Mrs. McDonnell

**Mrs. McDonnell** is a playable character and the main protagonist in *Nun Massacre***.**

## Description

### Appearance

Mrs. McDonnell, with the exception of her right hand while wielding the revolver, is not seen in-game, but the stealth chart show her as a middle-aged, relatively tall Caucasian woman with long, maroon brown hair in a beehive-style. Her outfit is partially obscured, but seems to be a short orange dress with purple stockings, black shoes and a grey necklace.

Mrs. McDonnell can be assumed to be semi-athletic, as the player is able to get her to run at a rather quick pace for a long period of time before the stamina bar runs out.

### History

Very little is know about her besides that she was of Catholic faith and had a young daughter named Janie. Given that she's called a "Mrs." and not "Ms.", it's unknown if she was a widow or had a divorce, although the former is more likely since seperation and the annulment of marriage is generally frowned upon in the Roman Catholic Church.

According to notes found in the game, sometime prior to the events of *Nun Massacre*, Mrs. McDonnell sent Janie to a Catholic boarding school where she was treated badly, and was abused by the head nun, Mother Apollonia. Among other things, Mother Apollonia took her comfort doll Bongo the Clown away, would hit her with a ruler for perceived transgressions, regularly locked her in a small room for keeping a diary, sexually abused her, and forbade her from using the bathroom. On one occasion, Janie made a mess while locked in punishment and was forced by the Mother Superior to smear herself with the filth. It's implied by the cryptic VHS tapes that Janie eventually committed suicide as a result of this maltreatment.

At some point, Janie got terribly sick and Mother Apollonia sent a letter to Mrs. McDonnell informing her about her daughter. A letter arrived while Mrs. McDonnell was having a bath. After reading the letter Mrs. McDonnell went to the school to pick her ill daughter.

## *Nun Massacre*

In what is assumed to be a flashback, given the lighting and old-fashioned electronics, Mrs. McDonnell is having a bath while listening to radio. After hearing a letter slide through the letterbox, she gets out of the tub to get the letter. This was followed by a flash of light and Mrs. McDonnel appeared standing next to a car in the woods during stormy weather. Because the road is blocked, she had no choice but to continue on foot. While climbing the path up to the boarding school, the outline of a Nun could be seen in the distance, before vanishing ominously. As she enters the boarding school, she finds that the atmosphere of the school is dark and quiet. No sooner than her first moments in the building is she met by a deranged Nun who patrols the halls and rooms of the place. Mrs. McDonnell explores the school while avoiding the Nun.

There are two non-standard game overs:

1. Mrs. McDonnell walks off the edge of the mountain during the trek up to the school and falls to her death
2. Mrs. McDonnell falls and gets stuck in the barbed wire pit on the stairwell of the third floor. The Nun eventually appears near the column and repeatedly stabs the helpless Mrs. McDonnell until she dies

### Endings

#### Ending A (Neutral Ending)

Mrs. McDonnell finds two candles to light at the altar at the chapel, which causes a decapitated, crucified body to burst through the stained glass, its head replaced with that of the stone statue in the courtyard. Upon placing it in its original place, an open grave reveals itself with two letters by it. Mrs. McDonnell, having seemingly gone insane, either from grief after remembering her failure to protect her daughter or from realizing that she had a direct hand in orchestrating her death from the notes, willingly buries herself alive within in an attempt to repent.

#### Ending B (Secret Ending)

Mrs. McDonnell gets stuck inside an increasingly narrow part of the vents. A static, luminescent humanoid figure rapidly approaches and apparently kills Mrs. McDonnell as it passes through her.

#### Ending C (Good Ending)

Mrs. McDonnell finds and watches all four VHS tapes in chronological order, which causes a crucifix to appear behind the TV set. Mrs. McDonnell uses it to navigate the vents until she comes to a room with a caged and shrunken Nun and a human-sized Bongo the Clown. Mrs. McDonnell slays the Nun by burning her alive, and is forgiven by Bongo the Clown. A staircase appears and Mrs. McDonnell climbs it towards the light.

#### Ending D (Bad Ending)

Mrs. McDonnell unscrews a cover within the vents and gets herself trapped in a narrow room at the end of the path. Unable to crawl back out, the Nun appears and proceeds to fill it with her acidic vomit, killing her.

