Playing Gracie Darling Ending Explained: How Did Gracie Die?

‘Playing Gracie Darling’ charts a riveting narrative ripe with small-town mystery and a supernatural edge. The series centers around Joni, a child psychologist, who moved away from her hometown after the tragic disappearance of her best friend, Gracie Darling. Since then, the missing teenager has become a part of the town’s folklore, with young kids inventing a game around staging a summoning for the spirit of the lost girl. Joni learns about the same when she finds herself returning to the town as the Darling family faces another tragedy when young Frankie Darling goes missing. Consequently, as the psychologist delves deeper into the case alongside her childhood friend, Jay, who is now a cop in the same town, she has to reckon with the secrets and mysteries of her own past. Somewhere along the line, as Frankie’s disappearance intertwines with Gracie’s death 27, the answers to the two mysteries unravel in unpredictable ways. SPOILERS AHEAD!

Playing Gracie Darling Recap

The first tragedy hits the Darling family in 1997, when young Gracie goes missing following one of the seance sessions her and her friends hold in the abandoned shack in the forest. In the aftermath of that disastrous night, Joni, her best friend, has to receive professional psychological help before she can put the incident behind her. Even then, she ends up moving away from the town with her mother in light of her parents’ divorce. In the contemporary timeline, she has become a mother and a child psychologist herself, shedding all the spiritual beliefs of her teenage years. However, her past comes rushing back when she receives a call from Jay, one of her high school friends who also used to participate in the seances with her and Gracie. As it turns out, his daughter, Raffy, had recently tried to do a seance herself, which led to the disappearance of Frankie Darling. As such, the small-town cop wants his friend to have a chat with his kid to ensure she’s alright.

This compels Joni to drop everything and make the drive back to her hometown the very next day. Although her conversation with Raffy is less than productive, she learns that the kids around town have started playing a game named after her former best friend. However, the real troubling bit remains the fact that they seem to know about a spirit named Levi. It’s the same name that Gracie and her friends encountered during their Ouija board sessions. As a result, Joni ends up snooping around a bit more, around the town’s youth group kids and the Darling family, who seem to have mixed feelings about her due to her complex connection to Gracie. Nonetheless, Joni decides to stick around and participates in the search party that is sent out into the woods for Frankie. However, in the woods, she sees an apparition of her dead best friend. After chasing the spirit, the psychologist accidentally discovers a charred, dead body.

Initially, the Darling family remains worried that the body belongs to Frankie. Therefore, they’re all the more surprised and devastated to learn that it’s actually Gracie’s dead body. Consequently, Joni’s stay in the town extends as the Darlings decide to hold an eventual funeral for her best friend. As a result, her mother ends up bringing her daughters, Lulu and Mina, to the town. This leads to a friendship between the latter and Raffy, which ignites Mina’s curiosity about Frankie’s disappearance. Eventually, as the town’s teenagers hold a memorial with readily available drugs and alcohol, multiple kids experience a mass episode following a game of Gracie Darling. Initially, once Joni looks into this phenomenon, she suspects it’s a case of mass delusion caused by recent traumatic events, further stoked by one of the attention-deficit teenagers. This causes a rift to open up between the mother and her teenage daughter. Yet, both of their interest were piqued simultaneously, once they stumbled upon a possible clue.

Apparently, there once existed a Levi Darling, whom the family seems to be extremely tight-lipped about. This revelation sends the mother-daughter duo down two very different paths. While Mina becomes interested in uncovering Levi’s identity and backstory, Joni finds herself returning to the dilapidated shack with Jay. She believes that putting herself back into a seance will jog her repressed memories of the fateful night. Nonetheless, what she remembers remains far from what she ever expected. As it turns out, before the teenagers conducted their last seance in 1997, Joni and Gracie got in a big fight that even turned a bit violent. Once the psychologist realizes she has her best friend’s necklace, the same one the latter was wearing on the night she went missing, things begin to come together in the most unimaginable way possible.

Playing Gracie Darling Ending: How Did Gracie Die? Is Her Ghost Real?

