Why Did Lady Maria Kill Herself?

Bloodborne never says that Lady Maria killed herself, so there's no stated reason. What the game shows is a woman slumped in a chair over a pool of her own blood, apparently dead, guarding the way to the Fishing Hamlet. The most common reading is that she took her own life out of guilt for what the first hunters did there. That's a fan conclusion built on item text, not a fact the game confirms. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

What the game shows#

When the player reaches the top of the Astral Clocktower, Maria is sitting in a chair with blood pooled beneath her. She looks dead. When the player reaches out, she grabs their hand and stands. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Her words before the fight: "A corpse, should be left well alone. Oh, I know very well how the secrets beckon so sweetly. Only an honest death will cure you now. Liberate you from your wild curiosity." (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Partway through the fight she drives her own blades into herself and turns the blood into a weapon, the very kind of blood art her Rakuyo says she disliked. It's the clearest image the game gives of Maria wounding herself, though it happens in the Nightmare, long after whatever killed her. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

What the game says#

The item text gives her history. Her hunter cap and garb say that among the first hunters, all students of Gehrman, was the lady hunter Maria, distantly related to the undead queen, who admired Gehrman, "unaware of his curious mania". (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

The Rakuyo carries the line that matters most. Maria liked it because it demands dexterity instead of feeding on blood, and she frowned upon blood blades despite her royal blood. Then: "One day she abandoned her beloved Rakuyo, casting it into a dark well, when she could stomach it no longer." The player finds the Rakuyo at the bottom of a well in the Fishing Hamlet. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

The Astral Clocktower Key adds that the caretaker of the tower's patients, "known to them only as Lady Maria", lived behind the great clock. Simon the Harrowed sends the player up to kill her, saying "She hides the real secret." (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

The guilt reading#

Behind Maria's clock lies the Fishing Hamlet, where hunters from Byrgenwerth massacred the villagers in a search for eyes and the dead Great One Kos lost her child. The village priest cursed them and their descendants. Simon says the Nightmare grew from the hunters' own misdeeds. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

From there the usual reading runs like this, and it is only a reading. Maria took part in the massacre, or saw it. She threw away her weapon because she couldn't stomach what it had been used for. Unable to live with it, she took her own life, and the Nightmare kept her as its warden, still guarding the secret she was ashamed of. Her first line about a corpse being left alone fits both herself and the corpse of Kos. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Other readings#

Not everyone agrees on the details.

• She died some other way. The game never shows her death, and the blood could come from wounds taken in the hunt. The chair scene shows a dead woman, not how she got there. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)
• The Nightmare is the point. The Nightmare is where hunters drunk with blood are trapped in an endless hunt. On this reading Maria is there for her sins, and how she died matters less. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)
• Her death and the Doll. After Maria falls, the Doll in the Hunter's Dream senses "a liberation from heavy shackles". Players who think Gehrman made the Doll in Maria's image see the two endings as linked. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

What happens after the clocktower, and why the hamlet matters so much, is on The Old Hunters story page. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)