The Most Bizarre American Horror Story Theories Out There

This is one of the more quaint theories and one that encourages me to cling to my shattered innocence after five seasons of this show. Reddit user SpaceCampDropOut suggests that all the AHS characters are merely good friends sitting around a campfire telling stories meant to spook the others. He posts: "Each person is a new story teller trying to out scare the next person. And each person uses the campers as characters in their stories which is why we keep seeing returning actors to the show."

Although this satisfies the Girl Scout in most of us, it's also a pretty disturbing thought to imagine your friends telling stories about your extremely violent murder.

Back when we were young and naive to the ways of Ryan Murphy, we didn't know we needed to watch AHS so closely. There were clues and hints all over the place and we didn't even know it.

According to an AHS wiki solely devoted to theories about Ben, the biggest clue of his mortal status comes in the episode "Afterbirth." In this episode, "there are flashes of Ben screaming the same things the ghosts are saying while he is alone in a room. In a close-up shot on his left hand you can see he is wearing a watch and ring that looks exactly like the ones Violet burned that we were led to believe belonged to Chad and Patrick."

Other theories suggest that Ben was murdered by his wife, Vivien, or that Vivien died in childbirth and he's in grief-induced delusion. You decide.

They're both handsome, dapper, charming, completely psychopathic, and homicidal. It's not too much of a stretch to think they could be related. A Redditor connected Dandy and Oliver, suggesting they have the same mother, Gloria, especially since she talks about killing running in the family in Freak Show. Then, Gloria gave up the evil doctor for adoption right after he was born. Oliver Thredson spent his young life in an orphanage, and that's probably where he picked up the last name. Since we don't know much about their father, maybe he is a murderous villain too.

This is thin, at best, but I guess it just depends on your feelings about aliens. The AHS wiki postulates the alien theory, with these pieces of evidence: aliens do strange experiments on humans like Arden does; when he visits Kit in his cell, Kit thinks he's being approached by an alien; and Shelley claims something is up with his genitals — alien?!

This one is more than a passing theory and has been legitimized by fans and critics alike. The site Red Herry compared AHS and the classic piece of literature, Dante's Inferno, while TVGuide explains how it all fits.

In case you're not up to speed on Italian Renaissance poetry, here's a quick summary: Inferno is a part of a longer, epic poem titled The Divine Comedy. Dante, the main character, and his guide, Virgil, travel through nine circles of hell, each assigned to differing kinds of sinners. Each circle is worse than the others, and the sinners in each circle are condemned to a fate that matches the sins they committed in their mortal lives.

It's a messy allegory, sure, but it helps that each season stands as its own vehicle, and each installment of the anthology centers around a unique place (Briarcliff, Fräulein Elsa's Cabinet of Curiosities, the Hotel Cortez, etc.). There's lots of quibbling about which season represents which circle of hell, since there's so much to sort out in terms of hellish and extreme storylines, so it's really whatever you want it to be.

Redditor sistergrimmer0220 sorts it out like this: Murder House is limbo; Asylum, lust; Coven, gluttony; and Freak Show, greed. Some folks agree with this, others don't, but either way, it's a pretty intricate way to talk about AHS.

Freak Show is arguably AHS's weakest season, but if you see it through the looking glass (see what I did there?) it holds up to the classic pretty well. Thismisspage started a thread on Reddit that reveals some of the more obvious parallels: Elsa's opium smoking is similar to that of the caterpillar; Dot and Bette are Tweedledee and Tweedledum; Dandy plays croquet just like the Queen of Hearts; and Twisty the clown wore a much creepier version of the Cheshire Cat's grin. Also, there's a ton of top hats (and in a ton of other seasons too), which calls to mind the Mad Hatter.

Incidentally, all the top hats were just Ryan Murphy's way of hinting at the season five theme of Hotel. Murphy told Entertainment Weekly that top hats are an allusion to the 1935 film Top Hat, starring Fred Astaire, that is also set in a hotel, and to Lady Gaga's album with Tony Bennett, Cheek to Cheek (which is also a song from the film). Because Gaga deserves every mention she can get.

Since so many of the seasons have some kind of connection to Massachusetts, the setting of the notorious witch trials, some fans think that Salem might be the origin story for all the seasons.

Huffington Post connects the seasons to Massachusetts like this: in Coven, the witches are direct descendants from those persecuted in the trials, and that Queenie is related to Tituba. Murder House's Harmon family relocates from Boston, much to their horrifying regret, and Asylum puts Briarcliff on the outskirts of the New England town. It's not too far a leap to think that maybe all the AHS universes could have been created in Salem.

Madison arrives in Coven as a spoiled, rich California girl who turns out to be a really powerful witch. Vulture suggests she's related to the original Murder House owners, the Montgomerys. Emma Roberts's fortune-teller character in Freak Show, Maggie Esmerelda, could be the stopgap that connects the Montgomerys of the '20s to the Madison in the present. After all, maybe powers are inherited.

This is a juicy one. Redditor LambicLifeBlood thinks that Jessica Lange's characters Elsa and Jude are related based on a scene with Elsa and Maggie the fortune teller, who "mentions a woman that looks like her, who took away all her fame. It seems she’s talking about Marlene Dietrich or maybe she’s talking about a twin sister, Sister Jude?”

This could also account for the Pepper's relationship with the two women in the separate universes.