'American Horror Story' Recalls Real-Life Hotel Horror Stories

This season, Ryan Murphy’s bloodshot gaze switches from witches, asylums, and freak shows to hospitality—or rather, the lack of it. American Horror Story’s fifth iteration, premiering tonight on FX, takes place in and around the fictional Hotel Cortez, a rundown Art Deco pile in Los Angeles. It’s Murphy’s most ambitious season yet, with an entire two-story building created from scratch on a Hollywood soundstage, where his regular crew of rep players like Sarah Paulson and Denis O’Hare can act out the creator’s gory, surreal fantasies. This season, those include forests of hypodermic needles, a serial killer whose drill bit has been customized in ways that would make Freud blush, and the misguided belief that new series headliner Lady Gaga can act well enough to evoke anyone other than, well, Lady Gaga.

But like so many of Murphy’s showy doses of slasher clichés, a hotel is an astute setting for a series like this. It co-opts our primal, but much tamped-down, anxiety about staying in strange new places. Somehow, hotels are venues where rules don’t apply, forever the site of tragic murders or mishaps. Take the Beverly Hilton (Whitney Houston’s drowning), the Chelsea Hotel (Nancy Spungen’s stabbing), the The Hollywood Roosevelt (Marilyn Monroe’s spirit hangs out in one of the mirrors), or even the Casa Monica Resort & Spa in St. Augustine, where the fourth floor is often filled with the sound of ghostly children running.

Murphy has acknowledged that this season was inspired by real-life events, namely the still-unsolved mystery of Elisa Lam. The 23-year-old was last spotted in the elevator of the supposedly haunted Hotel Cecil in Los Angeles, a building near Skid Row that dates back to the 1920s and has long had grisly associations. Lam disappeared in early February 2013; her body was found later that month, naked in the rooftop water tank, after guests complained about the taste of tap water in their rooms. This story hasn’t deterred some hotels from proudly touting tie-in packages to the show: Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel Chicago , for example, is apparently a regular haunt of Lady Gaga's (her fiance, actor Taylor Kinney, lives there while filming Chicago Fire) and so has launched a Halloween package including an “American Horror Story–inspired room” starting at $399 (hopefully, the hypodermics are extra).

Celeb Hotel Guests From Hell (and a Few Who Made Headlines for Other Reasons)

Thankfully, I’ve never seen a ghost in any corridor or hotel bedroom, nor chanced on Lady Gaga late night in any elevators. I have had one hotel experience, though, that was gorier than anything Ryan Murphy might conjure—and not just because of the silver dollar–sized bloodstain on my sheets that remained from night to night, despite repeated calls to housekeeping. Solo, en route to New Zealand, I’d snagged the cheapest room at a five-star resort on Bora Bora. The $900 nightly rate for my bungalow apparently included those gently used sheets, a broken plug in the bath, broken outdoor shower (never repaired, either), and screens missing from two of my four mosquito-beating doors.

The biggest trauma, though, wasn’t physical but emotional. I was already well aware that Tahiti was a honeymoon factory; traveling alone to this sun-soaked Noah’s Ark would mark me out. But I hadn’t anticipated that the staff would seize every opportunity to highlight my sad, lonesome state, with gusto. “Just… one for breakfast?” asked the hostess, nonplussed, every morning. “But there must be two of you. There are always two people. I have two garlands,” fumed the boat transfer captain, as the spare lilies jiggled in his hands agitatedly. “You’re on your own?” said the pool attendant quizzically when I refused a second towel, silently. The only upside was the welcome cocktail in my room—make that cocktails.As a seasoned, perhaps even grizzled, solo traveler, even I struggled to retain my self-confidence in the situation; after that stint of R&R, I needed extra TLC. It left me darting my eyes about nervously, wondering who might be around the next corner and worrying what my next stay at a hotel might bring. Put another way: exactly like an episode of American Horror Story: Hotel.