Sam Strange’s American Horror Story Ghost Primer

It seems my TV show, American Horror Story has been confusing a lot of people, so I thought I would send out this primer on who the ghosts are and how the ghosts work within the show's deeply planned out mythology.

So here it is:
American Horror Story is about a house that's filled with ghosts. Everyone who goes into the house will inevitably become a ghost, so when I say it's filled with ghosts, I really mean it.

Some of the ghosts are other ghosts, too. So it can get confusing. One ghost can change his body size so it fits a really big rubber suit. If there's ever a lady living in the house he can rape her and she won't know who he is because of his rubber suit, which means it's not really rape.

The baby he makes with his rape will be Satan. But not the kind of Satan anyone needs to get that worked up over. Just a baby ghost, really.

There's a maid ghost who is also actually multiple ghosts. One of her ghosts is an old lady with a bum eye because a bullet through the eye is what killed her. But if a dude looks at her she becomes a hentai ghost. So two people can look at her and each will see a different ghost. If a kid sees her it will see a Mrs. Santa ghost.

She was shot in the eye because a guy was trying to rape her. He was subsequently shot in the head. His brains flew out the window and broke through the window of an adjacent house, so he didn't get to be a ghost.

Kurt Cobain's ghost lives in the house as well. But it's young Kurt Cobain, so he looks and acts different. When he was alive he shot up his school just like Kurt Cobain and killed himself afterwards just like Kurt Cobain too. He can sometimes change his body shape to fill a rubber suit and rape ladies to make Satans.

Some people are ghosts who are alive. There's an old lady who lives next door. The house used to be hers and all her kids died inside of it. Because all her kin are ghosts, it makes her a co-ghost. Co-Ghosts act as a bridge between ghost people and non-ghost people. Having one foot in each world gives her a lot of power over events. She steals to help the ghosts pay their ghost mortgage, which mirrors mortgage rates in the non-ghost world regardless of the house's value on the ghosts' housing market.

There's also a guy with half a face. His name is Bernie. He set his wife and kids on fire when he lived in the house a long time ago, so all his kin are ghosts, too. The house would have burned down but all the other ghosts acted fast and put it out.

That's not even the only way that happened. Instead of killing his whole family, his crazy wife killed herself and her kids, while he fought to break down an unlocked door to save them. In both versions, the death of his family happened because he was having an affair with the lady next door, the other co-ghost. Except for in the two other versions of the story that are identical except that they have a completely different motive.

Two of the ghosts are gay men, forced to forever live with each other under the same roof in a broken relationship. WELCOME TO MARRIAGE, FAGS! One of the gay ghosts has a character. His main character trait is telling us the character traits of the other gay ghost, who really has no noticeable character traits at all.

Bernie also has a mutant son in the attic. Someone else has mutant son in the basement. This might be Bernie's mutant, too. Now they are mutant son ghosts. But they're shy around the other ghosts, so we don't see them as much.

There's a flapper lady ghost. Her husband took their dead baby and tried to sew him into other dead babies to make a Frankenstein Baby, but he didn't even make a Frankenstein Baby Ghost. The flapper lady killed herself, but her husband lived on so he isn't a ghost. And all this happened so long ago that he isn't even a co-ghost. Unless he is. One or the other. Or both. It's extremely possible that a co-ghost can be a full ghost too.

If you are born with Down Syndrome but live near the house, you will only LOOK like you have Down Syndrome. These people also have the power of a co-ghost even though they are fully not-ghost.

If they die in close proximity to the house, however, they lose all these privileges and just become a Down Syndrome ghost.

The rubber suit ghost is straight. It did not want to rape the gay men, so it killed them. That's how they died. They were in the house when they died. That's why they're ghosts.

One guy once killed two girls in the house. So now there are two girl ghosts in the house. They are both nerds. One's a nerd nerd. The other is a nurse nerd. They had three sisters, but they were not killed because they were at a concert.

Three guys, two of which were girls, broke into the house to recreate the killings that other guy did years before. They were not successful, however, because the ghosts killed them. Now they are ghosts. There is a lot of tension.

Kurt Cobain shot up his school. The people that he killed are ghosts in the house as well. If you are killed by someone who will later become a ghost in the house, you will become a ghost too. These ghosts want to haunt the other ghosts. So there is a ghost fight brewing.

Ghosts cannot speak to the living. Ghosts can have sex with and kill the living, though. Humans cannot harm ghosts unless the ghosts are having a ghost fight. In that case, humans can kill ghosts. A killed ghost always comes back to life. But if they come back to life, they are doomed to die because they are in that house.

There are twin ghosts. They have red hair and break things. But only ghost things. Unless you think of people as things. Because the ghost twins can break people.

Ghosts can go wherever they want and do whatever they want to do, but only on Halloween. They are frozen in place for twenty-four hours on Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Labor Day.

When a new family moves into the house, each and every one of these ghosts will interact with them. They can do this in ghosty and non-ghosty ways. Because there are so many ghosts doing this, the family may have trouble figuring out which ghosts to fall in love with.

When a family member dies, there is a small grace period in which they do not know they are a ghost. In this time they are granted all the privileges of a living person. If they die during this grace period, they get to come back to life. This happens all the time, but no one ever knows it.

So that's it. Pretty simple really. American Horror Story just finished its first season, so now is as good a time as any to get caught up. Last week would have been as good a time as any, as well.

(three stars)