HOLLYWOOD—The plot thickens and we are only on episode three, people! Flora went missing last episode and as we possibly get closer to finding the missing child, the mystery surrounding the “Roanoke Nightmare” becomes slightly less confusing.
Volunteers pull Flora’s jacket down from the tree and the search party begins, even though the police seem less than thrilled about searching the forest. Lee as a former cop knows that finding Flora within the first 72 hours after she went missing is critical to finding her alive. In the forest, Lee finds a blood circle with Flora’s dismembered doll with a pig head leading her, Matt and Shelby towards an abandoned farm.
At the farm no one is inside the house, but inside the barn the three find two feral boys suckling on a mother pig. The boys are brought back to the police station, but when they are questioned all they say is “Croatoan.” Matt in the interview indicates that they later learned this word was a warning.
Lee’s ex-husband, Mason, has returned to help search for their daughter. Mason is convinced Lee is hiding Flora so once the search party is done she can run away with Flora to Mexico. After Lee defends herself and Mason shoves her onto the floor, Mason leaves Shelby and Matt’s home. Later that night Matt receives a phone call from the police saying they found a body. Matt, Shelby and Lee leave expecting to find Flora’s body, but instead find Mason’s body burned and tied to a wooden circle. It is not looking good for Lee as Matt’s surveillance camera footage shows Lee leaving 15 minutes after Mason and Lee returning to the house four hours later.
As tensions rise when Lee overhears Shelby telling Matt that Lee might have killed Mason, an old man named Cricket enters their home. Cricket claims that he is a psychic who has helped the FBI find other missing children, and the spirits told him to leave New Orleans to help Lee. He is only able to convince Lee, Shelby and Matt that he is the real deal after the internet proves his work history, he is able to point out where Flora had been hiding prior to her disappearance, and after he holds a séance in the house.
Shelby gives Cricket permission to perform the séance, and we get to start unraveling the mystery of those historically dressed people in the woods. When Cricket calls for Flora’s ghost friend Priscilla, he instead gets The Butcher, aka Kathy Bates. The Butcher says she will harm anyone in the house, because she needs to protect her land and her colony. She uses her cleaver to cut a candle in half, and when Cricket says she is the trespasser all the windows in the room break. The Butcher said Priscilla was hiding Flora off the land so The Butcher couldn’t get to Flora, but Cricket won’t take Lee to Flora unless she pays him $25,000.
Matt calls Cricket a fraud and kicks him out, but as he leaves he tells Lee that Emily says hello and asks why Lee had stopped looking for her years ago. It continues to not look good for Lee when the interviews reveal that she had left Emily in a car at the age of four, and Emily had been taken and never found. Lee meets Cricket the next day and pays him the $25,000. He says that they need to find out about the house’s enemy before they will get Flora back.
Welcome to the old colony of Roanoke where The Butcher, previously known as Thomason White, is the leader after her husband leaves. When White refuses to move Roanoke to inland North Carolina, her son, played by Wes Bentley, along with other colonists betray her and banish her with a metal cage around her head. As White lay dying in the woods, days later a pig comes to kill her and as she prays what appears to be a witch saves her by killing the pig. Without speaking out loud the witch tells White to eat the pig’s beating heart and surrender White’s soul to her. White returns to the colony and kills the colonists who betrayed her, shows mercy to her son if he agrees to never betray her again, and moves the colony inland to where the house is now.
In the night, Cricket, Lee, Shelby and Matt go into the woods to make a bargain with The Butcher. Matt had agreed with Lee behind Shelby’s back that if The Butcher had Priscilla bring Flora back they would leave the house and burn it to the ground so no one else would live there. Matt goes missing and when Shelby goes looking for him she finds a dead pig and two local men watching as Matt is having sex with the witch.
Everyone regroups at the house where Shelby is furious with Matt, but Matt claims to have no memory of wandering off or having sex with anyone. The cops are there to arrest Lee, and that is the cliffhanger we are left with until next Wednesday, horror fanatics!
