American Horror Story has always understood the pleasure of a familiar face emerging from a dark hallway. Sometimes that face belongs to a brilliant recurring character. Sometimes it belongs to an actor we like being asked to wear a hat, smoke dramatically, and remind us of a better season.
That distinction matters more than ever with American Horror Story: Season 13. The developing season is being framed as an all-star crossover, with returning performers and familiar characters feeding the franchise’s long-running mythology. Because details about the season remain limited, this is less a prediction about confirmed appearances than a ranking of which characters would be most dramatically valuable if the story brought them back.
That is exciting in the way a haunted house built from every room you loved is exciting. It is also dangerous. A crossover can turn the series’ history into a living story—or leave us staring at a pile of Easter eggs wearing a trench coat.
So here is the test: not “Which character do we miss most?” Nostalgia is cheap. The better question is, which returning or absent AHS characters could actually generate trouble? The best comeback would bring a point of view, an unfinished conflict, or a radically incompatible worldview into the same room as somebody else’s nightmare. The worst would exist only to make fans clap.
This ranking considers four things: whether a character still has unresolved dramatic potential, whether they can interact meaningfully with characters from other seasons, whether their return would complicate the show’s moral questions, and whether the story could justify bringing them back without weakening the impact of their original arc.
This is my ranking of the characters Season 13 should want back, from essential story engines to pure nostalgia bait.
1. Cordelia Goode: The crossover’s moral center with teeth
If American Horror Story: Season 13 needs a character who can move between its various corners without feeling like a tourist, Cordelia is the obvious choice. She has already lived through institutional horror, supernatural apocalypse, family betrayal, and the exhausting business of trying to be decent while surrounded by monsters.
More importantly, Cordelia is not merely powerful. She is responsible. That makes her dramatically useful. Put her in a room with a character who believes survival justifies cruelty, and she has an argument. Put her opposite someone who treats the apocalypse as a branding opportunity, and she has a reason to act. A crossover needs somebody who can ask what all this destruction is for.
Her power also creates a practical storytelling advantage. Cordelia can plausibly understand supernatural threats, but she does not automatically understand every person involved in them. That leaves room for disagreement. She can recognize a danger without knowing the right way to answer it, which is more interesting than making her an all-purpose solution to the season’s problems.
She also carries the weight of Coven and Apocalypse without requiring either season to be reduced to a clip show. Cordelia can arrive with history, but she can still make a choice in the present. That is the difference between a character and a callback.
The danger is making her too virtuous to challenge. A compelling return would test whether Cordelia’s commitment to protecting others can become controlling, paternalistic, or even destructive. Her moral authority matters most when the story gives her something serious to be wrong about.
2. Madison Montgomery: The human grenade
Madison is what happens when a character’s defense mechanism becomes her entire personality—and then, occasionally, cracks open to reveal something more interesting underneath. She is vain, funny, cruel, wounded, and often the person most likely to say the thing everyone else is politely avoiding.
That makes her perfect crossover fuel. Madison does not enter a story to stabilize it. She destabilizes the social temperature immediately. She can puncture solemn mythology with one vicious observation, but she can also expose the emotional cowardice hiding beneath grand supernatural stakes.
She is particularly useful because she does not fit neatly into the role of hero or villain. Other characters may need her abilities while distrusting her motives. Madison, meanwhile, may do the right thing for selfish reasons—or the wrong thing while insisting that everyone else is being hypocritical. That ambiguity can keep a crossover from dividing its cast into obvious good and evil factions.
The key is not to make her repeat the same redemption arc. Madison’s usefulness lies in the tension between growth and relapse. Has she actually changed, or has she simply learned how to perform remorse when it benefits her? Put that question next to Cordelia’s moral certainty and you have a relationship worth watching—not just two recognizable figures sharing a frame.
Her strongest scenes would not be speeches about how much she has changed. They would be moments when she has a chance to behave selfishly and surprises everyone, followed by moments when the old Madison resurfaces at the worst possible time.
3. Misty Day: The soul of the reunion
Misty is an easier invitation than Madison, but not a lesser one. Her warmth gives the crossover a pulse. In a franchise crowded with sadists, narcissists, killers, witches, ghosts, aliens, and whatever the hell was happening in that hotel hallway, Misty remains a reminder that kindness can be strange, stubborn, and genuinely radical.
She is also a useful bridge between the natural and supernatural sides of AHS. Her worldview is spiritual without being tidy. She loves life, but she is not naïve about death. She can bring empathy into a plot without turning into a designated therapist for every damaged immortal in the cast.
Misty’s perspective could also challenge the assumption that supernatural power should be used simply because it can be. In a crossover, characters may want to resurrect someone, reverse a curse, preserve a dying world, or exploit a magical loophole. Misty would make the emotional and ecological cost of those choices difficult to ignore.
There is a risk of using Misty as decorative comfort food: give her a Stevie Nicks moment, let her say something earthy, and send her back to the swamp. Season 13 should resist that. The compelling version of Misty is one forced to decide whether preserving life is always the same thing as doing good.
