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All The True Stories, People, And Crimes Referenced In Every Season Of 'American Horror Story'
American Horror Story, the long-running FX horror anthology, is known for its intricate storytelling. How does the series weave together complex characters and storylines throughout its seasons? Because often, American Horror Story characters are based on real people. Sometimes these people are the victim, other times they're the evil mastermind, and still other times they're regular people with an outlandish story to tell.
The real-life horror stories behind AHS paint an undeniably terrifying picture of American history - from recreating Columbine to recounting H.H. Holmes's real-life murder-trap hotel. Inspiration for AHS isn't just limited to real tragedies, however; it also encompasses creepy unsolved mysteries (such as Roanoke) and long-standing urban legends.
Here are the true stories American Horror Story has drawn from to tell its horrifying tales.
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The real-life Cecil Hotel (now the Stay on Main Hotel) in Los Angeles has been the site of a number of horrific occurrences. The hotel housed two serial killers at separate times - Richard Ramirez (known as the Night Stalker), who killed at least 13 people, and Johan Unterweger, who claimed several victims while living at the Cecil.
The Cecil also was the setting of the mysterious and highly publicized death of Elisa Lam, who was found in the hotel's water tank after guests noticed low water pressure and a funny taste in the hotel's tap water.
The hotel also shares a number of similarities with H.H. Holmes's infamous Murder Castle, a hotel he had custom built to make his bloodthirsty hobbies more convenient.
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Evan Peters's twisted character James March was inspired by the hotelier who is often regarded as the first serial killer in America: H.H. Holmes. Holmes constructed a "murder hotel," perfectly crafted as the ultimate house of horrors, complete with trap doors, hidden rooms, chutes leading down to the basement, and purposefully disorienting hallways.
Some of the rooms were even equipped to turn into gas chambers on command, with air-tight doors that couldn't open from the inside. Holmes claimed as many as 200 lives, though he only confessed to 28.
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Angela Bassett's mysterious, ancient voodoo queen was based on a real person renowned in New Orleans history. Marie Laveau was a hairdresser in the French Quarter between the 1820s and 1860s, but she also practiced black magic. Laveau was said to mix elements of Catholicism with voodoo and was known as a nurse and a healer. Today, people still visit her grave and draw three Xs on the side of it, hoping the voodoo priestess will grant them wishes.
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Lady Gaga's American Horror Story debut did not disappoint. Her character, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, was truly terrifying both on the series and in real life. Elizabeth Bathory currently holds the Guinness World Record for "Most Prolific Serial Killer" and was a true sadomasochist. In the 1600s, she became a Transylvanian countess and convinced her husband to build her a torture chamber in their castle.
Her victims of choice were young, virginal girls, who she'd torture for hours by driving pins through their lips and fingernails and forcing them to cook and eat their own flesh, among other horrors. She'd then bathe in their blood to retain their youthful beauty.
Eventually, Bathory was found guilty of over 80 counts of murder and was supposed to be executed. Instead, she was imprisoned in a room alone for the rest of her life.
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Briarcliff seems like far too horrible place to be based in any sort of reality, but the story of Staten Island's Willowbrook State School is the stuff of real nightmares. The institution housed thousands of patients over the years, often well over capacity, providing horrific living conditions for the mentally challenged patients. People were sexually abused by the terrifying staff, awful medical experiments were performed on patients, and patients regularly died from neglect and starvation.
There were no evil nuns, but until Geraldo Rivera did a news exposé in 1972 that effectively got the institution shut down, there was basically no God who was of any help to the poor victims stuck there.
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Mena Suvari only nabbed a small role in Season 1 of American Horror Story, but it was a historically juicy one. She played the victim of one of the most famous unsolved homicides in American History – the Black Dahlia Murder.
In real life, Elizabeth Short was a 22-year-old actress who was found brutally murdered in 1947. Her body was chopped in half, but the defining mark of her murderer was the smile carved across her face - also known as a Glasgow smile. The case was never solved, and it was definitely front-page news.
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In Murder House, Rosa Salazar and Celia Finkelstein guest starred as two ghostly nurses who were murdered. According to AHS mastermind Ryan Murphy, their murders were inspired by the Richard Speck massacre – a very real, terrifying incident that occurred in 1966. It's one of the only instances depicted in American Horror Story that may have actually been played down rather than disturbingly embellished.
In 1966, Richard Speck broke into a nursing dorm in Chicago, where he sexually assaulted, tortured and killed eight residents.
