Every season of American Horror Story takes inspiration from real characters and events, though making significant changes to them to fit the show’s style and tone, and American Horror Story: Asylum has many characters based on real-life people. After exploring the stories of the ghosts living in a haunted house in American Horror Story: Murder House, the series took the audience back to the 1960s in AHS: Asylum to see the horrific events that took place at the fictional mental institution Briarcliff Manor. Asylum mixed the horrors of social experiments, racism, and a serial killer with a supernatural element that might seem out of place: aliens.

American Horror Story: Asylum followed the stories of Kit Walker (Evan Peters), an innocent man arrested under suspicion of being the Bloody Face killer; Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson), a journalist whose investigation of Briarcliff led her to be committed to it; and Sister Jude Martin (Jessica Lange), head nun at Briarcliff whose beliefs were put to the ultimate test. American Horror Story: Asylum is widely considered the best season of the show, and it might make it more terrifying to know that some of its main characters were based on real-life people.

1Kit & Alma Walker – Barney & Betty Hill

Kit and Alma Walker (Britne Oldford) were a young couple who had to keep their marriage secret as it was an interracial relationship, which was stigmatized and illegal in the 1960s. One night, while at their home, Kit heard strange noises outside but when he went outside to investigate, he was startled by a blinding flash of light and a thunderous sound. Kit ran back into the house, only to find the objects in the living room levitating, after which he was pinned against the ceiling by an unseen force. Kit had a series of strange visions of green humanoids standing around him, but as Alma went missing after this event and his story was too strange, nobody believed him and he was, instead, believed to be the Bloody Face killer.

Kit and Alma’s story in AHS: Asylum was inspired by that of Barney and Betty Hill, an interracial American couple who claimed to have been abducted by aliens in 1961. According to the Hills, they encountered a UFO on September 19, 1961, while driving back home from a vacation. After observing a strange object in the sky, the Hills explained it rapidly descended toward their car, and Barney, using binoculars, claimed to have seen eight to eleven humanoid figures peering out of the craft’s windows. The Hills then drove away as fast as they could, but they heard a rhythmic series of beeping sounds, the car vibrated, and a tingling sensation passed through their bodies, after which they experienced the onset of altered consciousness. Another series of beeping sounds brought them back to full consciousness, and they realized they had traveled about 35 miles south and had spotty memories of the road. Their stories have been analyzed countless times and debunked as well.

2Grace Bertrand – Lizzie Borden

Grace Bertrand (Lizzie Brocheré) was a patient at Briarcliff who later became Kit’s second wife and mother of his son. Grace moved to America from France with her family when she was nine years old, but she was constantly raped by her father at night. When Grace told her stepmother about it, she told her to not say anything to anyone and bribed her with candy. One day, tired of the abuse, Grace murdered her father and stepmother with an axe, and as her stepsister, who witnessed the murders, refused to believe her father did so much harm to Grace, she testified that she killed them without a cause, so Grace was sent to Briarcliff.

Grace’s story in AHS: Asylum takes many elements from that of Lizzie Borden. The story of Lizzie Borden has inspired a number of movies, TV shows, and books, as her case received widespread publicity back in the late 1890s. On August 4, 1892, the bodies of Lizzie’s father, Andrew, and her stepmother, Abby, were found at their home, and Lizzie’s contradicting answers to police officers made her a suspect. After a long process and lots of theories on Lizzie’s motives and more, she was acquitted of the murders, but all these events followed her for the rest of her life. It has been speculated that Lizzie was physically and sexually abused by her father, that she and her maid had an affair and Abby had found them together (and that her maid confessed on her deathbed to have changed her testimony to protect Lizzie), and that the maid was the real murderer.

3Pepper – Schlitze Surtees

Pepper (Naomi Grossman) was a woman with microcephaly who performed at Fräulein Elsa’s Cabinet of Curiosities in American Horror Story: Freak Show, after which she was committed to Briarcliff Manor. After the death of her “husband” and performance partner, Salty, Pepper refused to keep performing and Elsa took her to live with her sister, Rita Gayheart, who along with her husband, mistreated Pepper. Rita and her husband killed their disfigured infant nephew and framed Pepper for it, after which she was convicted of murder and sent to Briarcliff.

Pepper was inspired by Schlitzie Surtees, an American sideshow performer who also appeared in a couple of movies, most notably the 1932 classic horror movie Freaks. Like Pepper, Schlitzie was born with microcephaly and intellectual disability, and was often presented in shows as female or androgynous to add to the mystique of his unique appearance. Schlitzie died in 1971 at the age of 70.

4Oliver Thredson/Bloody Face – Ed Gein

Dr. Oliver Thredson (Zachary Quinto) was a psychiatrist brought to Briarcliff to assess Kit’s competency to stand trial, but he ended up manipulating Kit into admitting to the murders Thredson committed, as he was the real Bloody Face killer. Among Thredson’s many crimes were the murder of Lana Winters’ girlfriend, Wendy, and raping Lana, who gave their son up for adoption. When Lana got out of Briarcliff, she used her pregnancy to trick Thredson into confessing his crimes, after which she killed him at his home.

Thredson has become one of the scariest characters of American Horror Story, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he was based on one of the cruelest murderers in American history: Ed Gein. Gein exhumed corpses from local graveyards and confessed to killing two women (Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden), and when the police raided his house after the disappearance of Worden, they found a truly horrific scene. Gein used the bodies of his victims and all the corpses he exhumed to make trophies, including a corset, bowls, leggings, masks, and a lampshade. Gein was found guilty of Worden’s murder but also legally insane, and he spent the rest of his life in a psychiatric institution.

5Lana Winters – Nellie Bly

Lana Winters was a journalist who after sneaking into Briarcliff to investigate what happened there, was committed to it as Sister Jude threatened her girlfriend, Wendy, to expose their relationship as it was considered taboo and illegal at the time, so she signed a statement claiming Lana was mentally ill. Thredson earned Lana’s trust and helped her escape, only to take her to his home, where he raped her. Lana eventually left Briarcliff for good and she not only got a confession from Thredson but also killed him, proved Kit’s innocence, and exposed Briarcliff and its staff’s cruelties. Lana also killed her and Thredson’s son, John, who confronted her about his past, as she knew he was following his father’s steps.

Lana Winters was based on Nellie Bly (real name: Elizabeth Cochran Seaman), an American journalist known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days and an exposé on a mental institution, in which he worked undercover. In 1887, she took an undercover assignment for the New York World for which she agreed to fake insanity in order to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum. After some obstacles while trying to get into the asylum, she spent 10 days there before being released at The World’s behest, and her exposé not only brought her fame but also led to the institution implementing reforms. Nellie Bly died of pneumonia in 1922 at the age of 57.

6Dr. Arden – Josef Mengele

Oliver Thredson wasn’t the only monster in American Horror Story: Asylum, as there was also Dr. Arthur Arden (James Cromwell), the physician and administrator at Briarcliff. Arden was a Nazi war criminal who experimented on various patients at Briarcliff, and was the one responsible for the altered humans in the surrounding forest. Arden had feelings for Sister Mary Eunice (Lily Rabe), who was possessed and thus convinced him of torturing Sister Jude and other patients, though that doesn’t excuse all the experiments, deaths, and torture he was responsible for.

Dr. Arden was based on Josef Mengele, an SS officer and physician during World War II known for the deadly experiments he performed on prisoners at the Auschwitz II concentration camp, earning the nickname “Angel of Death”. His best-known experiments were those on identical twins, with Mengele wanting to prove the superiority of the Aryan race through them. Mengele fled to Argentina after the war, and he eluded capture despite many international efforts to bring him to trial.