Her kindness should not make her passive. If Misty returns, she needs the ability to oppose the people she loves, particularly when their plans treat living beings as tools in a larger supernatural war.
4. Lana Winters: The survivor who would investigate the show itself
Lana is one of the franchise’s sharpest tools because she does not accept horror as a mystical excuse. She wants evidence. She wants names. She wants the story told accurately, preferably by somebody who cannot edit the truth into a more flattering shape.
In a crossover, Lana could function as the audience’s skeptical investigator, but that should not mean turning her into an exposition machine. Her real power is adversarial. She is difficult to manipulate because she understands that institutions often produce the monster and then pretend they are merely containing it.
Imagine Lana looking at a supernatural crisis and asking who benefits from the panic. Imagine her interviewing a witch, a serial killer, or a demonic authority figure with the same cold focus she would bring to a corrupt official. She would not simply explain the mythology. She would interrogate it.
Her presence would also give the season a way to examine storytelling itself. Who controls the official version of the haunting? Which survivors are believed? Who is turned into a symbol, and who is erased? Those questions would let Lana contribute thematically without requiring her to become a supernatural combatant.
There is a potential limitation: Lana’s investigative role could make her feel separate from the main plot. The solution is to give her a personal stake in the information she uncovers. She should not merely report the crossover’s secrets; she should have to decide whether publishing the truth will save people, endanger them, or turn their suffering into another spectacle.
5. Myrtle Snow: Make the dialogue dangerous again
A story with Myrtle in it has no excuse for dull conversation. She brings style, judgment, theatricality, and a vocabulary capable of turning an ordinary insult into a ceremonial execution.
Myrtle is especially valuable because she is not a neutral observer. She has loyalties, prejudices, and an enormous sense of her own importance. That makes her a terrific pressure point inside a crossover ensemble. She could ally herself with the “right” side for completely the wrong reasons, or reject a necessary plan because its aesthetic is unforgivable.
She also understands the social machinery of power. Myrtle can identify who is pretending to be indispensable, who is using elegance to disguise cruelty, and who is performing rebellion while protecting their own position. That makes her more than comic relief. Her insults can reveal the hierarchy of the room.
Her return would be nostalgia bait only if the writers treated her as a quote dispenser. Give her a real ideological conflict and she becomes more than a fan-service machine in couture. The strongest version of Myrtle would have to choose between preserving her own standards and protecting people whose choices she finds vulgar, foolish, or morally compromised.
6. Liz Taylor: The emotional heavyweight
Liz Taylor does not need a supernatural gimmick to command a scene. Her story was built on identity, performance, exclusion, and the hard-won right to define herself. That makes her a powerful presence in any season about masks—literal or otherwise.
She would also bring a different kind of authority to the crossover. Liz understands the theater of horror: the costumes, the rituals, the people who mistake elegance for morality. She can see through a room full of monsters because she has spent her life navigating people who wanted her to disappear.
Liz could give the ensemble a perspective on chosen family that differs from the more mystical or biological forms of family elsewhere in the franchise. She knows that belonging can be constructed deliberately, and that a community’s warmth does not prevent it from reproducing cruelty. That would make her especially valuable in a group of powerful outsiders who assume shared trauma automatically creates trust.
The caution here is obvious. Do not bring Liz back merely to repeat her most beloved emotional beats. A comeback should give her agency in the central conflict, not use her as a symbol of how moving the franchise used to be.
Her best function would be as a leader whose authority is earned through perception rather than supernatural strength. If the others underestimate her because she appears less dangerous, the story can use that mistake to expose the difference between power and control.
7. Sister Jude Martin: A monster worth arguing with
There are characters we invite back because we love them, and characters we invite back because we cannot stop thinking about them. Sister Jude belongs in the second category.
Her cruelty was never interesting simply because it was cruel. It was interesting because it was tangled up with guilt, authority, fear, and the possibility—however compromised—of change. Bringing her into a crossover would create an immediate moral problem: does remorse mean anything when the person who caused the damage cannot undo it?
Jude should not return as a surprise cameo designed to make viewers gasp. She needs a problem only she can make worse. Pairing her with a character who claims to be morally superior would be particularly delicious. Jude has spent enough time around hypocrisy to recognize it, even when she is the hypocrite.
Her inclusion would also force the story to distinguish forgiveness from accountability. Those are not interchangeable, and a crossover crowded with resurrected, redeemed, or recontextualized figures could benefit from someone who refuses to let a tragic backstory function as an excuse.
Jude should not return as a softened version of herself, either. The point is not to prove that she was secretly good. The point is to ask whether a person who has done serious harm can contribute to a solution without being granted moral absolution.
8. The Countess: Gorgeous, lethal, and probably overqualified
The Countess is an irresistible character and a questionable structural choice. She brings glamour, appetite, and the kind of predatory self-invention that makes every room feel like a nightclub built inside a mausoleum.
