The Phantom of the Opera Ending Explained: What Happens to Erik

The ending people remember is a man weeping alone in a cellar. The ending Leroux wrote has one detail that changes the whole shape of it, and readers who only know the story secondhand almost always have that detail backwards.

Everything below is quoted from the free Project Gutenberg text, and every pull quote carries its line reference. The same final choice is a doorway in the playable Phantom of the Opera, where you are the one standing in front of him.

Spoilers below: this post states how The Phantom of the Opera resolves, including what happens to Erik.

The short answer

Nobody kills the Phantom. He releases his hostages, dies of his own collapse a few weeks afterwards, and arranges his own death notice before he goes. The chapter is called The End of the Ghost’s Love Story, and the word Leroux gives it is an ending rather than a defeat.

The scene is not narrated directly. Erik tells it himself, to the Persian, in the Persian’s flat, weeks after the fact and days before his own death. That framing matters: the last thing the reader gets is the monster’s own account of the night, delivered while he is barely able to speak.

If you came to this from the stage show or one of the films, the ending you saw is not this one, and the essay here on the three versions sets out where they part company and why the stage needed a different last scene.

The choice Erik puts to Christine

The climax turns on two bronze ornaments on a mantelpiece. One is a scorpion, one is a grasshopper. Erik tells Christine to turn the scorpion if her answer is yes and the grasshopper if it is no, and he laughs while he explains what the grasshopper does.

“The grasshopper! Be careful of the grasshopper! A grasshopper does not only turn: it hops!”

Underneath the house is enough powder to take the Opera down with everyone in it. So the proposal is nothing of the kind: an ultimatum with a countdown attached, delivered to a woman who has Raoul and the Persian drowning in a flooding cellar a few rooms away. Christine turns the scorpion.

The Kiss of Pity puts you in that room in the playable version: the two bronze figures are on the mantelpiece, the water is rising through the floor below, and the answer you give is the one the story runs on. Role-play The Phantom of the Opera →

The kiss, in Leroux’s own words

This is the part that gets remembered wrong. In most retellings the Phantom takes something from Christine at the end, or she submits to him, or the kiss is a payment. In the novel she does it herself, after he has already let her go, and Erik repeats the word twice because he cannot get over it.

“Then Christine kissed me, for the first time, herself, here, on the forehead.”

The sequence is exact and it runs in this order. Erik goes and releases Raoul. He brings him to Christine. The two of them kiss in front of him in the Louis-Philippe room. He gives Christine his gold ring and makes her swear to come back one night, cross the lake and bury him with it. Only then does she kiss his forehead, and only then do they leave.

Erik’s explanation of why he let them go is the softest sentence in the book. He tells the Persian that where Christine was concerned he was only a poor dog ready to die for her, and that she could marry the young man whenever she liked, because she had cried with him and mingled her tears with his. He is not describing a bargain. He is describing the first time in his life that anybody treated him as a person, and he is telling it to the one man in Paris who knows what he has been, in a rented flat, a few days before the end.

What happens to Erik afterwards

He goes home to die, and he is deliberate about it. He tells the Persian that when the end is near he will send over everything he owns of Christine’s, that the Persian is to inform the couple, and that the death is to be advertised in the newspaper.

• ✅The couple leave Paris. Raoul and Christine set off to find a priest in some lonely spot where they could hide their happiness, and marry away from anyone who knows them.
• ✅Erik takes a cab. He walks down to the street, gets in, and gives the driver one instruction. The Persian, watching from the window, hears it: go to the Opera.
• ✅Three weeks pass. Then the newspaper prints the notice he asked for, which is three words long and carries no name but his own.

“Erik is dead.”

That is the entire announcement. A man who spent the novel sending long, theatrical letters in red ink reduced his own obituary to three words, and left it to the one person who had every reason to hate him to place it for him, and by the time it ran, both of the people it was written for had already left the country to be married somewhere nobody would recognise them.

Why the book ends on a question

Leroux does not give you a verdict in the last chapter. He gives you Erik’s whole life, told by the Persian, and then he asks the reader to decide what to do with it. The question is printed on the page.

“Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him?”

He does eventually answer it, a few lines later, and a separate essay here works through the answer and the case against it. For the purposes of the ending, the shape is what counts: a book that opens by insisting the ghost was real closes by asking you how to feel about him. The full text is free at Project Gutenberg, and the last two chapters read very differently once you know the kiss was hers.