In many ways, Gracie’s death remains at the center of the narrative as every other mystery builds around it. In 1997, the teenager went missing after a chaotic seance wherein Joni and the others witnessed their friend get possessed by Levi, the spirit with whom they had been conversing for some time now. In the aftermath of the terrifying encounter, the others, including Joni, Jay, and Anita, managed to escape and return to town. However, Gracie was never seen again. After months of searching turned up without any result, it was assumed that the girl had fallen victim to some killer in the woods. Furthermore, her friends began believing that their Ouija Board sessions and Levi’s existence were actually just a manifestation of their mass delusions. Thus, everyone moves on with their lives, or at least they try to.

That is, until Jackie’s disappearance and the discovery of Gracie’s dead body bring the mystery back into focus. The similarities in their cases—the seances, the shack, and the appearance of the name Levi—suggest the two are interconnected. All of this makes Joni question her non-believing ways. Nonetheless, once some of her repressed memories resurface, she’s forced to reckon with a much darker truth. Apparently, all those years back, before the final seance, she had gotten in a fight with Gracie after she began believing her best friend was hooking up with Jay, her eternal crush. Therefore, the suspicion creeps up that she’s somehow responsible for the teenager’s death. This theory grows once she learns from Anita that Jay had shown up at her house with blood on his clothes after being missing for a few hours on the night of the seance. Yet, the real truth, as Mina discovers it, is much more menacing.

On the night of Gracie’s disappearance, once she begins convulsing, it sends her friends scattering into the woods. However, Jay returns briefly afterward in search of his friends. During this time, a still possessed Gracie attacks him. As he tries to shrug her off, he ends up accidentally banging the base of her skull against a heavy object. In the aftermath, he rushes out of the shack in a panic. Unbeknownst to him, although the blow draws blood, it doesn’t actually kill the young girl. In fact, in the aftermath, once she returns to consciousness, she treks all the way back home. It’s there that she runs into her grandfather, James. In her delirious and exhausted state, she begins prodding her grandfather about Levi, his brother, whose death was a big secret in the family and around town. James, a deeply controlling and abusive man, punished Gracie for her actions. Yet, this time, his retribution was delivered with much more mania and anger. As a result, in waterboarding his granddaughter, he ends up killing her.

What Happened to Jackie? Is She Dead?

Mina learns the truth about Gracie’s death the hard way when she goes up to the Darling house to ask James some questions about Levi. In his demented state, he ends up mistaking the teenager for his granddaughter, re-enacting the night of his granddaughter’s death with Joni’s daughter as his new victim. Fortunately, the mother is able to arrive on the scene in time to save Mina from the hands of the wretched abuser. Thus, it becomes evident that Gracie wasn’t killed by some evil spirit or killer in the woods, but rather someone close to her, who used the night’s strange events to cover up his crime. In turn, this revelation makes Jackie’s disappearance all the more confusing. So far, everything had been pointing toward the fact that there was some connection between the two cases.

Therefore, Jay realizes that if the same must still hold true, Jackie’s disappearance isn’t a result of a seance but rather the problems in her own home. Earlier, the authorities discovered the teenager’s backpack, and it was discovered that Billy, the town recluse, was responsible for dumping it in the trash. Unsurprisingly, it turns out, he has some tangible answers about the young girl’s fate. As it turns out, Jackie never actually went missing to begin with. Instead, she ran away from home, using the seance and her aunt’s missing person case as cover to throw the town off her scent. As a generationally traumatized family, the Darlings were ones to keep many secrets. From Levi and the reality of Gracie’s death to the apparent relations between Ruth and her cousin, Peter, which led to Jackie’s birth, they had many secrets to keep.

Much like Gracie, Jackie was also sick of these secrets and wanted to get to the bottom of everything. For her, this began with looking into her dead aunt’s mysterious disappearance. Although it took some time, the teenager soon realized that her great-grandfather was behind the death and that her mother and uncle were keeping the secret from him. Around the same time, she also discovered that her uncle is actually her biological father and that Ruth and Peter have continued their incestuous affair into their adult lives. Therefore, she was not only repulsed by her family but she was also scared for her own well-being. For the same reason, she used her seance with Raffy as a cover to run away, letting everyone believe she’s missing or worse, while she hid away with Billy’s help.

What Happens to James? Why Did Peter and Ruth Keep His Secret?