But that is also the problem: her aesthetic arrives fully formed. A crossover could easily mistake her presence for a plot. Put her in a scene, let her deliver a decadent threat, and the audience may cheer—but what does she want beyond survival, luxury, and control?
She earns an invitation if Season 13 uses her to explore the economics of monstrosity: who gets to make immortality look glamorous, and who is treated as disposable? That question would connect her style to a larger theme instead of treating style as characterization.
Her return could also create a useful conflict with characters who regard their supernatural condition as a curse. The Countess treats power as an extension of taste and appetite. Someone like Misty or Cordelia would see the moral cost behind that confidence. The clash would be stronger than another sequence of the Countess simply proving that she is dangerous.
Without that angle, she is beautiful wallpaper with excellent cheekbones.
9. James Patrick March: The nostalgia trap in a top hat
March is one of AHS’s most memorable villains, which is precisely why his return would require discipline. He is theatrical, quotable, and instantly legible. He is also dangerously close to becoming a greatest-hit version of himself.
His usefulness would come from forcing the crossover to confront the romance of its own monsters. March enjoys murder as performance. He turns violence into taste, ritual, and personal brand. That could make him a sharp antagonist for characters who have spent years mythologizing their own trauma.
He could also expose the danger of treating evil as entertainment. A crossover built around fan-favorite characters is already flirting with that problem. March would understand the audience’s appetite for spectacle, and the show could use him to reflect that appetite back at viewers.
If he is only brought back to be sinister in a hotel, Season 13 should leave him dead. A crossover does not need another charismatic killer admiring his reflection. It needs a reason that this particular killer matters now.
10. Tate Langdon: Keep the controversial ghost in the machine
Tate remains one of the franchise’s most divisive figures, and that is exactly why he could be useful—if the show is willing to engage with the discomfort rather than sand it down.
His return should not be a sentimental reunion. The character’s history raises ugly questions about guilt, manipulation, memory, and the way fandom can confuse a compelling performance with absolution. A mature crossover could make those questions part of the story instead of asking viewers to forget them for a wink at the camera.
Tate’s supernatural circumstances could make those questions even more complicated. If a character is trapped in a place or state where time, memory, and responsibility operate differently, does that change what accountability looks like? The story does not need to excuse him to explore that question. In fact, the tension only works if it refuses an easy answer.
That is a lot of work for one character, and Season 13 may not want to do it. If it cannot, Tate belongs on the absent list. Some ghosts are better left haunting the argument around the show.
The characters Season 13 should resist bringing back
Not every beloved face needs another entrance. Some characters have already completed the arc that made them memorable. Others are so closely associated with one season’s tone that moving them into a crossover would flatten both the character and the new story.
The franchise should be especially wary of bringing back anyone whose entire function is to trigger recognition. A character who appears, says a signature line, and vanishes has not returned; they have been used as a notification. That may generate a social-media reaction, but it does not generate drama.
The same goes for characters whose deaths or departures carried genuine finality. American Horror Story has always played loosely with mortality, but consequence is still a currency. Spend too much of it and nobody’s sacrifice means anything.
There is also a difference between a character who can cross seasons and a character who can only repeat a setting. A hotel figure should not be brought back merely because the new season contains a hotel. A witch should not appear merely because the mythology includes magic. The question should be what that character believes, fears, or wants now—not whether the costume can be recreated.
Finally, the writers should be cautious about overcrowding the emotional center. A dozen returning characters can produce the illusion of scale while leaving nobody enough time to change. The most effective reunion may use a smaller group of characters whose values genuinely collide, while allowing other familiar figures to remain part of the world without forcing them into the foreground.
What would make the Season 13 reunion work?
The answer is not more characters. It is friction.
Give Cordelia and Madison a genuine disagreement. Let Lana discover that the truth is not automatically liberating. Make Misty choose between compassion and intervention. Force Myrtle to sacrifice her own taste for somebody else’s survival. Let Liz confront a world that wants to turn her pain into mythology. Those are story engines. A hallway full of recognizable faces is not.
The season should also establish rules for its crossover. If characters from different stories can meet, the audience needs to understand what that means for time, place, death, and consequence. The explanation does not have to be exhaustive, but the emotional stakes depend on some consistency. Otherwise every problem can be solved by whichever supernatural rule is most convenient in the moment.
Character pairings matter just as much as individual returns. Cordelia and Lana could disagree over whether protection requires secrecy. Madison and March could recognize the seductive power of performance in each other. Misty and the Countess could embody opposing attitudes toward appetite and life. Liz and Jude could create an especially pointed conflict between self-invention and institutional authority.
Those combinations would make the crossover feel designed rather than assembled. They would also give the season a way to revisit old themes without simply reenacting old scenes.
The best version of American Horror Story: Season 13 would treat its history as a set of loaded weapons, not a display case. Returning characters should bring consequences with them. Absent characters should stay absent if their only purpose is to reassure us that the show remembers what we remember.
Because the real horror of a crossover is not that the ghosts come back. It is that they come back unchanged—and the story applauds anyway.
