alright so the ending didn't make sense but *spoilers*

how would you interpret the ending given the few hints we had of what was going on? And I'm not thinking from the perspective of what I think we were supposed to surmise; it's impossible to say there's only one answer as the end was so vague. When the branches were covering the girls, was that going to kill them altogether, or was it going to take away their "souls" and turn them into pod people? I suspected the latter, because Patricia Clarkson seemed so sincere when she said that the girls would come back; they always do. They would've had to for this school to keep running for over a century. Clarkson's acting was so good; I actually thought maybe she was telling the truth when she was trying to convince Agnes Bruckner that Rachel Nichols was just confused and this was all beyond their understanding. Not to mention Clarkson seemed to be protecting other people from the woods like the police officer, so she wasn't purely malevolent.

The one blonde childlike suicidal girl, who disappeared first, suggested that her death (and the other special ones) was needed to save the lives of the other girls. But then all the girls seemed to be taken over by the branches in the end anyway... The three witches in the flashback... I think they had already been taken over by the woods; they too had the telekinetic "gifts." Was Clarkson really Clara and the schoolteachers were using the students' powers to stay immortal? That might be the consensus, but I'd like to think they were just former students over the years, typically mortal, who were caught under the spell of the woods, and what they were doing was their way of protecting the woods from growing to be a wider malevolent force.

But then again you could say that in the flashback, the three witches' rage is what created the evil spirit in the woods. Bah who knows.....