The World's Worst Mom Brings An Adorable Little Girl To American Horror Story's Hell House

Witch Of You Forgot The Snacks?

What's the occasion? The human sacrifice Shelby wandered into/screamed up at the end of the premiere last week. Kathy Bates's character is presiding, and though we don't get the whole story on what the sacrifice did to end up roasted over a spit with a pig's head over his own, I guess it's worse than hitting someone with your car, because Bates's lady seemed pretty whatever about Shelby running her over.

What are the refreshments? None that we see, though I assume the guy is being spit-roasted as part of a colonial luau.

Whose big public scene will everyone be talking about tomorrow? That looky-loo Shelby. Make an engraving, it'll last longer! Shelby's such a mess that she scrambles back to the road, where Lee almost drives into her, but she stops just short...

...giving Shelby the perfect opportunity to be a drama queen.

Matt Wants To Move Out But Shelby Doesn't

Matt comes to see Shelby in the hospital (where personnel heard her crazy-ass story and, reasonably, checked to make sure she wasn't on hallucinogens, which she wasn't) with flowers and a teddy bear and promises that they will find somewhere else to live. But Shelby wants to stay! They can't let those hillbillies scare them away from the house -- not when they spent every cent they had on it!!! Fans of this argument will really enjoy this episode because, spoiler alert, it's not over!

Fleur Du Mal

Matt Has Changed His Mind, Now Agrees With Shelby That They Should Not Move

Matt won't lose his and Shelby's savings (though, let's be real: the yoga teacher probably didn't contribute all that much to them) to the inbred bigots who apparently live all around them. They'll fight their antagonists until they can sell! And I guess in the meantime they'll work on making much-needed upgrades? You just know the HVAC in that place is a fucking nightmare.

Matt And Shelby Learn A Tough Lesson About Wandering Off The Trail

Do you think when Kathryn VanArendonk wrote this post for Vulture about how dark TV shows are right now, she could have had any presentiment about the darkness that was about to envelop, like, 3/4 of every episode of American Horror Story? I get that it's a show about a haunted house, so a lot of the creepy shit has to take place at night. But whenever the characters race into the woods, in the blackest night, with nothing but a couple of extremely inadequate flashlights to illuminate the scene, I really get pissed at Ryan Murphy for wasting my precious, ever-dwindling number of TV watching minutes with SHIT I LITERALLY CANNOT ACTUALLY WATCH.

Anyway, Shelby hears creepy pig noises outside in the middle of the fucking night and goes out to investigate, and since Matt fails to stop her he feels obliged to follow her, and after what feels like twenty minutes of migraine-inducing handheld camera footage and a lot of the protagonists yelling each other's names...

...they just happen to end up in the clearing Shelby'd wandered into the other night, and though there aren't any witches currently torturing anyone to death, the evidence that it had happened remains. "This was beyond having a cross burned on your lawn," Interview Matt intones. OH, IT IS? YOU THINK? Matt uses the baseball bat he carried out there to knock down the structure, while Interview Matt comments, "There was something demonic about it." Hmm, yeah, something -- hard to put your finger on it, though, right?

R.I.P. Margaret

So then the cops get called out to the Miller estate AGAIN to look into the spit and pig head and whatever else, the sheriff wearily promising to go question the Polks and to post a 24-hour protection detail in the driveway. The Millers are pacified and feel like they can finally get some sleep, but it doesn't last, as Matt is awakened by the sound of a landline phone ringing, approximately 500 miles away from his bedroom. When he gets down there, all he can hear is a faint (you might even say GHOSTLY) woman's voice murmuring, "No. I don't want it. Please stop." This would already be creepy enough...

...but then the show has to take that one step further and show us THE PHONE ISN'T EVEN PLUGGED IIIIIIIIN. I guess the point of this is for Matt to be persuaded that it's not actually hillbillies fucking with him, but still: we all figured out there wasn't a live human drunk-dialing the Millers already, thanks.

Anyway, even after Matt finishes with his phone call, the voice doesn't stop: he follows the sound to an adjacent room, where two evilly grinning nurses in dirty uniforms are standing over an old lady named Margaret who won't take her medicine. Only one thing for it!

Interview Matt was sure he was dreaming! We watch as the taller nurse gets out a can of red spray paint and tags the wall with an "M, FOR 'MARGARET'!!!!"

Ugh, millennials.

Oh Cool, Flora's Been Left Alone Again

"Flora invented her own special version of hide and seek when she was three," Lee tells us. "She wouldn't tell us that we were playing....Part of the fun for her was seeing how long it would take us to realize she was hiding."

Back In The Drink

For some reason, that scaredy-cat Mason, Lee's husband, is put off by talk of the invisible girl who's planning to kill his daughter, so he removes her from the house, informing Lee that Flora will never return there and that he's going to go to court to revise their custody arrangement on the basis of LEE BROUGHT THEIR KID TO A FUCKING GHOST HOUSE. Flora cries; Lee begs Mason to relent, but it's no use.

Apparently Lee fell off and rolled into a gutter, because the next we see her, she's apparently been up all night drinking and is so shitfaced that she's lost control of her motor functions and dropped a bowl on the floor. Also?

