17 Disturbing Edgar Allan Poe Easter Eggs in "The Fall of the House of Usher"

The eldest son of the Usher family, Frederick or Freddie, gets sentenced to one of the most bone-chilling deaths. In the 1842 short story "The Pit and the Pendulum," the protagonist, trapped in a cell during the Spanish Inquisition, narrowly escapes a similar death by a slowly lowering and swinging edge of a pendulum. But Freddie isn't so lucky in Flanagan's iteration. He faces harsher consequences by Verna owing to his increasingly disturbing treatment of his wife, Morelle. In the opening moments of episode seven, we see a young Freddie transfixed by a clock with a cat's tail for a pendulum, which is just another piece of slow-burn foreshadowing on Flanagan's part.