is convinced that it's the house. the house drove maura crazy, the way it drove nell to hear things and meredith to see things and theo to feel things.
following maura's death, the manor sat empty for years and years to come. nicholas moved his family out almost immediately, and with time, they scattered across constance and beyond, each building lives of their own, far, far away from the manor. the ramsey's kept the home in their possession, nicholas unwilling to let it go and fall into the wrong hands — or anyone's hands, for that matter — and when he passed, he left the manor in his will to his children. fresh out of rehab with nowhere to go, meredith returned to the manor and has been living in the vacant, eerie house for the last three months.
whether or not your kid lives in the house, too, is up to you! meredith is the one that's claiming it since their father's passing because none of the other kids did, but they're collectively all in ownership of the house unless they all were to decide to sell it. the ramsey family is strained and distant, but they come through for each other when it matters most. the closest in the family are nell and meredith, being irish twins, they grew up at each other's side. theo and shirley butt heads, and steve falls into the role of family mediator. they're a mess of a family, but what family doesn't have their problems?
as for the manor, leave it to your imagination the way it spooks and haunts. meredith still sees figures, hears voices, is lead around the empty house by entities that shouldn't exist at all, but it doesn't feel as malignant as it did when they were all kids. it's just a quirk to the home. is it ideal? not really, but meredith has nowhere else to go, so back to the manor it is.
meredith ramsey 29, phoebe tonkin — luke crain / played by amanda
claudia ramsey 28, face claim — nell crain / reserved for emily
first ramsey 27, face claim — steve crain
first ramsey 25, face claim — shirley crain
henry ramsey 21, lorenzo zurzolo — theo crain / played by liv
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