Ms. Evers Lost Her Son To A Real Serial Killer

Mare Winningham's new character of Ms. Evers on American Horror Story: Hotel has so far only done one thing, and that's clean up after Mr. March's messes again and again. She's in charge of doing his laundry, every time he bloodies something up, and she shares a deep connection with him, judging from the fact that the two took place place in a murder suicide together. But, what brought her to Mr. March in the first place? During AHS: Hotel's Halloween episode, "Devil's Night," we learned that there might have been something else entirely to Hotel Cortez. Back in the 1920s, Ms. Evers' son was abducted and murdered, and the story is just as gruesome as you can image. It's also real.

AHS loves to draw from real life inspiration, and for "Devil's Night" they turned to the worst of the worst: serial killers. Back in the 20s, there was one serial killer named Gordon Northcott, who was responsible for the "Wineville Chicken Coop Murders," as the papers soon coined them. In 1929 Northcott was convicted of killing three boys (that was all they could prove), though many more bodies were found in a mass grave underneath his chicken coop, but by that time they were just bones.

How does Ms. Evers fit into all of this? As we see during "Devil's Night," back in the '20s she took her son trick-or-treating and dressed him as a ghost. She turned her back for a second, and her son was lured away by a hooded man (the hood was part of his Halloween costume). By the time Ms. Evers realized, it's too late. Her son was gone, and she started yelling for him frantically.

His abduction, and the aftermath we see play out in black and white, certainly mimics the real life Northcott story. It is also eerily similar to the same way John and Alex lost their son, Holden. So, it certainly gives John and Ms. Evers something horribly sad to talk about, and it explains a little about Ms. Evers obsession with keeping sheets clean. Perhaps she tries to get blood out of sheets as a way of trying to scrub away the memory of her son in his own white sheet ghost costume getting lured to his death. Yeah, that's dark but so is AHS.

Image: Frank Ockenfels/FX