When it comes to horror television shows, one of the scariest is American Horror Story. When the series first debuted in 2011, it immediately grabbed fans with its horrifying depiction of a family living in a haunted house. As an anthology series, the show changes plot every season, with each episode being more terrifying than the last. But what fans might find truly horrifying is that much of what we see on American Horror Story finds inspiration in events that happened in real life. Much of the show's plot, characters and mythology comes not just from urban legends, but from real American history. From axe murderers, haunted houses, evil clowns, vampires and beyond, here are the real stories behind American Horror Story.

16 Murder House: The Black Dahlia

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On the first season of American Horror Story, we meet aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, as portrayed by actress Mena Suvari. Short's life, though, ends quickly when she dies at the Murder House. In real life, though, Short was the infamous Black Dahlia, a woman who not only saw her death at the hands of a murderer in 1947 in Los Angeles, but whose corpse also suffered from being mutilated and cut in half, the body completely drained of blood. The case captured the imagination of the country, especially since police never found her killer. Her murder is one of the oldest unsolved cases in the history of Los Angeles. The gruesome details of her murder, as well as its mystery, was perfect for American Horror Story.

15 Murder House: The Richard Speck massacre

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American Horror Story introduced a serial killer in its first season, a man by the name of R. Franklin. On the series, in a flashback to 1968, this man kidnaps several nurses and then proceeds to kill them in the Murder House. These events repeat themselves in 2011, but the ghosts of the nurses intervene. These events find a basis in reality with the Richard Speck massacre, a man who tortured, raped and killed eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966. After a jury found Speck guilty of the murders, he faced a sentence of death, but a judge reversed that death sentence after questions arose about the jury selection process that happened before the trial. Instead, Speck spent the rest of his life in prison.

14 Murder House: School shootings

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During American Horror Story's first season, we meet the ghost of Tate Langdon, a high school student who killed 15 people during a massacre at Westfield High School in 1994. The show depicts part of the shooting scene flashback in a library, which is very similar to what happened during the Columbine shooting, one of the most infamous school shootings in American history. In 1999, two students walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, armed with guns and homemade bombs and unleashed carnage, resulting in the deaths of 12 students and one teacher. The aftermath began serious debates in the country about gun control, bullying and high school cliques. Since then, though, more school shootings have followed, with little progress being made in learning how to prevent such massacres.

13 Asylum: Couple abducted by aliens

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In American Horror Story: Asylum, Kit and Alma Walker are an interracial couple in the 1960s who have an extraordinary story: they are potentially victims of an alien abduction. Kit and Alma, though, have real life counterparts, a real interracial couple, Barney and Betty Hill. In 1961, the couple claimed that they were victims of an alien abduction. They stated that while driving home to New Hampshire from a vacation in Montreal, they saw strange lights appear in the sky. They soon saw a spacecraft land nearby and saw humanoid aliens in its windows. After that, they blacked out and woke up two hours later with strange bruises and scratches, their clothing torn. Their memories returned to them after hypnosis therapy, during which they realized they were victims of alien abduction.

12 Asylum: Anne Frank

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American Horror Story doesn't just make up characters based on real people. Sometimes, the series actually puts real people into the series, elaborating on their stories in a fictional way. One of the most famous characters to appear on the series is Anne Frank, whose story is known to almost everyone, thanks to the diaries the real Anne Frank wrote while hiding from the Nazis in Germany during World War II. In the second season of the series, the fictional Anne escaped Germany and ended up in the U.S. at the asylum. Of course, viewers soon realize that this woman is probably insane and only believes that she's Anne Frank, although by the end of the season, we're still wondering, was she really Anne Frank after all?

11 Asylum: SS Auschwitz Doctor

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Those who studied the horrors at concentration camps during World War II know that Auschwitz was probably the worst of the worse. In American Horror Story: Asylum, we meet Arthur Arden, a former Nazi by the name of Hans Gruber who once worked at Auschwitz. On the series, Gruber, a.k.a. Arden, spends his time experimenting on the patients at Briarcliffe, but we see flashbacks to his time at Auschwitz, where he was just as horrifying. American Horror Story based the character on Josef Mengele, a German physician who worked at Auschwitz. Mengele was responsible for sending victims to the gas chambers, but also had a reputation for experimenting on the prisoners there. Although he was a wanted man by nearly every nation on Earth after the war, he eluded capture and eventually died from drowning under an assumed name.

10 Coven: Madame Delphine LaLaurie

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On American Horror Story: Coven, Madame Delphine LaLaurie was a powerful and wealthy witch, a woman who was also a racist and a murderer, someone who spent time torturing her slaves. However, there really was a Madame Delphine a lot like that, who lived in New Orleans in the 19th century. And she, too, was not a very nice person. She was vicious to her slaves, and sometimes, they turned up missing, as a result of her murdering them and hiding the bodies. Authorities eventually found slaves in her basement chained to walls, some dead, some alive and dismembered. There were buckets with organs and body parts spread across the floors. Of course, Madame Delphine was long gone by the time people realized that she was a monster.

