People who’ve been waiting for decades to get more adaptations of late author Anne Rice’s scary and beloved work have been in luck for several months now. After the early October debut of the AMC series based on her novel, Interview with the Vampire (which, of course, drew comparisons to the film with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt), they can all now feast their bewitching eyes on the latest entry in what’s being called the Immortal Universe, Mayfair Witches.
The new supernatural series, which stars Alexandra Daddario as neurosurgeon Rowan Fielding, follows the lead as she learns she comes from a long line of witches and begins to both come into her power and deal with the many creepy occurrences and dark entities which have plagued her family for years. As you might imagine, a show about witches is incredibly likely to feature some standout spooky scenarios, and the premiere of Mayfair Witches did not disappoint on that front (despite its middling critical reviews). So, let’s dig into the spookiest scenes of the show so far!
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Mayfair Witches. Come back once you've caught up!
Episode 5 - “The Thrall” - Rowan And Lasher In The Basement
Are you sensing a theme here? Because I tell you what, I sure am. As could be predicted by now, while there were actually several creeptastic moments in the fifth episode of Mayfair Witches, one of the spookiest again involves Lasher.
So, Rowan and Cip are locked inside of the Mayfair home, with him still suffering after Carlotta accidentally stabbed him instead of Rowan. For a time, the two are trapped in a thrall caused by Lasher, which makes it seem that Cip and Rowan are happily engaged in a romantic interlude. Once they realize what’s really going on, though, the good doctor is desperate to get Cip to a hospital to treat his extremely bad wound.
She agrees to play Lasher’s game so that he’ll let Cip go, which he does by magically transporting him through the walls of the house and right into his apartment, several blocks away. As we were all likely wondering if there’s anything that Lasher can’t do, he makes Rowan put on a ‘20s flapper outfit so that they can dance, but when she sees that he really wants her to kill Carlotta, she refuses and goes looking for a spell or something that will let her out of the house.
She soon finds Carlotta’s sister, Millie, who I totally didn’t realize was a maybe-ghost until this episode. Millie leads Rowan to a spell book, but tells her that the ingredients needed are in their no good, very bad basement. As you might imagine, this is when the weird gets weirder, because that basement is a lot more cavernous than we saw last time. Rowan finds the herbs (on an autopsy table!) in the eerie glow of a grow light, and attempts to gather what she needs as Lasher tells her about her grandmother (and Carlotta’s definitely dead sister), Antha, who it turns out was also one of Lasher’s ladies, and killed by Carlotta.
It’s not long before he disappears and Rowan hears the basement door shut and lock. As she abandons the plants to try and get out, she stumbles over Delphine’s maggot-ridden body, though I don’t understand how she didn’t smell her as soon as she opened the basement door. With Lasher’s help, Rowan is able to get out, kills her aunt Carlotta when it’s clear that she’s still trying to kill her, and is soon free to walk out the front door.
Episode 4 - “Curiouser And Curiouser” - Lasher Leaves A Possessed Body
Wow, Lasher’s activities just keep getting creepier and creepier, which really shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, considering that he (it?) is a mysterious and dangerous otherworldly entity. Ciprien and the Talamasca have been investigating Deirdre’s murder, and in this episode they finally got their answer about how she was killed so brutally in the elevator of Rowan’s hotel.
After a couple of other members of the group catch a man in a parking garage who narrowly missed getting hit by cars and was about to jump off a high level of the building, he’s taken to Talamasca headquarters, where Cip’s boss watches as he removes his gloves to do a reading of the man, who’s in obvious distress and moving about in his chair in weird, jerky movements while in restraints.
Cip sees that this man was in the elevator with Deirdre and used a garrote to kill her, noting that he was paid to do the job. However, after the man jerks so much that his neck snaps, killing him, we get the spooktacular sight of Lasher leaving the man’s dead body. Welp. We know Lasher can do that now.
Episode 3 - “Second Line” - Delphine And Lasher’s Necklace
Ooh, boy. This was rough, but not totally unexpected. In each episode so far, we’d seen how Delphine had been tasked with caring for Deirdre, who’d been kept in a nearly catatonic state by her aunt Carlotta, likely since shortly after she gave birth to Rowan. Delphine clearly knew that lots of weird shit was going on with the Mayfairs, but she had seemed able to stay out of their line of fire, and that of Lasher, by simply doing her job and (I assume) mostly keeping to herself.
However, that all changed once Deirdre woke up and Delphine let her boldly leave the house. This eventually led to Rowan finding her mom in the elevator of her hotel with her throat slit to the point of her almost having been decapitated in the previous episode. Carlotta had failed to convince Rowan to return home with her, and while the now-traumatized and already very confused young surgeon was venturing toward the Mayfair home on her own (and having a surreal experience with Lasher at a stranger’s funeral), her great aunt decided to try and bind the malevolent spirit to someone else: Delphine.
