While I'm doubtful that the story that is getting a dramatic reenactment in American Horror Story Season 6 is real, it is undebatable that the Roanoke Colony truly did exist. Since Season 6's theme is My Roanoke Nightmare and is located in North Carolina, this season is most definitely going to pull from the historical story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke from the 16th century. This wouldn't be the first time that Ryan Murphy has combined his fiction with truthful elements from real life and I can't wait to see how he'll mix the present day story of Matt and Shelby with this historical mystery.
In Season 5's American Horror Story: Hotel, one of my favorite parts was when the real-life serial killers came to the Hotel Cortez on Halloween. Maybe that's because I have a truly unhealthy fascination with reading entire Wikipedia pages about serial killers to freak myself out for weeks, but the blend of Murphy's fictional characters — like John Lowe and James March — with real people — like Aileen Wuornos, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Richard Ramirez — was a stroke of genius that tapped into people's natural fascination with true-life, horrific crimes. Hotel took this idea of mixing truth and fiction even further later in the series by having film legend Rudolph Valentino be a vampire in the fictional series.
Because Murphy has already proven he's unafraid to play with the past, Season 6 seems poised to do the same. Although the Season 6 premiere did not explicitly refer to the Lost of Colony of Roanoke, where over 100 settlers disappeared in the 1500s, the modern characters of Matt and Shelby are in a remote home in North Carolina and the title is My Roanoke Nightmare — so what else are fans to expect?
While a lot less is known about what happened to those Roanoke colonists than the serial killers featured in Hotel, the Outer Banks, North Carolina website lists some of the identities of the missing colonists. The leader of the colony, John White, went to England for supplies and returned to Roanoke three years later to find it abandoned with his daughter Eleanor Dare, his son-in-law Ananias Dare, his granddaughter Virginia, and the Indian chief Manteo missing, along with everyone else. Considering Eleanor gave birth to Virginia in Roanoke (the first English child born in America), she seems like a perfect character for Murphy to reinterpret since he sure loves his creepy pregnancies and births. John White could also be a character in My Roanoke Nightmare as he is the only person of the original colonists that history knows where he went to.
The premiere of Season 6 focused on Shelby and Matt's story, but FX CEO John Landgraf told reporters that Season 6 would take place "in the present, with echoes of the past," according to TV Guide. And those echoes of the Lost Colony of Roanoke are surely going to haunt modern day couple Shelby and Matt if the title of the season is to be believed.
Images: FX (2)