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Dr. Arden (James Cromwell) is the doctor you'd never want to get in a hospital. In the show he performs cruel and unusual surgeries to the poor patients at Briarcliff. His real-life counterpart, Josef Mengele, was equally as awful. Nicknamed The Angel of Death, Mengele worked in the Nazi concentration camps and was obsessed with physical abnormalities.
He would take blood and perform experiments on those who piqued his medical interest. He's also known to have kept body parts in general.
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In AHS: Hotel, Evan Peters's Mr. March holds a grand banquet for serial killers every Hallow's Eve. These killers all existed in real life and hold claim to some of the most heinous acts in American history. One of the vilest was Jeffrey Dahmer (played by Seth Gabel). In real life, Dahmer was known as the Milwaukee Cannibal and assualted, dismembered and cannibalized at least 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991.
Wes Bentley's Edward Mordrake Is A Famous Urban Legend (Freak Show)
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The real Edward Mordrake (played by Wes Bentley) truly existed, though the legend surrounding his unusual malformation is debatable. According to the 19th century English-born urban legend, Mordrake had two faces – a normal face and a face coming out of the back of his head that whispered evil things.
His second face allegedly forced his forward-facing face to commit heinous crimes. Mordrake killed himself at the age of 23 - possibly after his second face drove him insane.
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The Axeman portrayed by Danny Huston in Coven was a real-life serial killer who attacked at least 12 people within his year-long spree in the early 1900s. The Axeman of New Orleans was never caught, but we do know he loved jazz music (just like his character on AHS) and had an affinity for writing letters.
Though his motivation has never been proven, his crimes largely focused on Italian Americans, leading people to believe he was either racially motivated or tied to the mafia.
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Pretty much any killer depicted in media that has a penchant for wearing the skin of their victims must give credit to the original skin-taker, Ed Gein. Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs preferred to wear his victims in a woman-suit made to fit him, but AHS: Asylum's big baddie uses the skinned face of another person to hide his identity.
Bloody Face, AKA Dr. Thredson (Zachary Quinto), is a gruesome site with his literal "face-mask" and its all inspired from Gein's taste for skinning corpses and saving their skin for various uses.
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Kathy Bates's twisted character Madame LaLaurie terrorized the witches in Coven. In real-life, she allegedly was just as violent, so much so that she was investigated for cruelty to slaves in 1828. Since rules were rather lax back then (seriously, you could own other people), how bad must it have been for her to get investigated?
It turns out, the stuff she did was pretty darn horrific. LaLaurie attempted to turn a woman into a human caterpillar and would regularly cut out her slaves' intestines and wrap them around their bodies like belts. She also made them eat animal waste, just a quick sidestep from the Madame LaLaurie in Coven, who made soup from human waste.
Roanoke's Killer Nurses Were Based On The Lethal Lovers (Roanoke)
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Miranda and Bridget, the two nurses who opened an assisted living facility in Shelby and Matt's Season 6 farmhouse, were absolutely twisted. They were also totally real. The two characters were based on Gwen Graham and Cathy Wood, a pair known as "The Lethal Lovers." The couple worked at a nursing home in Michigan during the late 1980s and started killing elderly people based on the initials in their names. The goal was to spell out MURDER.
Eventually, it turned into an all-out murder spree with no rules or rhyme, and when the pair were finally caught, they turned on each other in hopes to achieve lenient prison sentences.
Miss Evers's Son Was A Victim Of The Real-Life Chicken Coop Murders (Hotel)
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Miss Evers (Mare Winningham) is an especially good maid - she can get blood out of anything - but her character is given poignant depth when the story of her deceased son is revealed in flashback in Season 5. It is revealed that Miss Ever's young son was abducted and murdered. The incident is based on an actual real-life case, the Chicken Coop Murders.
The case gained major media attention in the late '20s. Gordon Stewart Northcott was a chicken farmer turned serial killer in Wineville, CA. From 1926-1928, he abducted and murdered young boys with the help of his mother, Sarah Louise Northcott, and his nephew, Sanford Clark. At least three boys were killed at Northcott's hands, though there may have been more. All the bodies were found in Northcott's chicken coops.
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Tate Langdon, the charming but mentally-unstable teen ghost played by Evan Peters, has a plot deeply inspired by the shooting at Columbine High School. In 1999, teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 12 students and a teacher while injuring 21 more after bringing guns to school. They both committed suicided after the rampage.
