Here’s How Lady Gaga in ‘AHS: Hotel’ May Connect To ‘Murder House’

We already know all the seasons of American Horror Story are connected and that Hotel will definitely connect with Murder House. Christine Estabrook’s realtor Marcy, from the first season, has already showed up, and there’s a strong theory that Hotel will bring back Elisabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, before she was brutally murdered in Season 1. But those aren’t the only connections to Murder House. Based on new photos and clues, the biggest connection of all may come from Lady Gaga’s Countess, who also may explain one of the series’ scariest monsters — Infantata!

Okay, bare with us. New photos from the set of AHS: Hotel from Wednesday show Lady Gaga filming outside of the Victorian murder mansion from Season 1. In the photos, Gaga’s Countess is clad in a green coat, brown cloche hat, and fur boa while standing near a 1920s-era taxi. Gaga is also noticeably pregnant in the photos.

Hm what would a pregnant woman be doing outside of that Los Angeles mansion in the ’20s? Getting an abortion, of course. In Season 1, Dr. Charles Montgomery (Matt Ross) and his wife Nora (Lily Rabe) moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, where he built the infamous murder house in 1922. But when money got tight, Charles began conducting illegal abortions in the home’s basement. It’s highly likely that a young, pregnant Countess discreetly took a cab to the mansion to get an abortion. If you need even more proof, just look closer at the photos to see that the taxi cab has a 1926 California license plate (click the above image to zoom in). While we know Nora killed Charles and herself in 1926, it’s still possible that the Countess came to visit them before their deaths. And now there’s definitive proof Matt Ross is returning as Dr. Montgomery, thanks to one Redditor spotting his trailer. (This storyline could be complicated, though, by the fact that Rabe is already playing a different character in Hotel and would likely confuse viewers if she reprised her Nora.)

But that’s not all. Gaga’s character may explain more about the Montgomerys. Remember the Infantata? After Nora and Charles’ son Thaddeus was kidnapped and dismembered, Charles turned the dead baby into a Frankenstein monster, putting the baby’s body back together and using the “beating heart” of one of his abortion patients. The baby attacks Nora when she attempts to nurse it, seemingly only wanting to drink her blood. Could the blood-drinking Countess have anything to do with this?

The Countess, who revealed in the second episode of Hotel that she was born in 1904, also said she was turned into a blood-drinking creature by a man who passed on his blood disease to her. If she was turned by the time she got pregnant and visited the Montgomery’s, there’s a chance her blood got mixed into Charles’ experimentation with the Infantata. That would explain why the Infantata is so bloodthirsty. Ryan Murphy explained back in 2011 that it is the blood that keeps the Infantata alive (remember, he’s not a ghost, but still living in the murder house basement as of 2011), which is strikingly similar to the Countess and those she passes her virus on to. There’s also the possibility that Charles used her heart for the creature, since we don’t fully know whether or not the Countess has a heart nor all the rules to her vampirism. If the Countess ends up having a connection to the Infantata, hopefully Murphy will use it to pay homage to the late actor who played him, Ben Woolf.

The only other times we’ve seen the house around this era in Season 1 was when the nursing students were murdered in the 1968 home invasion, and when the two young boys were killed by the Infantata in the pilot in 1978. Perhaps AHS will flash back to the house after it was seemingly abandoned following the ’68 murders.

Beyond the mansion’s connection to Gaga’s Countess, we know that Hotel can connect with Murder House in two other possible scenarios. Murphy recently told THR that the “Anti-Christ Baby” from Season 1, aka Michael Langdon whom Constance adopts, “might show up at the hotel.” The murderous Cortez would be an ideal place for Michael, who killed his babysitter in the season finale. But even better, this could signal the return of Jessica Lange as Constance (Murphy did say she'll be back eventually), since the now-4-year-old Michael will probably need a chaperone to arrive at the hotel — unless the blonde-children-loving Countess kidnaps him. To top things off, Murphy told Entertainment Weekly that he might make another connection to Season 1 by revealing Constance’s fourth child, which is still a major mystery among fans.

Either way, get ready for a whole lot more Murder House this year.