Recap from Thrilllist

The Latest episode of American Horror Story: Cult, "The Winter of Our Discontent," had a lot of freaky stuff going on, from a bizarre All-4-One-scored bedding ritual to fratricide to Ally Mayfair-Richards (Sarah Paulson) finally joining the cult. But nothing was so downright terrifying as an early episode flashback that saw a younger Kai and Winter visiting something called "Judgment House," a deranged haunted house run by a man named Pastor Charles that contained the real bodies of tormented "sinners."

The Anderson siblings find Judgment House on the dark web. They're invited by Pastor Charles himself, and at first the siblings believe the house is populated with actors. But after smelling blood on a victim in the first room they enter -- a mockery of an abortion clinic -- they realize they're in a real-life house of horrors, and that Pastor Charles is far more sinister than they could have imagined.

Does Judgment House sound like an invented, over-the-top nightmare designed to spice up a fictional show? It isn't: Judgment House shares a name and basic concept with a real-world series of haunted houses run by evangelical churches throughout the United States. While the actual versions aren't full of dead or tortured bodies, they do have a similar, bizarre function -- to scare people "for the sake of heaven."
Judgement Houses may be strange and intense, but they don't actually inflict bodily harm on anyone. In AHS: Cult, Pastor Charles is a straight-up murderer, and not a particularly smart one: as Kai and Winter discover, the people he's trapped and tortured aren't even guilty of the sins he punished them for.