Random Facts You Didn't Know About 'American Horror Story' (31 items)

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  (#1) Naomi Grossman Was Once Kicked Off The Set Accidentally

  It takes Naomi Grossman over three hours to get into her costume and make-up to play Pepper, and when she's out of costume, needless to say, she looks pretty different. So much so, in fact, that she was once thrown off the set by confused security officers who didn't recognize her.
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  (#2) Meep Was Also In Season 1 (And Has A Surprising Day Job)

  When he's not pretending to bite the heads off chickens, Ben Woolf, that guy who played Meep on Freak Show, spends his day-to-day life (believe it or not) teaching core curriculum to school children.

  His occasional dabbling in show business didn't start with his portrayal of the hapless geek, however - aside from his assorted roles in smaller productions, Woolf also played the deformed mutant baby, Thaddeus Montgomery, on AHS season one.
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  (#3) Denis O'Hare Refused To Speak While Playing The Role Of Spalding

  In AHS: Coven, Denis O'Hare plays the butler, Spalding, at  Miss Robichaux's Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies. Spalding cut out his own tongue out of devotion and thus doesn't speak. To keep in character, O'Hare stayed mute on-set even while the cameras weren't rolling. He was functionally mute for production on several episodes of the season, only speaking up once Spalding began verbalizing on the show itself. 

  "It made it very difficult to kind of just navigate," O'Hare recalls. "People would sort of walk into me, they'd walk around me. I was like wallpaper. I would just stand there in my little corner, and people would not notice me. They wouldn't ask me things. They would break for lunch and not tell me."
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  (#4) James Cromwell's Son Played Him In A Flashback Scene

  If you were feeling kind of freaked out by the uncanny similarities between James Cromwell and that guy who plays the youthful version of his character in the flashback sequence from Asylum, rest assured you're not losing it. The actor was actually James Cromwell's son, John Cromwell, hence the eerie family resemblance.
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  (#5) Jyoti Amge Is Considered A Deity In India

  19-year-old Jyoti Amge, who plays Ma Petite, quickly became a lot of people's favorite character from Freak Show. Though her premiere in show business may seem thrilling to the rest of us, in Amge's home country of India, where the majority of the population is Hindu, she's widely regarded as a living incarnation of a goddess due to her unorthodox stature.

  Becoming an American television star is probably no big deal by comparison.
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  (#6) Kathy Bates's Baltimore Accent Was So Difficult She Had To Speak That Way At All Times

  Kathy Bates gets all the difficult accents in American Horror Story. A New Orleans drawl in Coven, a Baltimore accent in Freak Show, and her old world accent and dialogue in Roanoke. The Baltimore accent in Freak Show was by far the hardest to be consistent with. As a result, Bates would speak with the accent outside of the set as well while filming commenced.
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  (#7) The Ghosts From Season 1 Have Something In Common

  Some characters from Season 1 - Boggs, Greenwell, Stanley, Stapleton, and Gedman - are all named after former Boston Red Sox players.
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  (#8) Zachary Quinto Plays The Banjo

  Aside from being an actor and having amazing hair, Zachary Quinto is also a fanatical banjo aficionado who likes to whip out his banjo on-set and play songs for the cast and crew between takes.
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  (#9) The Same Guy Created The Opening Credits For Both 'AHS' And 'The Walking Dead'

  The opening credits are an important part of American Horror Story, since, aside from being skin-crawlingly unsettling, they also contain clues and riddles about what's going to happen, and what's already happening behind the scenes.

  It turns out that the show's trademark, jittery combination of live action stills and simple animation is the creative accomplishment of Kyle Cooper, the same genius imagination in charge of the similarly creepy opening credits for AMC's The Walking Dead.
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  (#10) Alma And Kit Walker Were Inspired By A Real-Life Couple

  It turns out that the Season 2 subplot about the couple getting taken by aliens was there for a reason. Well, sort of. It was based on a true (or, at least, "true") story.

  Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple living in New Hampshire in the early '60s, were, it turns out, the first people ever to widely disseminate an "alien abduction" story, and many common tropes in modern science fiction derive from their account.
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  (#11) Edward Mordrake Was A Real Man (With A Real Second Face)

  To be fair, surviving records of Mr. Mordrake's case in medical literature have been described as "apocryphal," meaning there's no clear evidence proving that his case was real. Supposedly, though, Mordrake was a young aristocrat born with a vestigial face on the back of his head, which he claimed, "never sleeps, but talks to me forever of such things as they only speak of in Hell." According to these accounts, Mordrake eventually took his own life.
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  (#12) Evan Peters Was Covered In Lubricant In Order To Get Into The Rubber Man Outfit

  It had to have been a little cumbersome getting in and out of that PVC suit, but you probably never imagined Evan Peters had to be slathered from head to foot in KY to wiggle in and out of it.
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  (#13) Neil Patrick Harris And David Burtka Were Originally Slated To Appear In Season 1

  You probably heard rumors about how Neil Patrick Harris and his husband David Burtka were threatening to show up on Freak Show, but you might not realize that the couple was originally supposed to appear on Season 1 as the embittered, undead gay couple.

  They turned it down, supposedly, because they had very recently played a feuding married couple in A Very Harold and Kumar 3-D Christmas, and they didn't want to start giving people ideas about their actual marriage.
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  (#14) The American Morbidity Museum Is Based On A Real American Museum

  The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, which has existed for many decades, is one of the only museums in the world that displays the skeletons, organs, and other physical remains of people throughout history. Among other specimens, the museum's collection includes the conjoined livers of famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng, the skeletons of a dwarf and a giant, and preserved slices of Albert Einstein's brain.
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  (#15) Eric Stonestreet Was Supposed To Return For 'Asylum'

  Modern Family's Eric Stonestreet memorably made a one-off appearance in Season 1 as the hapless prey of a masked figure. Stonestreet was slated to reappear on Asylum, but for some reason, his part in Season 2 was removed prior to filming, and no explanation was ever given.
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  (#16) The Cheerleader Played Evan Peters's Girlfriend On 'One Tree Hill'

  In Season 1, Kyle is confronted repeatedly by the ghosts of several people he offed, including a brunette in a cheerleader outfit. This cheerleader is actually Ashley Rickards, who played Evan Peters's girlfriend back when he had a role on One Tree Hill.
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  (#17) The Show's Creators Are Also Responsible For 'Glee' And 'Nip/Tuck'

  Given the show's decidedly morbid slant, it's not incredibly surprising that one of Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy's previous credits is the plastic surgery melodrama Nip/Tuck. If you haven't been doing your homework, though, it might shock you to learn that Ryan and Falchuk also worked together on the musical sitcom Glee. No wonder people on AHS are breaking out into song and dance routines all the time.
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  (#18) Edward Phillipe Mott Is Related To Dandy Mott

  Edward Philippe Mott (Even Peters) from American Horror Story: Roanoke is a distant relative to Dandy Mott (Finn Wittrock) from American Horror Story: Freak Show. 

  A historian on Roanoke stated:

  The house remained in the Mott trust for over a century, but it was said madness always ran in the family. The line ended in scandal when the last Mott died in south Florida in 1952.

  This is time period and location of the Freak Show season. 
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  (#19) Briarcliff Asylum Was Inspired By A Real (And Horrible) Place

  Briarcliff was inspired by quite a few very similar places operating in the mid-20th century. One institution in particular, though, the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York, was the subject of a series of media exposés during the late 1960's and early 1970's, which gradually revealed its deplorable living conditions and heinous disciplinary regimens to a shocked public.

  The "school" eventually closed down in 1987, almost 20 years after it was first publicly condemned.
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  (#20) The Show Uses A Lot Of Recognizable Music

  American Horror Story's creative team loves to sneak in subtle references to classic horror movies, and one of their favorite ways of doing this is by using borrowed music. So far they've affectionately ganked soundtrack elements from Carrie, What Lies Beneath, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Twisted Nerve, Psycho, and Candyman, to name just a few.
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  (#21) Real-Life Clowns Find Twisty Offensive

  There is a real, professional organization devoted to promoting clown welfare, and they are super unhappy about Freak Show's creative decisions regarding Twisty the Clown. Members of the Clowns of America International have gone on record protesting what they see as a harmful and insensitive depiction of clowning, which they fear will be harmful to their business, and damaging to the public reputation of clowns.
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  (#22) Frances Conroy And James Cromwell Were Married On Six Feet Under