All these years, Jay and Joni repressed their real memories of the night of Gracie’s disappearance. This was because both of them had reasons to believe they played a part in hurting their friend and possibly contributing to her death. Jay’s interaction with the teenager was much more direct as he had ended up harming her in self-defence. On the other hand, Joni believed that her momentary animosity toward her best friend manifested in a deep and dark desire. In the moment, as Levi possessed Gracie, the other girl couldn’t help but blame herself a little for the ordeal since she was half-wishing against her friend’s well-being. For the same reason, after the night passes, both Joni and Jay repress these memories as a result of fear, trauma, and a lack of understanding. Nonetheless, the real culprit did no such thing after killing the young girl. James has a long and varied history of doling out punishment on his family, forcing them to repent for their sins in increasingly harmful ways.

The older man hated Gracie’s rebellious personality, and he hated her tendency to delve into family matters that he wanted to keep a secret. For the same reason, he ends up killing the girl during a particularly brutal punishment. By the time Ruth and Peter manage to pull him off the girl, she has already drowned. Yet, instead of feeling any remorse for his actions, James instantly jumps into self-preservation mode. After sending Ruth away, he employs Peter’s help to drag Gracie’s body into the woods and burn it. In the aftermath, the cousins keep the grandfather’s secret due to an innate sense of fear as well as a habit of compliance. They wouldn’t have dared to go against the patriarch and tarnish the family name, especially when they had their own secrets to keep. Nonetheless, all bets are off once Moira, Gracie’s mother, learns the truth about her daughter’s death. Moira knows that the guilty man is unlikely to face any real consequences for his actions since his aging memory likely makes him unable to stand a fair trial. Therefore, she ends up taking justice into her own hands and strangles the man in his sleep.

Who is Ivy? Why Does Joni See Her in Her Backyard?

Once the mystery of Gracie’s death has been solved, punishment has been doled out, and Jackie has returned home, Joni inevitably leaves town, returning to the city with her mother and her daughters. In her house, she glimpses an apparition of Ivy, one of the patients at the juvenile psych ward the psychologist works at. Earlier, before visiting her hometown, Joni had run into some problems with the young girl. Ivy had suicidal tendencies, and it was almost impossible to talk her down from her attempts. In fact, the day Joni got the fateful call from Jay, Ivy had tried to stab herself in the neck. Therefore, when she sees the girl in her backyard, the psychologist assumes she must have run away from the institute.

Nonetheless, Ivy disappears as quickly as she had appeared once Joni tries to chase after her. Things become all the more confusing when the latter receives a phone call from Liam, one of her co-workers. Apparently, while Joni was gone, Ivy had made another one of the suicide attempts, and this time she had succeeded. This opens up the very strong possibility that when the psychologist sees Ivy’s apparition, she is actually seeing her ghost. Throughout the show, Joni comes across visions of Gracie’s spirit, mostly in dreams. While these instances can be explained away as residual trauma, there’s no real reason for her to see Ivy in the same manner, especially when she wasn’t even aware of the girl’s death. As such, only one explanation remains: Joni is actually a psychic who can see the spirits of the dead and departed, likely if they had some strong connection to her.

Is the Shack Really Haunted? Who is Levi?

The show’s ending scene raises a number of questions. For much of the storyline, Joni wrestles with the supernatural and a logical explanation for the Darling girls’ disappearance. In the end, although a logical, non-supernatural explanation emerges, the process of getting ot it also exposes the psychologist to experiences that blur the lines between reality and superstitions. When Joni and Jay go into the shack as adults and attempt to hold a seance, it truly does seem that their actions were driven by spiritual interference. Likewise, Joni has numerous encounters with the spirit of Gracie, including the one that led to the discovery of her dead body, which cannot be explained through any other means. Therefore, the undeniable conclusion remains: something supernatural is indeed circling around the Darling family.

This remains true for the haunted shack and Levi, the spirit that seemingly haunts it. Levi was actually James’ younger brother who perished in a tragic shack fire. Although the narrative never clears it up, it’s implied that James watched his brother die without moving to help him or save his life. Whether this was a result of intention or shock is never revealed. Either way, Levi’s death was muddled enough that the Darlings decided to cover it up, almost entirely erasing him from the town’s memory. That is, until Gracie begins snooping around and learns about his existence. It’s possible that it’s the same reason why she brought her friends around to the same shack for the seance. Ultimately, even though Levi isn’t responsible for Gracie’s death, it appears that the spirit does indeed exist and is attached to the shack.