Carlotta pretends to just have a basic chat with Deirdre’s maid/nurse about her dearly departed niece, when she presents her with Lasher’s necklace, claiming that Deirdre left it to her, and tells her to put it on. Now, what comes next is a great lesson (as far as I’m concerned) in always following your first mind, because it’s very obvious that Delphine neither wants possession of the jewelry, nor wants to actually wear it. But, probably hoping that she will just be able to rid herself of it later, she uneasily puts it around her neck, and we know she’s going to die, just not how.
We haven’t been told yet how the necklace plays a part in Lasher’s connection with the Mayfairs, but after Carlotta locks Delphine in their unnecessarily creepy-ass basement, it appears pretty clear that Mayfairs can at least survive for several years while wearing the token, whereas others probably cannot. It doesn’t take long for poor Delphine to be driven mad, as we last see her repeatedly bashing her own head in against the brick wall in the basement. Oh, Delphine. We hardly knew ye.
Episode 2 - “The Dark Place” - Lasher Finds Rowan In The Shower
Well, things are certainly moving right along on Mayfair Witches, as not only has Deirdre woken up from her medically induced semi-catatonia, but she decided not to wait around for her suspiciously helpful doctor, Dr. Lamb, and his lawyer to find a way to free her from the Mayfair home. Her first step was to look around her bedroom, and put that necklace from Lasher back on. OK, girl. Let’s see what that dedication to an evil spirit gets you.
Off in California, Rowan accidentally incapacitated the Talamasca assigned to watch her, Ciprien, which leads to her finding photos of her and other Mayfairs on his phone, including one of her mother and adoptive mom in the ‘90s, which is clearly labeled “Cousins, New Orleans,” leading her right to the city everyone hoped Rowan would never go to. As this is going on, Deirdre has reconnected with Lasher, with me using “reconnected” to gently describe their spectral bang-a-thon.
When Deirdre later realizes that her aunt Carlotta doesn’t like Dr. Lamb, she decides to make a break for it and heads to her uncle, Cortland, who helps her perform a ritual so she can contact Lasher and they can find her daughter. This is when things get super spooky, because the well-dressed ghostly presence quickly locates Rowan as she showers in her hotel room. He’s about to touch her when Deirdre, who can see what he does, puts a stop to it and he goes over to a desk where the desperate mother can see that her daughter is already in New Orleans.
What followed was, well, a rather sad reunion for Deirdre and Rowan, which will certainly confuse the young surgeon and pull her into this dark tale even further.
Episode 1 - "The Witching Hour" - Lasher On The Boat
OK, so the action of the first episode of the drama goes back and forth between the modern day with Rowan, and what is the late ‘80s or early ‘90s with another Mayfair, Deirdre, when she’s a teen. Young Deirdre is trapped in the Mayfair home when she’s not in school, and her family is trying desperately to keep her from entertaining any notions put into her head by Lasher, a seductive spirit/potential evil demon who’s been attached to the women in the family for many generations.
As Rowan is finally coming to realize that she has dangerous and unchecked power in the current time (she has nearly killed at least three people in her life by the time the first episode ends), she’s also being stonewalled by her adoptive mom whenever she mentions her worries about having “monstrous power.” Not only does her dear, ol’ mom (who’s really her biological aunt) know all about the Mayfair gifts and Lasher (and has spent Rowan’s whole life attempting to keep her from finding out about either), but she’s also dying from cancer.
Once she does, Rowan heads out on her boat, right around the time that a basically catatonic adult Deirdre (who pledged herself to Lasher as a teen while accepting his true form and keeping the necklace that’s his talisman, when pregnant with Rowan) is somewhat released from Lasher’s hold when his necklace is removed from her neck.
It’s unclear right now if that big piece of jewelry (which is basically an ornate key) was the only thing hiding Lasher from Rowan, but once it’s off of her biological mother’s neck, he finds her. The surgeon is on her boat, and appears to be in the middle of the ocean somewhere, on a dark and stormy night. She’s trying to sleep, but is woken up by odd, barely audible whispers and, probably, a general “Oh shit, something ain’t right” feeling.
Visibly shaken, she begins to look around the rather large vessel and out of its many windows, when she stops, and spots Lasher peering at her from the deck before he quickly disappears. Spook. EEEeeeeeeee!
Rowan seems to be on her way to realizing more of her powerful potential as a witch, so you can tune into Mayfair Witches, Sundays at 9 p.m. EST on AMC to see what other spine-tingling things happen! If you missed the first episode, you can catch up now, as it's already on a number of streaming services, like Shudder and Sundance Now.
