Ethan Winters

"They say that when one door closes, another opens. Well, a door closed tonight. And what a long night it was--but not just for me. Mia and I weren't the only victims here. So were the Bakers. It was that...thing, Eveline, who made them that way. But now Eveline's dead. And these guys are here to clean up the mess. I had just come to terms with losing Mia. But now she's back and wants to start over--put all of this behind us. Maybe this is where the next door opens."

- Ethan Winters

Ethan Winters is an American systems engineer from Texas who was a survivor of the Dulvey incident, a series of homicides committed by the Baker Family under the influence of their adopted daughter, Eveline. Ethan went to the ranch in search of his wife, Mia, who was believed dead in a hurricane three years earlier. During his imprisonment with the Bakers, Ethan discovered the nature of the killings and killed Eveline with the help of a Blue Umbrella special forces team.

Early life
Ethan married Mia Winters in 2011, where she kept her job as a special agent for The Connections a secret despite Ethan's own suspicions. Ethan received a video message from her in 2014, telling him that she would be coming home soon. However, she was never seen or heard from again, and for the next three years, Ethan believed her to be dead.

Investigating the Guest House
In July 2017, Ethan received an e-mail from Mia, asking him to come find her at the Baker ranch in Dulvey, Louisiana. An incredulous Ethan traveled to the "Dulvey Haunted House" in search of her, unaware that its owners, the Baker family, had also gone missing in 2014.

Unable to access the main house, Ethan takes a side path leading to the abandoned guest house, encountering a number of disturbing sights along the way. Inside the house, he discovered a videotape belonging to the Sewer Gators which revealed to him a hidden underground passage - as he traveled through it, he discovered Andre's maggot-ridden corpse floating in the water and eventually found Mia asleep in a bare cell, quickly freeing her. When he confronted her about the email, however, a bewildered Mia claimed that she did not send it. From there, Mia guides Ethan through the basement as the both attempt to escape the house, but run into a dead end which Mia vehemently believes was the way out. Seeing her obvious distress, Ethan let her rest on a nearby sofa as he looked around for an alternative exit, but while his back was turned, a mysterious assailant burst through the wall and kidnapped Mia.

Ethan followed through the exit and up the stairs, ending up back at the ground floor and another dead end - but he soon heard a knocking noise coming from back in the basement which he went to investigate. To his surprise, he found Mia once again, now demonic and violent, throwing him back up the stairs and relentlessly attacking him with a knife, at one point piercing straight through his left hand. Ethan managed to disarm Mia, who raved on about someone else inside her mind as she bashed her head against a wall and lost consciousness. However, Ethan barely got a chance to recover, as Mia got straight back up and threw him through a wall into another room, where he picked up an axe and defended himself against her advances. After a brief duel, he managed to seemingly strike the killing blow on Mia's neck and make her collapse, but was barely able to consider his actions as a phone down the hall began to ring.

Ethan decided to answer the call mysterious woman on the other end briefly revealed herself as Zoe and told him to escape through an exit in the attic, but as Ethan went to search the house for a fuse to restore power to the attic stairs, he noticed that the body of Mia had disappeared, and upon fixing the power was jumped by Mia who pinned him to the wall with a screwdriver. As Mia approached him with a chainsaw, he only just managed to free himself in time, but not before his left hand was cut off in his attempt at defense. Despite his horrific injury, Ethan pushed through up to the attic and almost made it through the exit, but is foiled by Mia once again as the ladder leading up to it is destroyed. Ethan successfully defeated Mia in combat, but was soon after knocked out from behind by Jack Baker, who welcomed him to the family and dragged both him and Mia to the main house.

