First of all, this post contains THE MAIN SPOILER for The Fall of the House of Usher, revealed in the last episode. If you haven’t seen the series yet, I recommend reading it later. It makes a difference to know.

The first curiosity is that there was a family called Usher. And since she lived in Boston around the 1600s, she would have been the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe. The patriarch, Hezekiah Usher led a book publishing company. In fact, he is known as the first Editor of the United States, when the country was still a Colony. So much so that the first book published in the country was his publisher.

Born in England in 1616, he came to Boston around 1645 and settled in the central part of the city, with his bookstore occupying the ground floor of his house. His personal life is what would have inspired Poe because he was married three times and had five children, all of whom died before or shortly after Usher himself, who was the protagonist of a tragedy.

The family name was immortalized by the American writer in the book published in 1839, with the fictional characters of the brothers Roderick and Madeline Usher, and the structure of the novel was maintained in the Netflix series. There is the double reference of two things attributed to the Ushers. Legend has it that Hezekiah one day caught his wife with a sailor and his reaction was worthy of horror stories: he buried them both in the walls of his house. There are both situations in the Netflix series. But in the case of the real Usher house, when it was demolished in 1830, two bodies were found hugging one of the basement walls. Even without facts proving who the people were, rumors became legends and Edgar Allan Poe obviously had knowledge.

In the series, there is another fact inspired by the real Usher Family. Just like Madeline and Roderick, there were twins – James Campbell Usher and Agnes Pye Usher were children of an acquaintance of the writer’s mother, Eliza, who would be special and therefore hidden. Certainly, the sibling bond was reused in the book and series.

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