Picking up where last week left off, Shelby has been confronted by the man with half his skull missing. He disappears, and is replaced with a deer. This soothes Shelby, until she notices, through the leaves, some kind of strange, witchy ritual. Everyone is dressed in 16th century clothing, and Kathy Bates leads the ritual, hammering something (maybe a bit of entrails) onto a guy’s tailbone, like a tail. “A deserter was found, a cloven beast, rotting in the mire and muck,” Kathy chants. The man is to be purified. They put a pig’s head on his head, tie him to a stake, and roast him like a pig over a fire. Ye olde people see Shelby, which causes her to scream and run. She finds herself in the middle of the street, about to be hit by a car. She passes out and Lee takes her to the hospital.
The officers go to the site in the woods, but find no evidence of people or ritual. The hospital tests Shelby for drugs; she is clean. Matt promises his wife they will find someplace else to live, but this time it is Shelby who opposes a move. She is certain that it is an elaborate hoax at the hands of the mountain men, and won’t let them scare them away.
Mason drops Flora off at the farmhouse to stay with Lee for the weekend. Though she was concerned about bringing her daughter into such a sketchy situation, she figured it would be okay if she kept a close eye on her. Lee leaves Flora playing jacks in the dining room while she fetches a snack. Flora wanders off, and Lee finds her talking to the wall. Flora explains she is talking to her friend Priscilla. As Flora snacks, she explains to her mom that Priscilla has promised to make a bonnet just like hers, and “make it stop.” Priscilla is tired of all the blood. Lee checks on a shattering noise in the other room. In front of an open window, a flower vase broke. Laying next to it is an old-fashioned bonnet.
In the middle of the night, Matt wakes to the sounds of pigs grunting. Shelby is already awake, and furious. She assumes it is the Polk hillbillies and plans to scare them off. Matt follows her outside, and they see nothing. Shelby chases after the sound of footsteps and the pair are separated in an instant. A huge, snorting pig runs out of the fog, past Matt. Shelby sees something that makes her freeze. Matt finds her, staring at an enormous twig effigy, draped with meat and intestines, with a pig’s head on top. The whole monstrosity is on fire. Matt knocks it down. There was something demonic about it. The cops come out and this time, the effigy is there for them to see. The sheriff assures them they will bring in Polk and his sons for questioning. Shelby is furious and threatens to take their case public. In an attempt to mollify her, the sheriff promises to leave a 24-hour protection detail.
Matt thought he could relax and get some sleep with an officer sitting outside. Then a phone call wakes him. He answers the phone, and through a staticky connection, hears a strained female voice say, “Please, they are hurting me.” Then Matt notices the phone isn’t even plugged into the wall. The female voice is coming from inside the house, and he sees a strange, terrifying vignette in his dining room. An elderly lady is in bed, with two nurses attending to her. These are the same women Shelby thought she saw last week, and they seem to exist on another plane – they do not hear or see Matt. The old lady, Margaret, is begging for mercy. One of the nurses takes out a gun and shoots her dead. They laugh hysterically and use red spray paint to paint a huge M on the wall. “M for Margaret,” they giggle. They continue cackling as Matt rushes from the house to alert the police officer. They come in and check it out – and find no evidence of a murder, or intruders in the house. Maybe he was dreaming. Matt starts to wonder if he sustained neurological problems from the attack in Los Angeles. At least that would be a logical explanation.
Mason arrives in the morning to pick up Flora. She seems to be playing hide and seek, and they go looking for her. Flora is tucked into a cubby under the stairs, and Lee opens the door. Flora is mad because that made Priscilla leave. She was going to give Priscilla her doll so that she doesn’t kill them. “She’s gonna kill us all, but she’s gonna kill me last,” Flora explains. Mason is apoplectic. He grabs Flora and swears she is never coming back to the house. That is the day Lee fell off the wagon.