Escaping the Main House
While unconscious, Zoe procured Ethan's severed hand and stapled it back onto him, additionally placing the Genome Codex on his wrist while telling him that he has "work to do". When Ethan finally awoke, he found himself around a dining table where he met the Baker family - Jack, his wife Marguerite, son Lucas, and an unnamed, silent elderly woman all enjoying a feast of human organs. Jack attempted to force-feed the offal to Ethan, but he immediately spat it out, causing Marguerite to become furious and storm out of the room. In retaliation, Jack picked up a knife and began to cut Ethan's face, only to be interrupted by the arrival of deputy sheriff David Anderson. While Jack and Lucas left to deal with the officer, Ethan escaped his bonds and tried to find a way out of the house - however, Ethan soon ran straight into Jack which forced him to evade through a trapdoor and under the floor. This led him to the laundry room where Zoe contacted him through phone once again, informing him that there may be a way out of the house through the main hall. After Ethan investigated the area, he caught the attention of Anderson who pounded on one of the boarded windows. Ethan was initally relieved and begged the officer to help him escape the house, but understandably Anderson instead treated Ethan as a possible suspect and instructed him to meet in the garage for an interrogation. Ethan agreed, but then asked Anderson for his gun, reasoning that he needed it to defend himself against the Bakers. Although Anderson refused, he reluctantly gave Ethan a pocket knife before commanding him to go to the garage. Once the two finally united, Anderson accosted Ethan for answers, but was swiftly and brutally executed from behind by Jack, who split his head clean in two with a shovel right in front of Ethan. The two remaining men have a well fought duel, with Ethan picking up the dead officer's handgun and Jack eventually commandeering Ethan's car and using it as a weapon. Although Ethan was able to evade being killed by Jack's driving, with the car being damaged enough for it to start burning up, the patriach did not stay down and continued to relentlessly pursue Ethan before the car violently exploded into flames. This allowed Ethan to make his exit via a ladder up to the rafters, but Jack was able to grab him one last time and, determined to make a point, inserted Ethan's handgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger, blowing his own face off.

Believing Jack to be dead, Ethan made it to the main hall where he was greeted by another phone call from Zoe,  who revealed that she was in fact part of the Baker family and suggested to look around the house for keys in order to unlock the front door - which Ethan discovered were actually reliefs in the shape of dog heads. However, on his hunt for the reliefs, he was soon pursued by Jack again, demonstrating that his infection prevents him from dying. Ethan's search led him into the basement where he first encountered the Molded, and eventually arrived in the dissection room where one of the marble dog head reliefs was lying on a shelf. However, Jack grabbed it first and placed it on a hook in the drawing room to act as bait for Ethan, and once the relief was in his possession, Jack kicked him down into the area below, initiating a vicious close-quarters duel which ended in Ethan completely destroying Jack's entire upper body, killing him as far as Ethan could exepct.

Creating a serum
After acquiring all the dog heads and escaping the main house, Ethan made it to Zoe's trailer, once again being phoned by her. Impressed with his progress so far, Zoe explained her dire situation to him - her entire family, including herself and Mia, were 'contaminated' and needed some sort of serum to cure themselves. Believing that her mother Margeurite may have hidden some in the Old House, Zoe instructed Ethan to start the search there. While investigating the area, Ethan briefly reunited with Mia on the other side of a chainlink fence and started to question her about what she knew despite her amnesia, but Lucas appeared from behind Mia and kidnapped her. Once Ethan got the Crow Key and headed towards the second floor, Marguerite ambushed him and threw him down a flight of stairs. The impact of his fall caused the wooden floor beneath Ethan to break and send him plummeting down a hole in the ground, leaving him at the mercy of Marguerite and her mutant bugs. Ethan retaliated by shooting at Marguerite from the hole, eventually weakening her to the point where she stumbled and fell into the pit, allowing Ethan to climb back up form the hole. On the second floor, Ethan discovered the mummified corpse of a "D-Series" child, the basis of the serum. However, he was unable to enter the room where the D-Series arm was stored, as it could only be accessed with Marguerite's lantern. Ethan returned to the pit where he fought Marguerite, only to find that she has escaped with the lantern through a hidden tunnel. Ethan followed the tunnel and arrived at an old greenhouse, where he was confronted by a grotesque, mutated Marguerite, but he defeated her and caused her to calcify and crumble to pieces, revealing the lantern inside of her. Ethan picked up her lantern and used it to access and grab the D-Series arm from the old house. After agreeing to meet Zoe back at her trailer, Ethan was instead contacted by Lucas, who had managed to capture Zoe. He told Ethan that the D-Series head could be earned back if he agreed to participate in an "activity" he put together, and before hanging up, Lucas urged Ethan to look in the fridge which contained Anderson's now decapitated and partiallly mutated head along with a note on the back saying, "The pig is waiting for you in the dissection room, bitch". Ethan backtracked to the dissection room in the basement of the Main House, and found the body of the beheaded Anderson with a sign saying "Prove you're a real man and stick your hand down this pig's throat!". He reluctantly did so, feeling sorry for the deputy, and pulled out the Snake Key, which Lucas explained over an intercom would help him find the two key cards he needed to join the "party" in the barn. After managing to get his hands on both, as well as a tape entitled 'Happy Birthday', Ethan went back outside and used them to enter the barn.

