American Horror Story – Chapter 3

By: Caitlin Walsh

Hide And Seek

It’s hard to decide if the cops in “American Horror Story: Roanoke: are the absolute worst, but I’m leaning towards saying yes. Listen, I sympathize. I get that it would be hard to take a bunch of phone calls all the time about spooky ghost happenings in the woods, but come on. No one in this show takes their near death experiences and satanic warnings seriously for more than five minutes. The third episode picks up right at the end of episode two – with Lee (Angela Bassett) horrifyingly staring at her daughter’s sweat jacket, high atop a tree and still no sign of Flora (Saniyya Sidney). When the cops show up, they’re little help and Lee isn’t happy. She knows the statistics, she knows the drill. The search is made nearly impossible after the first forty-eight hours. Longer than that? You’re looking for a body.

As Matt (Cuba Gooding Jr.), Shelby (Sarah Paulson) and Lee go off on their own from the search party for Flora, they find scattered pig limbs along with assorted body parts of Flora’s doll. Demonic and downright disturbing, like a bread crumb path. They come across a small house in the woods, presumably inside are the hillbillies they think have been taunting them. They find no signs of life – just rotting meat and fecal matter.  You know, your usual episode of “Hoarders.” Until they stumble out to the barn, that is, finding two filthy young boys feeding from a mother pig.

When the cops make it out to them, they say there’s no sign of the family and they take the boys back to the station. The cops have a theory that the hillbillies took Flora and fled. Interrogating the boys didn’t help – they couldn’t speak and couldn’t communicate.

Lee’s husband Mason (Charles Malik Whitfield) bursts into the station soon after, wildly mad. And the search continues. They hit the 72-hour mark and Lee knows, the cop side of her knows, how bad that is, and how slim their chances become of finding her daughter.

They need rest. They don’t want to, but they take a break. Shelby, Matt and Lee go back to the house only to find Mason waiting and livid. He’s accusing Lee of orchestrating the whole disappearance of their daughter. He ends up shoving Lee to the ground in the midst of their argument and things are tense. He storms out of the house.

Not long after everyone falls asleep, Matt (Cuba Gooding Jr.) gets a late night phone call that wakes them. It’s the cops and they’ve found a body. Instantly, everyone’s hearts drop into their stomach and they rush out to the woods, seeing the burnt and charred body strung up. But it’s not Flora’s. It’s Mason.

Who You Gonna’ Call?

It seems that was finally what made them contemplate leaving the house. (What a crazy, novel idea, wow!) But before they can make any headway, a man walks in. He says his name is Cricket (Leslie Jordan) and offers to help connect them with spirits to find Flora. He was called to them after hearing their story on CNN. He just knew he had to come. They’re having a hard time buying it, figuring he’s a scammer, but when he leads them upstairs to the crawl space he says she had been hiding there days before with Priscilla. So, Lee (Angela Bassett) can’t send him away. He tells them Flora isn’t dead and Priscilla is real. “She’s a child. She had a fondness for corn husk dolls. She died in the late 1500s.” It starts coming together, just a little.

Cricket, later that night, performs a seance ritual by trying to contact the spirits. And while Matt, Shelby and Lee can’t see her, he does. In fact, he sees The Butcher herself (Kathy Bates). “I protect this place. This place is mine, ours,” she says. She tells them the child, Flora, isn’t with her as she would’ve been roasted by now, if so. Priscilla “the bastard child” is hiding her. Windows start breaking and Cricket starts yelling “Croatoan!” All normal seance Saturday night happenings, you know? And then Cricket says it. “I can take you to her…for $25,000.” He gets a gun pulled on him by Lee (kind of deserved) and thrown against the wall by Matt (also kind of deserved), but he swears that they’ll be begging for his help by the end. On his way out, he whispers something to Lee that changes everything.

Real Lee (Adina Porter) isn’t keen on revealing anything to the interviewer, pretending she doesn’t remember, doesn’t know. But when they bring up Emily, after a brief metldown freak-out Lee (Adina Porter) finally reveals what was said and who Emily was. It was her daughter, long before Flora. She went to the store years back, leaving Emily in the car for just a minute, and when she came back to the car. Emily was gone, never to be seen again. Lee (Angela Bassett) ends up paying Cricket after that.

Hell Hath No Fury

Cricket tells her the backstory of The Butcher (Kathy Bates), known as Thomasin White. Her husband was head of the Roanoke colony and she helped. She fed them and did her best. Real Lee (Adina Porter) admits that everyone knew the ghost stories of Roanoke in North Carolina but they were far away, weren’t they? Cricket corrects her. That’s what everyone may think, but it isn’t so. The Butcher’s colony and family turned against her and they locked her up, a contraption over her head like some animal. They left her in the woods for days – no food or water, left for dead. That was until a strange woman (Gaga?! Is that you?!) finds her, releasing her and saves her from a pig that had been running around. The strange woman kills the pig, rips out its heart and holds it out to Tomasyn telling her to eat it. Just like Khaleesi before her, she did so with a regal determination. (Or, well, something like that. She might’ve just been that hungry.) She finds her colony later that night, killing some of them, sparing her son and the others that promise to follow her.

Present day Cricket takes Shelby (Sarah Paulson), Lee (Angela Bassett) and Matt (Cuba Gooding Jr.) to the woods and speaks with the colony that only he can see. He makes a deal with The Butcher (Kathy Bates) that once Flora is back, alive and well, they’ll leave the house. Hell, they’ll burn it to the ground so no one else takes it. The land will be the colony’s.

In the midst of the conversation, Shelby (Sarah Paulson) realizes Matt (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is missing. She goes off to find him only to discover him having sex with the strange woman in the woods, with the hillbillies watching. It’s about as freaky as any nightmare I could conjure up.

Present day Matt (Andre Holland) says he still doesn’t remember it. He blacked out with no recollection of what happened in the woods.  But Shelby (Sarah Paulson) ran back to the house and called the cops on Lee (Angela Bassett) anyway.