As Liz lies on her deathbed, she remembers taking over the Cortez after the Countess' death. With Iris, Liz set out to remake the hotel in their own image. The Countess then cuts her throat.
At the grand reopening, Liz and Iris greet two visitors and figure their reviewers for Trip Adventure, an Internet review site. The women serve champagne and liquidate the Countess' art to put in Egyptian sheets and Japanese wonder toilets. Once Liz takes them to their room, the couple settle in and Sally appears. She talks about how Liz and Iris couldn't remove the pain no matter how much they tried, and jabs a syringe into the man Mitch's chest. He goes down, overdosing, and the woman Jo runs out and yells for someone to call the police. She bumps into Will and hugs him in relief, and he stabs her in the neck.
Later, Liz is cleaning up Mitch's corpse when Iris comes in and tells her that Jo is dead as well. They call a meeting of the hotel ghosts and Marcy complains that guests keep interrupting her. The women ask the ghosts to stop killing the guests, because they can't fill the place if guests keep disappearing. Will points out that Iris is a vampire, and she insists that she's now on donated blood. Sally says that she and Will are the killers and they're not going to stop because they get off on the thrill. James arrives and agrees with Sally and Will, but notes that once John completed the Ten Commandment killings, James' career is over.
James points out that they have no choice but to keep the Cortez running because they don't know what will happen to them as ghosts if the place is torn down. The Cortez meets all of the criteria to become a historical landmark except time, and it has to remain open until 2026. Will points out that he paid cash for the place, but Iris reminds him that he didn't have any other designers so now that Will is dead, his design house is worth nothing. James insists that it's not a democracy and they'll do what he says. When Sally refuses, James reminds her that he had the Addiction Demon rape her the last time she disobeyed him. Despite that, Sally insists that there are no rules when people are dead, and figures that Hell can't be any worse than their current existence.
Later, Iris brings Sally champagne and says that she understands Sally's pain since John went back to his family. When Sally says that she's all alone, Iris gives Sally a iPhone and free WiFi, and tells her to post on the Internet using Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Sally does so and soon has thousands of followers hanging on her every word without her ever having to leave her room. One day Sally tossed away her syringes for good.
A year after he died, Will is drinking at the bar and lamenting the loss of his design business. He tells Liz that he feels like he doesn't exist, and Liz says that they closed the couture business. She's gotten Lachlan into a private school and assures Will that he matters. Will doesn't want Lachlan to come to the Cortez, and Liz tells him that the spirits that have gotten along at the Cortez discovered a purpose. She advises Will to go back to designing, and he admits that he was out of ideas even before he died. Liz assures him that everyone reinvents themselves in California, and suggests that he claim he's holing up in the Cortez to continue his work and she'll be the public face of the company.
Soon, Liz is calling the shots at Will's company. Will's lawyers confirm that Will has given Liz full authority. Back at the Cortez, Liz tells Will to look around for inspiration. Soon, the Cortez is hosting fashion shows with the ghosts--and Ramona--as models, and all phones and cameras banned to add to the mystery of Will's new art deco style. Liz, watching, tells Iris that it was at another fashion show that he first saw Tristan.
Later, Iris takes Liz to her room with Tristan and introduces her to Lifetime psychic Billie Dean Howard. Billie Dean puts the living in contacted with their deceased loved ones, and has heard all about the Cortez as a psychic hot spot. She makes contact with Tristan's spirit, but he refuses to talk to Liz. Liz figures that Tristan blames her for his death, and Billie Dean makes contact with Donovan. She tells Iris that Donovan says that he's in a place where it's always Saturday morning and it smells like Iris' pancakes.
Despite Tristan refusing to talk to her, Liz is reunited with her son Douglas and his wife Janice. They have a daughter, Isabelle, and Liz is happy that the baby's new world is more accepting than the one Liz was born into. However, Liz soon discovers that she has prostate cancer. She tells her friends at the hotel and asks them to kill her so that she'll die at the hotel and be with them always. Liz refuses to let Ramona turn her and calls all the ghosts together. She presents them with weapons and insists that she wants to be her family, but they can't bring themselves to do it. Only Sally realizes that Liz wants to be reborn, and hugs her as the others pick up weapons. Before they can strike, the Countess comes in. She says that Liz was her fondest creation and she came to help her transition. Crying, the Countess cuts Liz's throat.
Liz's spirit finds herself standing over her corpse. Tristan comes in and says that he wouldn't talk to Liz while she was alive because she had more living to do and he didn't want to get in the way. Reunited, the lovers kiss.
Devil's Night- October 30th, 2022
Later, Ashley Rhodes checks in for Room 64 where John lived. She heard about the room from Billie Dean on her prime-time specials and insists on taking it. Iris blames herself because she thought Billie Dean would provide free advertising, but now people just check in to have sex with John's ghost. The people that come in are bad for the brand, but John appears Will tell Ramona that they don't want to shut down the hotel because it's good for the dead to have contact with the living. He doesn't like Billie Dean pestering him with questions each October 30, and tells Iris to get here there that night before sundown.
That night, Billie Dean arrives and begins her new special. John appears to her and only her, and she asks for his side of the story. John explains that his family came to understand that he was cleaning up the world in his own way, and all he could provide them with for blood was dog because he refuses to target innocents. He then moved into the Cortez with Alex and Holden, and give Scarlett a chance by having Liz send her to private school. Later, John killed and exsanguinated a drug dealer, but the police chased him to the steps of the Cortez and shot him dead before he could get inside to die.
Billie Dean wonders why she can only feel John's presence appears on Halloween Eve, and he explains that normally the dead can only walk the world on Devil's Night. John offers his hand and Billie Dean takes it, going with him and leaving her camera crew behind. He takes her to James' suite and introduces her to the "rock stars of the dead": Aileen Wuornos, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Zodiac Killer, John Wayne Gacey, and Richard Ramirez. They are celebrating and hail John as the greatest of them. Billie Dean insists that she isn't frightened. James arrives and offers a toast of absinthe, and is intrigued to hear what Billie Dean feels off of him.
Gacey seats Billie Dean down and they all close in on her. James says that John has brought them their "party favor," and they handcuff Billie Dean to the chair and pick up their weapons. John assures her that she'll like staying at the Cortez and she won't have to worry about her career ever again. Once they kill her, the hotel will become a myth. When Billie Dean realizes that they can't leave the hotel and make her keep her word, Ramona comes in and promises that she'll hunt down Billie Dean if she goes back on her word. Soon, Billie Dean is running out of the hotel, never to speak of it again.
John goes to his room where Alex and Holden are sleeping. A teenaged Scarlett is waiting and John tells her that he took care of what he had to take care of. He thanks her for coming the one night of the year where they can all be together, and Scarlett sits and watches as John gets in the bed with his wife and son.
In the Cortez bar, a young man is drinking when the Countess approaches him. When he says that he's meeting some friends there, the Countess says that he isn't and compliments his looks.
Written by Gadfly on Jan 14, 2016