Lee denies having thrown the Millers' into knives the ceiling for drunken funsies, but it seems like even she knows she's not the most credible witness in her own defense. Although, on the other hand, if she did throw the knives with that much force and accuracy while fifty-eight sheets to the wind? Not bad.

After Matt puts Lee to bed, telling her to get her shit together, he goes down to the kitchen, where Shelby is gazing out the very cloudy window at a figure in the yard. Since at this point she may not trust the evidence of her senses 100% of the time, she asks whether he can see "her" (I'm amazed that she could assign the person or item or possibly tree a gender, but sure); Matt says he can.

Like a couple of fucking morons who have surely gotten overconfident in daylight, Matt and Shelby go outside to investigate the spot where the girl was standing and find a hatch. Looks like something you'd definitely want to board up and never enter, right? RIGHT?!

Upstairs, Lee is writhing around, but starts to see the two nurses standing at the foot of her bed...just for a second. When they've blinked away, Lee staggers out to the hall...

...which seems pretty chill, nbd, just waggling bloody pigtails nailed to the wall, that's how they're decorating in Echo Park.

And of COURSE Matt and Shelby the dipshits have climbed down into the hatch to see what's shaking in the cellar. There's evidence that someone had been living there; Interview Matt decides that the girl had been standing on it to lure them out there not as a trap, but so they'd find the video camera, but why?!

Rapid-Fire Exposition Delivered By The Lunatic On The Camera From The Cellar (Also The Lunatic From The Video Lee And Shelby Watched In The Basement Last Week)

• His name is Dr. Elias Cunningham.
• He's got wounds on his neck from SOMETHING.
• He's been driven from the house in terror of a malevolent force there that intends to kill him.
• So he's been living in the cellar instead.
• Today is October 11, 1997.
• This recording may be his last testament.
• Cunningham is a professor at Bradley University.
• He came to the house two months ago to begin work on a true crime book.
• His initial subjects were two nurses/sisters: Miranda and Bridget Hayne.
• In 1998, they were suspected but never proven to have killed two patients in the assisted living facility, in Rochester, where they worked.
• They quit before they could be investigated, moved to North Carolina, and opened a facility of their own...IN THE GHOST HOUSE.
• Before that, the house had been empty for fifteen years.
• The family who lived there before THAT suddenly vacated, leaving all their shit behind and no forwarding address.
• They specifically sought patients whose families didn't care about them and were just looking to warehouse them.
• "But the most bizarre criterion for accepting a patient had to do with the letter of their first name."
• tl; dr: Miranda and Bridget killed patients in order to spell out "MURDER."
• (Pretty basic, ladies.)
• Cunningham found Miranda's diary, in which she wrote that she and Bridget came to believe that each life they took would "add a lifetime to their passion."
• On October 29, 1989, the cops came to investigate the facility after even some of these uncaring jerk relatives could no longer ignore the fact that no one there was answering the phones anymore.
• Miranda and Bridget were gone, leaving behind no personal effects.
• Hella corpses, though!
• Bridget and Miranda were never found.
• All they left on the wall was an unfinished word: "MURDE"
• No one could ever totally cover up the word on the wall.

LOL so then Matt FINALLY catches up to the rest of us and figures out that "MURDE" is under the wallpaper in the room where he just saw Margaret get shot in front of him the other night.

YEP, GOOD JOB.

• Cunningham doesn't think the nurses left: he thinks they were stopped by something in the house or the woods or the air before they could take their final victim.

Then there's a very Blair Witchy (slow, barely visible) segment of the video when Cunningham goes back into the house and yells at WHATEVER, "Show yourself!" And it does, for a second, I guess?

Now Everyone Wants To Move Out Of The Murder House

Having Dr. Cunningham's crazy monologue capped off by this...

...has convinced both Matt and Shelby that it's time to go. Since they bought the house from the bank, they want the bank to take it back and refund their money, but the bank guy -- who, hilariously, they've apparently forced to come to the house to have this meeting. He's basically like, it was on you to do investigate the house before you bought it, and Shelby's like, we couldn't because you changed the address on the house, and Bank Guy's like sorry not sorry byeeeeeee.

Matt And Shelby Make Their Peace With Living In The Murder House

No point talking more about moving when you're trapped because you're bad at real estate and apparently also at saving money!

And then Lee rolls up with Flora in the back seat. Whoops! This disgraced cop is going to be even more disgraced when it comes out that she's committed a felony by kidnapping her daughter!

Shelby takes Flora into the next room to do her homework so that Matt and Lee can talk, which is when Matt determines that Lee didn't drive drunk with Flora in the car. Soon enough, Shelby wanders back in so that Lee and Matt can hear her half of a call from Mason about...his missing daughter? She manages to placate him enough that it doesn't sound like he's actually going to press charges.

So Flora's been left alone in what has now been CONFIRMED to be a fucking murder house AGAIN, which is when she sees a new playmate outside beckoning her to come outside! Or possibly the same playmate: WHY IS THIS SEASON SO FOGGY?!

In the kitchen, a relieved Lee goes to say goodbye to Flora before Mason comes to pick her up, but of course, Flora's gone, FUCKING DUH.

All of the adults tear ass outside to try to find her, racing through the woods and past more pigtails...

...and then Lee finds, let's say, a trace of her? Flora really is good at hide and seek!