### Interpretation

Ending A of the game has two final notes, apparently written by Mrs. McDonnell. In them, Mrs. McDonnell is shown to be a religious fanatic and describes her despair on being unable to control her daughter, lamenting that despite Mother Apollonia's "best attempts", she believes that Janie still continues to stray from the light and remains bound for eternal damnation. Towards the end, Mrs. McDonnell vows to "save" her daughter herself and proclaims that if she can't help Janie as a mother, she will have to become a sister, heavily implying that after Janie was taken home by her due to illness, which, considering the circumstances, may have been a code between her and Mother Apollonia for her supposed heresy, Mrs. McDonnell continued and replicated the abuse she experienced in a last-ditch effort to prevent her daughter's soul from being doomed, hoping to accomplish what the boarding school had failed to do. In turn, this would mean that Mrs. McDonnell had allowed or even advised Mother Apollonia to be especially strict with Janie and even after finding out about the extent of the punishments, decided that they had not been enough and taking on the mantle of a nun with an equally cruel disposition as Mother Apollonia. This seems to have been the tipping point for Janie, who implicitly hanged herself to escape this torture.

Many years later, sometime in the late 70's or early 80's, Mrs. McDonnell returned to the now abandoned school to reconcile with her daughters death.

This theory is supported by certain unexplained details, such as Mrs. McDonnell unwillingness to enter her daughter's bedroom in the beginning and her generally questionable course of actions in Ending A and C. These imply that she eventually came to her senses and felt awful about what she had done to Janie, both directly and by proxy. Coupled with the implication that Mrs. McDonnell, who had inexplicably thought of her daughter as being in the clutches of the Devil, was mentally ill or at least an extremely deluded zealot, likely means that the Nun is a product of a guilt-ridden psyche, representing both Mother Apollonia and herself, as sadistic torturers hiding under the veil of holy guidance. Likewise, the Nun's strangely child-like facial features also show that she is representative of Janie as well, likely because she feels that her daughter is seeking and deserves to punish her for the torment she had to go through. The events in the game are thusly mostly interpreted as Mrs. McDonnell coping with her guilt and either taking her own life in some way (Ending A, B & D) or forgiving herself and atoning by eliminating the Nun, the facet of her own self which led to Janie's death, before "ascending", likely meaning she has, or at least hopes to have, redeemed herself in the eyes of God.

## Nun Massacre: The Book

*\*Massive spoiler alert\**

With the 2021 novelization's protagonist being an entirely new character, Dawn, Mrs. McDonnell is largely reduced to a background role, with most of the exploration done by her in-game being left to the high schoolers. Additionally, an alternate narrative is created to demystify and make sense of the bizarre happenings, with a new interpretation given that doesn't line up with the events seen in in the game, which are already subject to a multitude of theories.

