Top 10 Real Events That Inspired American Horror Story

In season 3, Danny Huston played The Axeman, a ruthless serial killer/jazz enthusiast. Scary and absurd as it might sound, he was not a work of fiction. The Axeman of New Orleans murdered half a dozen people between the summer of 1918 and the fall of 1919. While the murders are very real, the show took many liberties with the character given that the actual culprit was never caught. Though its legitimacy has been called into question, a letter, supposedly written by the Axeman, was published March 13th, 1919, promising to spare anyone in the presence of a jazz band that night. In fear, the citizens went to dancehalls or hired bands that evening.

While there were probably no forest spirits or angry ghosts, there was indeed a real colony on Roanoke that mysteriously up and vanished. The Roanoke colony was founded by Sir Walter Raleigh and was meant to be the first permanent English settlement in the New World. The colony was established in 1585, but when John White returned to the island in 1590, there wasn’t a soul there and the buildings had been taken down. White found the word “Croatoan” carved into a fence post, a possible clue that the colony had moved to nearby Croatoan Island. A search couldn’t be conducted at that time however, and the fates of the colony remain unknown.

Another popular “Coven” character is Angela Bassett’s Marie Laveau, a revered figure in the practice of Voodoo. And, like the Axeman of New Orleans, she is based on a historic figure who lived in New Orleans, in this case, during the 19th century. Not much is known about the real Marie Laveau. What we do know is that she worked as a liquor importer, hairdresser, and matchmaker. She also became known as the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans through her work in voodoo, and many successful runaway slaves credited Laveau for their escape. However, little is known about this aspect of her life, leaving the real Marie Laveau a tantalizing mystery.

In the second season of the show, Kit and Alma Walker, a loving interracial couple, are enjoying a night of sex and delicious roast when they are seemingly abducted by aliens. And while it’s not a direct adaptation of the real events, this storyline bears a striking similarity to the story of Betty and Barney Hill. Like Kit and Alma, Betty and Barney were an interracial couple who claim to have been abducted by aliens in a rural area in the early 1960s. Their story gained substantial media attention, and it became the first widely-known instance of a supposed alien abduction.

In the show’s second episode, Home Invasion, two students named Maria and Gladys are attacked by a home intruder. After dragging Gladys upstairs, the assailant forces Maria to don a nurse’s uniform, ties her up, and stabs her in the back. As show creator Ryan Murphy explains, this scene was somewhat based on the Richard Speck killings. Speck broke into a townhouse serving as a nursing student dormitory on the night of July 13, 1966 and murdered its eight occupants. Speck was sentenced to life in prison and died of a heart attack after serving 25 years.

Twisty is undoubtedly one of the show’s most grotesque and popular villains. He wears a terrifying mask that hides his disfigured jaw, commits horrible acts of violence and… he’s a clown. It doesn’t get much worse than that. Twisty strongly believes that it is his life’s work to be a clown and to entertain children, despite being a kidnapper and serial killer. And while it’s not a direct translation, Twisty bears a strong resemblance to real-life serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Gacy kidnapped and murdered over 30 teenage boys in the mid 1970s, but he also loved to entertain children with his clown alter-ego, Pogo the Clown.

James March is one of “American Horror Story’s” most deliciously vile characters. He is a serial killer who constructed an elaborate hotel and used it to murder and dispose of its occupants. However, the story gets even scarier when you realize that he was based on a real person. H.H. Holmes was a 19th century serial killer who constructed a mixed use building, including a hotel, near the 1893 World’s Fair Columbian Exposition. Like James March, Holmes would murder tenants and clients in the building using various devices scattered throughout the elaborate building, and send their corpses to the basement via secret chutes where he would either burn or dissolve their bodies in acid.

Like a lot of characters in the show’s third season, Kathy Bates’s psychotic, racist, slave-killing character, Delphine LaLaurie, was inspired by a real woman. While she was more commonly known as Madame Blanque, LaLaurie was a prominent socialite who was married three times to a royal officer, a banker, and a physician. She and her third husband kept slaves in their mansion, and there were widespread rumors that the slaves were cruelly mistreated. After a fire broke out in their home, bystanders found seven horribly disfigured slaves suspended by their necks in the slave quarters. Mobs of angry people subsequently destroyed the LaLaurie residence, forcing Delphine to flee New Orleans.

Season five’s Hotel Cortez not only took inspiration from H. H. Holmes’s murder castle, but also the infamous Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. Creator Ryan Murphy told a TCA panel that the season was greatly inspired by the story of Elisa Lam. Lam was staying at LA’s Cecil Hotel when she began acting erratically and mysteriously ended up in the hotel’s water supply cistern. Lam’s story isn’t the only weird thing to happen at the Cecil. The hotel quickly earned a reputation as a site for prostitution, drug deals, suicides, and murders, and serial killers Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger reportedly stayed at the Cecil while conducting their murders.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.

Daisy and Violet Hilton

Schlitzie

Grady Stiles

In the first season, an aspiring actress by the name of Elizabeth Short arrives at Dr. Curran’s doorstep for dental work. However, Short is subsequently raped, inadvertently killed, and bisected. Curran then disposes of her mutilated corpse in Leimert Park, where it is discovered by Betty Bersinger. And as grotesque as the situation is, Elizabeth Short was a real aspiring actress whose bisected corpse was in fact found in Leimert Park by one Betty Bersinger in 1947. Short would become known as The Black Dahlia (most likely named after the 1946 movie “The Blue Dahlia”), and her murder remains unsolved.