  If you're a fan of HBO's Six Feet Under then you probably already know this, but AHS perennial Frances Conroy appeared on that show, too, as family matriarch Ruth Fisher. James Conroy, who appeared as the terrifying Dr. Arden on Season 2 of AHS, also appeared on Six Feet Under as Ruth's lover, and eventually problematic second husband, George Sibley.
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  (#23) Chris Zylka Passed Up A Role On 'AHS' Because He Didn't Want To Shave His Head

  Chris Zylka was briefly signed on to appear on Asylum, but he quietly changed his mind after learning the role would require him to sacrifice his lustrous mane of blonde hair for a season and go bald. Rather than replace Zylka, the show creators simply wrote his character out of the script.
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  (#24) The Season 1 House Is A Real Home In LA

  Rosenheim Mansion is located in Los Angeles's Country Club Park, just up the road from the similarly ostentatious family homes of the Del Amos and Dohenys (both of whom have a lot of stuff in Los Angeles named after them, even major streets).

  AHS wasn't the Rosenheim Mansion's screen debut, either - it had already been used as a shooting location for countless movies and TV shows, including an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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  (#25) The Axeman Was Real

  Okay, obviously no one can actually verify that there is (or was) literally a vicious ghost roaming the streets of New Orleans, but the slayings that inspired Danny Huston's character were definitely a real thing during the early 1900s. The letter mailed to the police,advising New Orleans residents to avoid a grim fate by hiring live jazz musicians was real too, and the request inspired one of the biggest popular hits of the era, Joseph John Davila's "The Mysterious Axeman's Jazz."
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  (#26) To Play The Antichrist, Cody Fern Read The Bible And Ayn Rand

  In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the actor stated:

  I did a lot of research and in different areas. I started off by reading the Bible. I’m not a religious person, but I read the Bible many years ago. So I read particularly the Old Testament. Not to offend anyone, but it’s quite a read. It’s true that it’s filled with rape and incest and murder and hatred. It’s a very black book. But in reading it, what became apparent to me is that people interpret this however they want.

  I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Atlas Shrugged shows when you have a singular vision of something and how quickly you can become attuned to that vision and devalue others quickly based on their principles and ideologies. 
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  (#27) Delphine Lalaurie And Marie Laveau Were Both Real Historical Figures

  There's no evidence that they ever met, but they did both exist in New Orleans around the same time, and certainly both women had reputations which preceded them, so it's likely they at least heard of each other. Marie Laveau was a famous Voodoo practitioner, and Delphine LaLaurie was a wealthy plantation owner known for her awful treatment of enslaved people.
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  (#28) Angela Bassett Also Played Cuba Gooding Jr.'s Mother In A Movie

  Angela Basset played Cuba Gooding Jr.'s sister in the sixth season of AHS, or at least an actor playing the role of his sister. Twenty-five years before Roanoke aired she played Gooding Jr.'s mother in Boyz n the Hood. Just goes to show her versatility.
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  (#29) The Seasons Connect

  Though it seems weird and unlikely, given the outrageous disparities in historical era and physical location, series creator Ryan Murphy has said that all of the seasons of American Horror Story take place in the same universe and are connected. The first character to appear on multiple seasons was Pepper, who was a Briarcliff resident on Season 2, and also appeared on Season 4 as a member of Elsa Mars's traveling freak show. Pepper is the same character with a single, unified chronology, and not just an alternate reality version of herself.

  Lana Winters also appeared in both Season 2 and Season 6. That's just the tip of the iceberg, there are even more ways the seasons connect.
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  (#30) The Show Uses A Lot Of Real Cases, Including The Black Dahlia

  Elizabeth Short (The Black Dahlia) was an aspiring actress whose remains were found in Los Angeles in 1947. The case was never solved, and to this day, the identity of Short's slayer remains a favorite topic of debate.
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  (#31) Lana Winters Exposé On Briarcliff Asylum Mirrors A Real Event

  Lana Winter's (Sarah Paulson) return to Briarcliff Asylum to expose the mistreatment of the patients is based on a real event. In 1968, NBC's Bill Baldini turned the cameras on Pennhurst State School to reveal the terrible state of the institute and how it treated its residents. The ground-breaking news piece led to the closure of the institute, as well a the release its patients.

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