How I Get Through Holloway Manor and Stop the Curse

Quick Answer

My Holloway Manor route is:

speak to Ezra Holloway

→ go through the Portrait to the Museum

→ recover the family Medallion

→ return to Ezra for the master key

→ find 3 heirlooms and return them to the Museum

→ follow the Holloway family memories

→ reach Ezra’s ritual

→ follow him into the tunnels

→ Defeat the Shadow to Stop the Curse

The biggest navigation mistake is treating every locked door as something I should solve immediately. The manor opens in stages. Before I have the master key, I stay on the Medallion route. After Ezra gives me the key, I start revisiting the newly accessible parts of the house.

Holloway Manor initially looks like another investigation inside a large old house.

It does not stay that simple.

What helped me most was treating the manor as a sequence of progression states rather than one map I needed to completely solve at the start:

Museum

→ Medallion

→ master key

→ 3 heirlooms

→ family memories

→ ritual

→ tunnels

→ Shadow

Once I followed that structure, I stopped wasting time repeatedly testing doors that the story was not ready to open yet.

Talk to Ezra Holloway First

I start by speaking with Ezra Holloway.

Calvin Rafferty has come to the manor because of Ezra’s letter, which described a curse tied to the Holloway family.

Ezra tells me that ancestral relics have disappeared from the family Museum, but he does not ask me to recover all of them immediately.

His first request is much more specific:

find the family Medallion in the Museum.

That distinction matters.

At this point I do not need to search every bedroom, office, or locked hallway for the three later heirlooms.

The Medallion is the current progression item.

When Calvin asks where the Museum is, Ezra gives the clue that controls the entire opening route:

through the Portrait.

After the conversation ends, the game makes that instruction even clearer.

My objective becomes:

Go through the Portrait to the Museum.

Go Through the Portrait to the Museum

The portrait clue is literal.

While searching this part of the manor, I come across a portrait identified as:

Sylvia and Bertrand Holloway — circa 1779

That kind of date and family name is worth paying attention to in Holloway Manor because the house repeatedly uses generations of the family to tell me where I am in the investigation.

I follow the portrait route into the family Museum rather than continuing to circle the main rooms.

This is the first place where Holloway Manor teaches me an important rule:

A blocked normal doorway does not necessarily mean I have missed a normal key.

The mansion uses portraits, family objects, memories, and changing access to move the investigation forward.

If the current objective tells me to use one of those routes, I trust it before backtracking across the whole building.

Get the Family Medallion From the Museum

Once I reach the Museum, I stay focused on Ezra’s first request:

the Medallion.

There are hostile creatures along this route, so the Museum is not just a quiet collection room.

I clear whatever is directly stopping me from investigating, but I do not spend all my ammunition trying to make every old corridor completely safe.

The Medallion is the progression blocker.

Once I have it, the game gives me a strong hint not to continue wandering deeper:

Calvin notes that he should help Ezra first.

That is my signal to return.

I do not keep searching the Museum for the three heirlooms yet because Ezra has not opened the next stage of the house.

Return to Ezra Before Searching the Rest of the House

When I bring the Medallion back, Ezra explains what comes next.

He gives me his father’s master key and tells me:

the key opens the door to the rest of the house.

Then the objective expands:

Find the three heirlooms and return them to the Museum.

This is the cleanest progression break in the entire manor.

My backtracking rule becomes:

before the master key

→ ignore most inaccessible rooms and finish the Medallion route

after the master key

→ previously blocked areas are worth checking again

That saved me from the classic mansion-game mistake of finding one locked door and assuming I had already missed its solution.

I had not.

I was simply early.

Use the Museum as the Center of the Heirloom Route

The next phase revolves around 3 family heirlooms.

I do not treat them like optional collectibles.

They are progression items, and Ezra explicitly wants them returned to the Museum.

That makes the Museum my mental reset point.

Whenever I finish a major Holloway memory or recover an important family object, I ask:

Did I just advance the heirloom objective?

If the answer is yes, I stop searching the same hallway and follow the updated state of the manor.

That works better than trying to memorize every dark corridor.

The house keeps changing the relevance of rooms as the investigation advances.

Follow the Family Names and Dates

The manor also gives me unusually specific family references.

One of them identifies:

Ezra Holloway seated in his study — 1919

Elsewhere I find references to earlier generations.

I pay attention to those details because they are not just decorative lore.

They help me distinguish which Holloway memory or heirloom route I have actually reached.

One of the clearest examples is the Mirror.

Find the Grandfather’s Mirror

Eventually Calvin reaches an object and explicitly recognizes it:

“Guess that’s the grandfather’s mirror.”

That confirmation matters because the mansion contains plenty of decorative objects.

I am not guessing that every reflective surface is part of the objective.

Once Calvin identifies this one, I know I have reached the correct heirloom sequence.

Touching the Mirror immediately leads into another Holloway memory.

Clarence hears Lizzy and begins following her voice.

Soon afterward, the investigation identifies:

Clarence Holloway at the Holloway Foundation banquet — 1844

That 1844 reference gives me a concrete connection between the Mirror and the generation whose memory I am experiencing.

At this point I stop thinking of the heirlooms as three different keys.

Each object is pulling Calvin into part of the Holloway family’s past.

That becomes much more important near the end of the DLC.

