AHS: Delicate - Anna's Hairy Problem Has Its Roots In A Spine-Chilling Urban Legend

Contains spoilers for "American Horror Story: Delicate" Season 12, Episode 1 — "Multiply thy Pain"

It's only one episode old, but "American Horror Story: Delicate" is already awash in the same spider-centric imagery that dominated its advertising campaign. Anna Alcott (Emma Roberts) has encountered multiple arachnids as she runs from danger, tries to promote her acting career, and undergoes another round of IVF. But the long, silken strands of hair she pulls from her head and the spider her husband Dexter (Matt Czuchry) finds in her hair all have their roots in a scary urban legend that's been chilling people for decades.

The story usually involves a young girl with a complicated hairdo — originally a bouffant or a beehive — whose stylish locks form the basis for her downfall. Sometimes she refuses to wash her hair after taking such a long amount of time ratting it up; sometimes her love of hairspray isn't mentioned and her teacher notices blood dripping down her neck and sends her to the school nurse. The end result is the same: spiders have infested her hair because she has failed to brush it out and wash it. Said spiders then attack her, sometimes biting and envenomating her when she or others find them on her head, sometimes resulting in the revelation that the spiders have chewed their way through the victim's skull and into her brain. Since the story began circulating, hundreds of different alterations have been made to the tale, which has shape-shifted with the decades to reflect social mores.

The spiders-in-the-beehive urban legend first took root in the 1960s when hairspray-shellacked mile-high hair started becoming popular. Whether it was a reactionary pushback by those who disapproved of styles drastically changing or a joke about beauty standards, the tale managed to keep a cultural footprint going even when the beehive passed into kitschy memory. With time, the victims of those dastardly spiders became hippies with bushy beards and dreadlocks and other folks with seemingly outlandish haircuts.

The story definitely has some healthy legs, and "American Horror Story" isn't the only series that's taken recent advantage of it. In the "Riverdale" episode "Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Two: Tales in a Jugular Vein," Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse) pens a story in which a girl who looks an awful lot like his friend Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart) dies on the dance floor at Pop's because the spiders that have infested her hairspray-soaked beehive have killed her. Hopefully, that's a fate Anna Alcott will manage to avoid.