Once inside, Ethan sat down in front of a TV and was greeted by Lucas who proved that he had the D-Series head and refused to give it up. As Ethan progressed further into the barn, he realised that it had been rigged full of traps by Lucas, who gloated over various speakers throughout the complex. After successfully evading several of Lucas' Molded assaults, Ethan made his way into a puzzle room which Lucas intended to be impossible to solve - however, he used the knowledge gained from the 'Happy Birthday' tape in order to outsmart Lucas and make him retreat, leaving behind the D-Series head but not before issuing one final threat to Ethan through the monitor system.

Once arriving at the Boathouse and finding Mia and Zoe, Ethan freed the two women and gave the serum ingredients to Zoe to make the final product, intending to use a docked boat as an escape. However, as Ethan grabbed the two serum samples Zoe had created, a heavily mutated Jack burst through the house and grabbed him, forcing a final shwdown between the two. Ethan manages to take out the many eyes covering Jack's body, and even though this alone was not enough to keep him down, a quick suggestion from Zoe led Ethan to inject Jack with one of the serums in desperation, causing him to rapidly calcify. With one remaining serum left, Ethan made the difficult choice of curing his own wife Mia over Zoe.

Escaping with Mia
Despite telling Zoe that he would help her, she angrily ordered him to leave with Mia on the boat. As the two propellled their boat through the bayou, Ethan and Mia stumbled upon the wreckage of the tanker Annabelle, but were soon stopped and thrown from the boat by Eveline's mold, capsizing it to prevent Ethan and Mia from leaving the Baker family's residence. Once Mia awoke and started desperately searching for Ethan, she found him lying on the ground unconscious, but was then quickly taken away by the mold further into the wreckage where he was imprisoned. During his imprisonment within the mold, Ethan had a vision of sorts where he talked to a calm, sane Jack Baker sitting alongside his daughter Zoe. Jack explained to Ethan that none of the family were truly psychotic killers, but rather Eveline took control of their minds and mutated them into monsters, pleading to him to 'free' his family. Mia eventually freed Ethan from the mold, quickly handing him a tissue sample from Eveline and shutting herself off from him before she was ovetaken by her, telling him to "go kill that little bitch".

Ethan promptly exited the ship and ventured out to the Abercrombie Salt Mine in search of Eveline, eventually coming across a lab with the necessary equipment to craft the E-Necrotoxin required to kill her. He then fought his way through the mines and found a passage that led him back inside the Bakers' Guest House. Along the way, however, he suffered flashbacks of the events that occurred inside the old house, with Eveline standing in the background. Ethan traversed the old house in search of Eveline, ultimately coming face-to-face with the girl hell-bent on subjugating his mind. However, Ethan pulled out the E-Necrotoxin, frightening Eveline and causing her to flee. Giving chase, Ethan was assaulted by a hallucinatory Mia wielding a chainsaw. Ultimately, however, he managed to corner Eveline again, and injected her with the E-Necrotoxin despite her power trying to force him back. The Necrotoxin injection disrupted Eveline's hallucinatory control, revealing her true form as the wheelchair-bound "grandma" of the Baker family. As the decrepit woman broke down in tears, her body rapidly followed suit, decaying in seconds until she was one with the Mold beneath their feet. For a moment, it seemed as if Ethan had finally put an end to Eveline, but then Eveline's consciousness commandeered all of the Mold in the Baker residence, returning as a gargantuan, eldritch and very enraged abomination bent on Ethan's destruction.

Forced to fight one last time for his life, Ethan fired again and again into Eveline's face, but to no avail. Suddenly, a crate containing the Albert-01 dropped out of the sky and caused Ethan's codex to respond. Ethan answered the codex to find an unknown person telling him to use the pistol, whose bullets also contained RAMRODs. Ethan did so and after a few shots, finally calcified and killed Eveline once and for all. A man then dropped down from a helicopter and approached Ethan, removing his helmet and introducing himself as Redfield before helping Ethan onto the helicopter. On the helicopter, Ethan was finally reunited with Mia once more, before leaving the Bakers' residence for good, while Redfield's squad took care of the aftermath.

End of Zoe
Before escaping with Mia, Ethan informed Chris and his team about Zoe. They successfully rescued her along with Joe. Ethan later called a recovering Zoe, during which she thanked him for keeping his promise and sending help.

Personality
Ethan is a very headstrong and determined man, willing to go forward with searching for his wife even after encountering a dead body, missing persons posters and various other disturbing sights at the beginning of the game. He also seems to be able to restrain his emotions better than most people, as he does not break down after seemingly killing his wife at the beginning of the game, and is generally unperturbed by many of the things he sees and experiences throughout the game (at least less than most people would be). He also has an extremely high pain tolerance, being able to function after having his hand severed, being stabbed multiple times, and being thrown with great force through walls or onto the ground.