Tate's shooting occurs in 1994 at Westfield High School. He murders 15 people and then is shot down by police in his home.
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AHS: Roanoke was based on a real-life colony that is one of America's oldest unsolved mysteries. In 1587, a colony of 115 people settled off the coast of North Carolina on Roanoke Island. After an attack by the Spanish Armada, founder John White sailed back to England to gather essential supplies for the colony. He returned three years later and found the entire colony had vanished without a trace.
The only thing left behind was the word "Croatoan" carved into a tree. This word has appeared at numerous sites where people have mysteriously disappeared throughout history. Potential theories behind their disappearance include cannibalism, infectious disease, and murder by Native American tribes.
The Lovable Pepper Was A Real-Life Sideshow Performer (Freak Show)
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Pepper is one of the most loveable characters in both Freak Show and Asylum. She and her husband Salty were inspired by Schlitze Surtrees (a.k.a. Schlitzie the Pinhead). Schlitze suffered from microcephaly, which left him with the cognizance of a three-year-old child who could only speak in single syllable words.
Throughout his career, he was often billed as a female because he chose to wear dresses. Just like his character in AHS, Schlitzie was beloved by those around him. In 1932, he landed a role in the film Freaks, and become somewhat of a household name.
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Lily Rabe made an appearance in American Horror Story: Hotel as serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Rabe's character had previously been played by Charlize Theron in the unsettling blockbuster Monster. Wuornos killed several men in Florida between 1989 and 1990, and was eventually executed by lethal injection.
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A lot of Freak Show's freaks were based in reality. Throughout history, those suffering from Ectrodactyly (Lobster Claw Syndrome) have been featured in freak shows, but Even Peters' character was inspired by one in particular. Grady Franklin Stiles, Jr. and his sideshow-performing family all suffered from Ectrodactyly. He was forced to become a freak show act, nicknamed the Lobster Boy, shortly after he was born and performed throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. Eventually, he became an alcoholic and murdered his future son-in-law.
Lance Reddick's Papa Legba Is A Staple Of Voodoo Culture (Coven)
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Papa Legba may not be real per say, but he's definitely a very important legend when it come to the practice of voodoo. Though Papa Legba is undeniably a villain in AHS, in real life he represents both good and evil. He's the message man between the living and the dead, and is often depicted as an old man with a cane and straw hat (AHS ramped up his look to include a creepy top hat instead).
AHS did get one thing right: Papa Legba's signature colors are black, white and red, which is evident in his striking appearance. In addition to facilitating conversation with the dead, Papa Legba presents people with choices and leads them along different crossroads. In American Horror Story, these paths aren't really ones we'd want to cross.
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The real Richard Ramirez took up shop in the very hotel that American Horror Story based their fifth season around. In Hotel, the serial killer (dubbed "the Night Stalker) shows up at Mr. March's serial killer dinner party. From 1984 to 1985, Ramirez robbed, assaulted and killed a number of residents of San Francisco and Los Angeles.
He lived in the Cecil Hotel for part of that time. The scariest part was that his victims were chosen at random and killed with no distinct method.
Kit And Alma Walker Were Inspired By Barney And Betty Hill (Asylum)
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According to American Horror Story producers, Kit and Alma Walker from Asylum were actually inspired by two very real people. Just like it was depicted in the series, Barney and Betty Hill were a mixed race couple. In 1961, the pair's alien abduction claims became highly publicized. Their story didn't just inspire AHS – they inspired the bestselling novel The Interrupted Journey and the TV movie The UFO Incident.
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Twisty the Clown's (John Carroll Lynch) tale of attempted suicide is gut-wrenching. We almost feel sorry for him after his life is ruined by accusations of child molestation. His character is deeply layered, but at the root of it all, he's inspired by a cold-blooded killer who warrants no sympathy at all.
John Wayne Gacy is one of the most infamous serial killers in American history and he used his alter ego, Pogo the Clown, to commit heinous crimes. In 1980, he was found guilty of assaulting and murdering at least 33 young males, who he buried in a crawl space underneath his home.
We also see John Wayne Gacy directly in AHS: Hotel at the Devil's Night dinner party. In perhaps a bit of referential casting, John Carroll Lynch plays Gacy in that episode, as well.