9 Coven: Marie Laveau

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When it comes to famous voodooiennes, none gets mentioned more in New Orleans than Marie Laveau. In the 1800s, people would come from miles around to see the infamous Laveau, and later, her daughter (who also had the same name, sparking rumors that the woman herself was immortal), do her magical rites on St. John's Eve. She also appears as an immortal character on American Horror Story: Coven, as portrayed by Angela Bassett. On the series, Laveau has an ongoing feud with Madame Delphine, another practitioner of magic. Eventually, this feud extends to the coven led by the Supreme, although they call for a truce in the 1970s. The real Marie Laveau's tomb is a tourist hot spot in New Orleans, even to this day.

8 Coven: The Axeman

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American Horror Story loves its serial killers, and often features serial killers in its anthology stories. In Coven, the series introduced the Axeman of New Orleans, who finds his basis in a similar person who existed in real life. In the early 1900s, the real Axeman terrorized New Orleans by breaking into people's houses and killing them. In 1919, he wrote to the local newspaper that he would spare homes that played his favorite music, jazz. Although the sound of jazz wafted through the windows of homes throughout the city, there were still some killings, but authorities never figured out who the killer was. In American Horror Story: Coven, his ghost is the love interest of Fiona, the Supreme of the New Orleans coven of witches.

7 Freak Show: Killer Clown

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Just last year, we were all freaking out from all the rumors running around of clowns terrorizing cities and neighborhoods. But where does this innate fear of clowns actually come from? It all goes back to the clown that inspired Twisty on American Horror Story. On the series, Twisty wants to help children, but after a freak accident, he realizes that he terrifies people instead. So he becomes a serial killer. In real life, though, there was a clown named Pogo, who was actually John Wayne Gacy, a man who was eventually discovered to have been a serial killer. In the 1970s, police discovered that Gacy had sexually assaulted and murdered over 30 teenage boys, many whose bodies were found in a mass grave under his house.

6 Freak Show: Edward Mondrake

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One of the freakiest characters of American Horror Story: Freak Show wasn't one of the freaks, but a mysterious figure known as Edward Mordrake. On the series, Mordrake is the ghost of a 19th century man who had two faces, one of which convinced him to kill himself. Elsa summons him on Halloween, convinced that he will help her revive her failing career as a performer. It's obvious that he has murder on his mind, but he only ends up killing Twisty. In the real world, Mordrake exists as an urban legend, also as a man with two faces. Although no one knows if he actually existed, he was one of many human freaks mentioned as existing during the 19th century. Legend says that he committed suicide at the age of 23.

5 Hotel: the Hotel

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Although Lady Gaga headlined as one of the main characters in American Horror Story: Hotel, the real star of the show was the hotel itself. The Hotel Cortez has its own dark personality, almost as if it was a building that came out of the mind of Stephen King himself. But the Cortez actually has a real life counterpart, the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. One of the strangest stories about the Cecil Hotel, though, happened recently after a surveillance video of a girl staying there surfaced. In the video, the girl becomes shaken and scared about something. That girl turned up dead later in the hotel's water tank. But she wasn't the only person to die mysteriously there. The Cecil Hotel has a long history of strange deaths.

4 Hotel: The Blood Countess

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Lady Gaga killed it, literally, in American Horror Story: Hotel as the Countess, the vampire who ruled the roost and penthouse at the Hotel Cortez. As the head vampire in charge, the Countess spent a lot of time choosing her victims and lovers very carefully, but also devoted herself to raising child vampires that she collected along the way. The character finds a basis in the very real Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who has the distinction of being the Guinness Book of World Records most notorious female murderers. She was responsible for the deaths of many young Hungarian girls, all virgins. Legends state that she would collect their blood and bathe in it, believing that it would help her retain her youth, inspiring tales that she was a vampire.

3 Hotel: serial killers

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American Horror Story: Hotel pulled out all the stops when it came to serial killers. The hotel has a whole club of dedicated serial killers, including one based on H.H. Holmes, who had a hotel in Chicago where he trapped his victims within hidden rooms and the building's halls. American Horror Story's character, James Patrick March, finds inspiration from Holmes, but he's not the only infamous serial killer staying at the Cortez. The hotel features an annual get-together of serial killers, a virtual "who's who in American serial killer history." Among those who attend the event are the monster Aileen Wuornos, the killer clown John Wayne Gacy, the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Gordon Northcott and the Zodiac Killer. These are all serial killers that existed in reality.

2 Roanoke: the lost colony

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The setting for American Horror Story: Roanoke, revolves around a real incident that took place in American history. In 1587, an English colony settled on an island what is now North Carolina, all in hopes of a better life in the New World. That place became known as Roanoke Island. Their leader, Captain White, left the colony for four years to get more supplies from England, but when he returned to Roanoke, it was gone. There was no sign of the colony or any of its 100 people. To this day, no one knows what happened or how everyone and everything disappeared. Historians suspect that the people eventually just all moved away or integrated with the local Native American tribes, but no single explanation has proof.

1 Roanoke: The Lethal Lovers

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American Horror Story: Roanoke features a pair of twisted nurses who like to kill their patients while spelling out the word "murder" by using the first letter of their names. But those two nurses also existed in the real world: the television show based its story on events that happened in Michigan in the 1980s. And their story is almost identical: the two nurse's aids met while working at a nursing home, fell in love, and decided to become "The Lethal Lovers." They even used their patients names, killing them in a certain order to spell out the word "murder." The women eventually had a falling out, though, and one finally admitted to their crimes, although they blamed each other for the murders. Both women are currently in prison.