American Horror Story is capable of terrifying audiences with fictional concepts, but what real-world events inspired its fifth season?
The fifth season of Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy’s smash hit, American Horror Story follows a theme similar to its first. Its first season, Murder House, told the story of a haunted property that harbors the ghosts of anyone who dies there. At first glance, Hotel is another retelling of this story, but it draws from some real-world inspiration.
Back in 2015, Murphy spoke with Deadline about the inspiration for American Horror Story: Hotel. “It’s based in the hotel in horror movies and horror tropes,” Murphy said. “We’ve researched several real-life hotels in downtown LA where absolutely horrifying things happened. Murder House I thought was a very primal season because everybody’s greatest fear is about the bogeyman under the bed in their house, and this feels similar to me in that when you check into a hotel, there are things beyond your control.”
One of the inspirations Murphy refers to is the Cecil Hotel located in downtown Los Angeles. In 2011, the Cecil Hotel was renamed the Stay on Main, and it became a Historical-Cultural Monument in 2017. The infamous building has earned a great deal of recognition over the past year after Netflix released a documentary titled, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. The four-part docu-series relays the true story of Elisa Lam whose body was found in one of the hotel’s rooftop water tanks on Feburary 19, 2013. Her death was ruled as an accidental drowning by authorities, though the circumstances surrounding her disappearance and death have spurred many theories.
American Horror Story: Hotel is the first season of the franchise without veterans Jessica Lange and Frances Conroy. Instead, Lady Gaga joined the cast to play the lead role of The Countess. Hotel is set at the fictional Hotel Cortez in Los Angeles. Despite being built out of a twisted form of love, the Hotel Cortez has earned a reputation for being a place where sketchy things take place. Amidst the antics of the season’s fictional Ten Commandments Killer, Hotel features the appearances of real criminals including the Night Stalker, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Aileen Wuornos, and the Zodiac Killer. The strange occurrences at the Hotel Cortez are chalked up to the vampires that control the hotel and the ghosts that roam the halls. As the vampires lure people in to feed on, those that die on the grounds are trapped inside.
The Cecil Hotel doesn’t have rumors of vampires presiding over the premises, though it does have an incredibly dark history aside from the death highlighted by the Netflix docuseries. Since its construction in the 1920s, the Cecil Hotel has been the location of an alarming number of suicides and peculiar deaths. Cecil is also known for housing Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger when he arrived in the United States. Richard Ramirez, otherwise known as the Night Stalker, is also said to have stayed at the Cecil Hotel while committing murders in the mid-80s. Given the inspiration American Horror Story’s fifth season drew from Cecil, the inclusion of Ramirez at the Devil’s Night dinner was likely intentional.
Over the years, many people have jumped from the windows of Cecil and many remain unidentified today. One of the hotel’s most infamous stories is Pauline Otton’s in 1962. Otton jumped from her ninth-floor window after an argument with her estranged husband, landing on George Gianinni, a 65-year-old pedestrian. Otton’s fall resulted in both Gianinni’s death and her own. Prior to this, Dorothy Jean Purcell awoke in the middle of the night in 1944 and gave birth to a baby boy in the bathroom. Purcell believed the baby was stillborn and threw the child out of the hotel’s window. Coroners determined that the baby was born alive and Purcell was charged with murder. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity in January 1945.
Another infamous and still unsolved crime occurred at the Cecil Hotel in 1964. “Pigeon Goldie” Osgood was a long-term resident of the Hotel and she was found murdered in her hotel room. Osgood had been stabbed, sexually assaulted, and strangled. A man was arrested for her murder after being found walking through Pershing Square in clothes covered in blood but was ultimately cleared of the crime. Elizabeth Short, commonly referred to as The Black Dahlia, was rumored to have been spotted at the bar of the Cecil in 1947, days before she was found murdered nearby. While this rumor has been disputed by some sources, Short and her murder were featured in American Horror Story: Murder House.
Like the story behind Falchuk and Murphy’s Hotel Cortez, the Cecil Hotel was built with honest intentions. The 19-floor, 700-room hotel was meant to be a place for prospering businessmen to stay while in the city. After the United States fell into the Great Depression, Cecil became a hotspot for secret rendez-vous, criminals, and the sordid reputation that remains linked with the property. With an alarming rate of homeless in the area, the Cecil became a place of residence for some on Skid Row. In mid-December 2021, Cecil reopened as a form of affordable housing in a partnership between Simon Baron Development and Skid Row Housing Trust.
American Horror Story: Hotel is typically considered one of the show’s more average seasons. Many find the theme unable to compete with its previous installments of Murder House, Asylum, Coven, and Freak Show. The true horror of the Cecil Hotel that helped inspire Hotel does make the season of the most terrifying to watch.