Follow Direct Location Clues From the Memories

The Holloway memories often give me the best navigation clue right before I need it.

One of the clearest is:

“My pistol. The office.”

When I hear something that specific, I use it.

I prioritize the office instead of checking every bedroom simply because I know another heirloom is still missing.

This is how I approach most of the middle section:

• family name tells me whose memory I am seeing;
• room name tells me where to search next;
• heirloom progress tells me whether I should continue or return toward the Museum.

I do not need to memorize the entire floor plan at once.

Keep Going After the Rocking Horse Door

Later, Calvin explicitly identifies another useful route marker:

the rocking horse on the door.

The important part is not memorizing the exact appearance of every corridor around it.

It is recognizing that I have reached another forward-progress point.

Calvin even comments that what lies beyond is not what he expected from the symbol on the door.

So I do not turn around just because the next space looks strange or disconnected from the room I was just in.

Holloway Manor does that deliberately.

Finish All Three Heirlooms Before Rechecking Old Rooms

Eventually Calvin announces that he has found the final heirloom.

That line is important.

Once I hear it, I know the three-object search is over.

I do not start another sweep of the early manor looking for a fourth Museum item.

The focus now moves from recovering family objects to understanding what those objects have shown me.

One of the later memories reveals that Ezra had a son who was not entirely human and killed the child.

That changes the investigation.

The curse is no longer just Ezra’s vague story about a tormented family.

I now have a direct piece of the history that caused the Holloways’ current situation.

Stop Trusting the Manor’s Floor Plan

The deeper I get, the less useful a normal mental map becomes.

At one point Calvin recognizes scenery associated with the Living Room door where it should not logically appear.

That is another signal that I should stop trying to reconstruct the entire building like a normal mansion.

I follow the active path instead.

The manor is now using altered spaces and memories as part of the progression.

Trying to force those spaces into a perfectly consistent floor plan makes navigation harder, not easier.

Listen to the Fifth Woman Before the Final Sequence

One of the most important late memories comes from a woman who says she was the fifth.

She explains that the Holloway women were no longer treated like wives.

They became doors and tools, trapped inside the family’s cycle.

She also warns Calvin that he has become part of what is happening.

At that point I stop treating Ezra as the helpless old man from the opening.

The heirlooms have been showing me what his family actually did.

And Calvin is no longer just observing that history.

Follow the Ritual Instead of Backtracking

Eventually I reach the ritual phase.

The words repeated through the manor are:

Blood of birth.

Heart of hurt.

Fire of fire.

This is not a cue to search for another code.

It marks the transition into the explanation of what Ezra has actually been doing.

Calvin confronts him with the death of his son.

Ezra then reveals why the three-heirloom route mattered.

Every heirloom Calvin handled and every piece of family history he carried through the manor pulled him further into the Holloway family curse.

Ezra tells him that the ancestors’ memories now live within him.

The shadows that have been appearing are tied to those ancestors.

That completely changes the meaning of the middle of the DLC.

I thought I was restoring the family’s Museum.

I was helping complete Ezra’s ritual.

Chase Ezra Instead of Searching for Another Puzzle

After the confrontation, Calvin understands that Ezra cannot be allowed to finish what he started.

This is another hard progression break.

I no longer need:

• another heirloom;
• another Museum return;
• another family-room search.

I need to follow Ezra.

The route heads downward until Calvin reaches the tunnels beneath the manor.

He even comments on them directly:

“Tunnels. Of course there are tunnels.”

Once I reach that point, I keep moving forward.

Returning upstairs only takes me away from the finale.

Follow the Tunnels to the Shadow

The tunnels lead Calvin back to Ezra.

Ezra calls on the Holloway ancestors again, and the final confrontation begins.

This time the game makes the objective completely explicit:

Defeat the Shadow to Stop the Curse

That objective answers the question I would otherwise have had in this arena:

Am I supposed to activate something before I can finish this?

No.

The investigation phase is over.

The job now is to survive the encounter and kill the Shadow.

I keep moving instead of letting the creature and the surrounding pressure trap me in one part of the arena.

This is also where conserving resources earlier in the manor pays off.

I do not need every old hallway completely cleared.

I need enough ammunition and recovery resources left to finish the fight that actually controls the ending.

What Happens After I Defeat the Shadow

Once the Shadow goes down, the Holloway sequence finally breaks.

Calvin makes it out.

He says that the Shadow is gone and the manor has become quiet.

But he does not describe that silence as peace.

That ending fits what I learned inside.

I arrived believing Ezra needed help recovering old family property.

Instead, the Medallion opened the way to the master key, the master key opened the three-heirloom investigation, and those heirlooms pulled Calvin directly into Ezra’s ritual.

The route only really makes sense once I stop treating each room as a separate puzzle.

For me, the clean progression is:

Portrait

→ Museum

→ Medallion

→ Ezra

→ master key

→ 3 heirlooms

→ family memories

→ ritual

→ tunnels

→ Shadow

If I am still on the Medallion objective, I do not waste time on the rest of the house.

Once I have the master key, I start revisiting the newly accessible rooms.

Once the final heirloom is found, I stop searching for more Museum objects.

And once the game tells me to Defeat the Shadow to Stop the Curse, I know the investigation is finished and the only thing left is the final fight.