Matt and Shelby find Lee, fall-down drunk, sitting amongst the pieces of a broken bowl. There are a dozen knives embedded in the ceiling. The bowl was her fault, but she swears she didn’t do the knives. Neither believe her. Matt puts her to bed, and returns to Shelby when she calls for him. The nurses appear at the foot of Lee’s bed, and wait until she wakes up – then they are gone. Lee sensed someone or something was there. She goes down the hall and sees bloody bits of flesh – pig tails, perhaps – nailed to the walls like pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. They are wiggling. In an instant, they are gone. But then she sees a pig man.
Looking out the window, Shelby sees a girl in pioneer clothing. Matt sees her too. They go outside to look for her and instead find doors for a root cellar. They think this might be a trap set up by the Polk family, but investigate anyway. Someone had been living down there. Amongst the canned fruit they find an old video camera.
Back in their home, Matt and Shelby play the video tape. A bearded, manic man appears, the same man on the video Shelby saw last week. He had been forced from his home by the terrifying events he had witnessed and had been living in the cellar. It was cold and smelled bad, but it was far more hospitable than the house he escaped. The man goes into his frantic tale.
This is Dr. Elias Cunningham, an author and academic, recording on October 11th, 1997. He came to this farm house to do research for his next book, a true crime tale in the vein of Helter Skelter (the definitive volume on the Manson Family murders). The book was to be about nurses Bridget and Miranda, sisters who spent all their time together. They worked at a nursing home, but were fired when they were suspected of being behind the suspicious deaths of two residents. The sisters opened their own nursing home in this very farm house.
Miranda and Bridget had curious criteria for accepting residents. For starters, they were only interested in families who were looking to dump their parents there. Also, they only accepted people based on the first letter of their first name. According to Miranda’s diary, their residents names had to begin with M, U, R, D, or E – MURDER. They thought each soul they took would grant them an eternity of life (or something like that). In 1989, police raided the facility and found that Miranda and Bridget were gone, as were all their belongings. All that was left were the rotting corpses of five murdered residents. Written in red spray paint on the wall was MURDE – they never got to that last victim. The thought was that the sisters fled the country and they were never found. The house was cleaned out and put on the market, but no matter how many coats of paint workers put on the wall, MURDE kept peeking through. They finally wallpapered over it.
It is at this point that Matt stops the tape and rushes to the dining room. He peels off the wallpaper, and sure enough, MURDE is spelled out in faded red paint. This was the exact same place he saw the nurses paint the M in his late night waking nightmare. Returning to the video, Cunningham continues. He doesn’t believe the sisters fled the country. He believes they were stopped, and he is going to go back into the house to find it. He takes the camera, and over garbled “found footage” style video, he demands the spirits show themselves. Someone or something jumps out behind him (seen in a mirror) then, as happens with every found-footage film ever, the camera goes out. Matt and Shelby barely have time to process this when there is a thunk at the door. They look – and see a bloody cleaver wedged into the door.
Shelby backs down from her ferocious stance: she wants out, and what’s more, she wants her money back. They meet with someone from the bank and accuse him of fraud for not disclosing the murders. The banker is unsympathetic and says the sale was “as is.” They should have done their research. Shelby points out that it wouldn’t have mattered: the house address was changed since the nurse murders. The banker doesn’t care. Matt and Shelby are trapped in the house, at least until they can sell it.
Matt didn’t think things could get worse – then they did. Lee has kidnapped Flora. She just went to see her daughter, then one thing led to another and the girl was in her car and they were pulling up to the farmhouse. Matt tries to talk some sense into his sister while Shelby takes Flora into the living room to do her homework. Lee is in a panic. She doesn’t know what to do, only that she was desperate for her kid. Shelby gets a call from Mason and talks him out of calling the police. He is on his way to pick up Flora.
Flora is coloring when she hears a giggle and looks out the window. The little frontier girl that lured Shelby and Matt outside now beckons her. Lee comes into the room to say goodbye to her little girl – and finds Flora is gone. The three of them search the house and the ground, but find no trace of her. Then Lee lets out a horrified scream. At the top of an impossibly tall, branchless tree, is Flora’s yellow jacket. There is no sign of Flora anywhere.
Check out a preview of next week’s episode, “Chapter 3.”