* Nun Massacre is given a specified year, 1978, on a Saturday in either May or June, shortly before the high school graduation of Dawn and her friends.
* Janie's backstory is elaborated on:
	+ Janie's age is given as nine, with her having been sent to the boarding school, St. Cecelia's Preparatory School, in 1948 due to her free spirited demeanor, lack of discipline and delinquent behavior at her previous school.
	+ She spent six months at St. Cecelia's, with Janie and her fellow students being physically abused by Mother Apollonia, whose wrath, unlike what her later notes implied, extended onto the entire student body and her fellow nuns for even minor slights. As a result of this abuse, combined with the graphic stories of martyrdom told in class, Janie lost her belief in a merciful God and became increasingly mentally unstable.
	+ Rather than having implicitily committed suicide, she was thought to have disappeared during a massacre many decades before the story, in which all students and staff were murdered, with the unaccounted exception of Janie and Mother Apollonia, the suspected perpetrator.
* With the focus being on Dawn and her friends, Mrs. McDonnell has several short-lived encounters with them throughout the course of the night, something which did not happen in the game. She first meets the group as they party in the dining room, later has a brief exchange with Andrea as she looks for safety from the Nun, then finds Dawn and Scott inside a classroom before meeting with Dawn two seperate times towards the end.
* Mrs. McDonnell is described as having dark brown hair and wearing a coat. Her height is also downplayed, as she refers to Andrea, a volleyball player, as the "tall girl".
* Mrs. McDonnell is shown to be borderline catatonic most of the time and wholly obssessed with finding Janie. Due to this, she is equally attached to Bongo, Janie's beloved toy.
* Mrs. McDonnell is portrayed as kindly and matronly, but confused and absent minded, wandering the halls solely in search of Janie and deeply afraid of the Nun, who wreaks havoc upon misfortunate overnight visitors of the school. Despite her well-founded fears, they never cross paths, due to her being too busy hunting after the high schoolers.
* Janie's notes are only found by Dawn and her group, mostly as singular notes around the school, though a mostly intact diary, containing most of the entries, is found mid-way through the book.
* Mrs. McDonnell does not find any items herself, but recovers Bongo from the teens and is later given a book of matches by Andrea.
* The scale in the kitchen is neither filled with blood nor is weighed down with mannequin parts by Mrs. McDonnell. Instead, Dawn inadvertently uses her own body while hiding from the Nun to overload the scale.
* A plot twist reveals that Mrs. McDonnell suffers from dissociative identity disorder and maintains a total of three personas: Mrs. McDonnell, Janie and Mother. Mrs. McDonnell's full name is really Jane McDonnell, meaning she had been Janie all along, way back in the 1940's. It's all but stated that Janie snapped from her experiences at St. Cecelia's and had a psychotic episode, killing everyone there in their sleep. The trauma made her repress both her childhood self and the "force" that drove her to kill, which manifested as a nun in the likeness of Mother Apollonia, as split personalities. Janie was childlike, but needy, and Mother a cruel, authoritarian figure, both alter egos being deeply psychopathic, molded from the terrible happenings at the school. Mother would regularly resurface, haunting Mrs. McDonnell whenever she suffered a breakdown, while Janie, who she subconsciously came to view as a daughter figure, would compel her to return to St. Cecelia's to "find" Janie, a ritual likely born out of the childhood wish for her own mother to come and bring her back home. While there, presumably due to the negative memories associated with the school, she would imitate Mother Apollonia's behavior, albeit with an even more brutal ferocity, stalking the halls armed with a knife and in full nun garb while arguing with her alternate personalities. During this state, she encountered thrill-seeking sightseers who would visit the premises due to the spot of the unsolved massacre having become an attraction among the True Crime fandom and murder them while Mother was in control. Although aware of this, Mrs. McDonnell refused to seek treatment and justifies the loss of human life to herself by continually bringing up her childhood trauma.
* The rotting body on the crucifx inside the chapel is revealed to be the mummified corpse of Mother Apollonia, dug up and desecrated by Mrs. McDonnell.
* In the end, Dawn connects the dots and tricks Mrs. McDonnell into the safe room to buy herself time to prepare. As Mrs. McDonnell shifts back into Mother, she enters the newly opened courtyard in search of her, where she finds Bongo inside Mother Apollonia's open grave. Distracted by this, she is ambushed by Dawn with a shovel. Mrs. McDonnell, still under Mother's influence, manages to dodge another blow after being disarmed and takes the shovel from her, shattering Dawn's hand in retaliation. Dawn can make Mrs. McDonnell snap back to her usual self by calling her Janie and reminding her of the time Bongo was taken from her. As she cries in remorse that she cannot control herself and wishes to stop, Dawn pulls out a hammer and strikes Mrs. McDonnell in the head. She can't bring herself to deal the fatal hit, so she instead decides to bury her alive, mirroring Ending A of the game. Still conscious Mrs. McDonnell, as Janie, first cries in fear, then continuously repeats a deranged prayer, which only stops when she suffocates on the dirt, bringing an end to the murders and the three lives of Jane McDonnell.

## Trivia

* In the gameplay photo, Mrs. McDonnell can be seen hiding behind a wall trying to avoid the Nun. As such, she is the only protagonist whose appearance is only revealed through a secondary source.
* Mrs. McDonnell is the only protagonist with a given surname, but no known first name. This averted in the novel, where her first name, Jane, serves as the plot twist of the story.
	+ The envelope containing Mother Apollonia's letter in the intro sequence has the recipient's contact info on it. Although the low-quality of the game renders it illegible, the 2D asset can be found in the game files. On it, the ZIP code 80203 is given, placing Mrs. McDonnell's home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Denver, Colorado, as well as the name "Shannon McDonnel", the surname being misspelled. An in-game footage comparison can be found here.
* Occasionally, glimpses of a small human figure, resembling a rotting, hairless corpse, can be seen running through the hallways while exploring the school. Though this is presumably a distorted vision of Janie, nothing has been confirmed.
	+ The model is reused for an undead child in *Murder House*.

## Gallery

Mrs. McDonnell hiding behind a wall in the top right corner photoMother Apollonia's letter with Mrs. McDonnell's mailing infoHigher quality asset of the letter extracted from game files