Lady Gaga's Wild Witch Is A Real-Life Legend (Roanoke)
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Lady Gaga's creepy Roanoke character Scáthach (Celtic for "The Shadowy One") may have never existed, but her legend runs deep. Scáthach is a sexually-charged female warrior and teacher in Irish mythology. She has magical strength and intense rage and is particularly adept in underwater fighting and pole vaulting. In addition to training female warriors, she allegedly sexually rewards male warriors at the end of their training.
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"Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done She gave her father forty-one." Those who love horror lore will be well acquainted with this parenticidal axe-murderer from 1892. In Asylum, Grace (Lizzie Brochere) has also killed her parents in such a fashion.
The Cult In Season 7 Is Based On The Smiley Face Murder Theory (Cult)
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That creepy smiley face the murderous clowns in Cult emblazon on every crime scene is actually inspired by a real-life series of murders, which may not actually be homicides at all. The Smiley Face Murders are not recognized by the law as fact and are widely ruled to be accidental drownings. Still, many believe the deaths encompassed in this theory were homicides performed on young men across America by a group of killers. Nearly all of the deaths had a graffiti smiley face somewhere near the crime scene.
Sarah Paulson's Dot And Bette Tattler Were Inspired By Real Conjoined Twins (Freak Show)
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Conjoined twins have long been a staple in a freak shows, but Dot and Bette were inspired by one of the most famous. Violet and Daisy Hilton, who were fused together at the pelvis, were born in England in 1908. It didn't take long for them to launch a booming but short-lived career after moving to San Francisco.
The pair was the subject of a documentary called Bound by Flesh: The Story of Violet and Daisy Hilton and starred in the 1937 film Freaks. Throughout the 1920s, they performed in vaudeville shows alongside major talent like Charlie Chaplin and Bob Hope. Eventually, their success waned and they ended up working at a grocery store to make ends meet.
The Zodiac Killer (Maybe) Appears Twice (Hotel And Cult)
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The Zodiac Killer makes his/her first appearance in AHS: Hotel at Mr. March's spooky Devil's Night dinner for murderers. Of course, the hooded killer's identity is never directly revealed, keeping with the historical truth that the Zodiac Killer was never discovered.
In AHS: Cult the show makes its first stretch on history by first exploring the story of Valerie Solanas - the woman who shot Andy Warhol - and then stretching history even further by theorizing that Solanas was the Zodiac Killer. Or at least, the show theorizes she led a group of women in a cult-like way toward the multiple killings that would be attributed to the single male figure of the Zodiac.
Valerie Solanas And Andy Warhol Showcase The Cult Of Celebrity (Cult)
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In the first of a couple of flashbacks to cult culture (if that makes sense) in Season 7, Evan Peters plays Andy Warhol and Lena Dunham plays his would-be assassin, Valerie Solanas. Here the historical figures play out their own true story of Solanas attempting to assassinate Warhol because she was mad he lost a script she wrote (and generally being quite misogynistic toward her.) The episode warps known history a bit later in the episode, but the two characters and their whacky tale are all too true.
Kathy Bates's The Butcher Was Based On The Real-Life Tomasyn White (Roanoke)
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There's not much known about the real-life Tomasyn White (named Thomasina White in AHS: Roanoke). There are no public records of her beyond her 1566 marriage to Roanoke governor John White. It's not even clear if Tomasyn accompanied her husband to America during one of his Roanoke expeditions or if she had a hand at the colony's alleged mysterious disappearance. It seems unlikely, therefore, that the real Tomasyn White was anything like her onscreen counterpart.
Anne Frank Was Not A Mental Patient In Real Life (Asylum)
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Most of us have read The Diary of Anne Frank in school, but nowhere did we hear about her descent into madness or her trip to an American asylum. That's because it didn't happen, unless you're watching American Horror Story's second season.
Anne Frank was a 15-year-old Jewish girl who painfully wrote about her terrifying experiences during the Holocaust. Frank is thought to have died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from typhus, but AHS makes a pretty compelling argument that she did in fact survive. Could Franka Potente's character, a mental patient named Charlotte who swears she's Anne Frank, really be the famed writer? It's certainly interesting to think about.
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Although Richard Ramirez had a cameo appearance in American Horror Story: Hotel, he became more of a star character in season 9. Real-life serial killer, Richard Ramirez, terrorized the Los Angeles area in the 1980s, and American Horror Story: 1984 just builds on that mythos. Both the onscreen version and the real-life Richard Ramirez were self-proclaimed Satanists and brutal, troubled killers. One major difference, of course, is the 1984 version was killed and then resurrected by the Devil himself.
