Widow’s Bay will undoubtedly end up being one of the best shows of 2026, and a large part of its appeal is that nobody can quite figure out what’s going on. Season 1 has been incredibly dense with clues, references, obscure ephemera, and little suggestions and connections that people have largely forgotten about because the show keeps moving on to the next thing. But everything we’ve seen is probably relevant in some way to the broader plot, and fan theories are understandably percolating all over the internet.
It’d take a better man than me to keep track of everything, but I’ve managed to isolate most of the suspicions into a few big-ish threads that help to explain some of the things we don’t yet know. It’s all guesswork and supposition, but that’s the fun. Either way, there’s something pretty dodgy going on here, and some of the characters we’ve come to like may well be connected to it in more ways than we realised. Let’s get on with it.
There’s Something In Tom’s Basement
Even though Patricia stole the show in the latest episode, it also contained a major clue that Tom is hiding something. And I mean something else beyond the fact that his wife, Lauren, didn’t really die in childbirth, which he had implied to Evan throughout his entire life.
In Episode 7, Evan discovered a trunk of Tom’s belongings that contained various mementoes of Lauren, including photographs of her and Evan as a toddler, disproving Tom’s claims. We’ll get to Lauren in a minute, but in the meantime, there’s something else to take note of in this conversation. When Tom initially spots a sulky Evan clutching the photographs and letters, he panics and assumes he went through the basement. “No, I went through your trunk,” replies Evan. “What the hell is in the basement?!”
Since Tom gives a touching explanation about what happened to Lauren and why he has been hiding it ever since, leading to a breakthrough in his relationship with Evan that is helped along by Red Sox tickets, the question never comes up again. But what is in Tom’s basement?
Musical Chairs
The idea of chairs in underground locations has been a bit of a recurring motif through Season 1 of Widow’s Bay. Way back in Episode 1, the camera panned down to what looked like an electric chair in the basement of the Salty Whale. In Episode 6, Sarah Wescott Warren discovered a chair in the tunnels beneath her house – which is now the home of the town’s historical society – facing two gigantic metal doors.
It’s a little unclear whether these are the same chair, discovered years apart, or whether they’re two separate chairs, both fulfilling the same purpose. It’s also a little unclear if the one under the Salty Whale is actually ol’ sparky, or just an old-school restraining chair, such as the kind that – more on this below, too – dentists might have used to extract teeth.
Tying into what we know about the pact Richard Warren made with whatever evil haunts the island, the best working theory is that the chairs were used for human sacrifice. Someone was tied there, and something emerged through the doors and claimed them. But Richard Warren was buried alive hundreds of years before the show picks up. In his absence, who was feeding the town its sacrifices?
Has Tom Been Feeding the Island?
As far as we know, if the island isn’t “fed” with sacrifices, it sends almost Biblical punishments to torment the inhabitants (such as the fog, etc.). It has to be kept satiated, and someone has to be responsible for that. Upon his resurrection, Richard referred to Tom as the “Lord Protector” of the island, which would imply that it was probably his responsibility.
Tom ran for mayor unopposed, and his primary goal with the position has been to turn the island into a tourist trap. Ostensibly this was to modernise it, but could it be that he required a steady stream of people to use as sacrifices to keep the evil at bay?
We saw in the flashback episode that the subterranean tunnels connected to Richard’s house. Could they also connect to Tom’s? Is there a gigantic network beneath the town that can be navigated by people in the know to facilitate human sacrifices using the chairs? Is there a chair and a tunnel in Tom’s basement?
The Widows
Connected to this theory is the idea that Tom perhaps sacrificed Lauren to the island. It seems very much like he’s lying – or at least bending the truth – about the preeclampsia-induced stroke, since we saw them attempting to leave the island on a ferry, which is where her problems began. Tom, sensing she wasn’t going to get any better, could have offered her up to the island in order to buy an era of relative peace in which to raise Evan.
This also ties into larger ideas about the historical misogyny of Widow’s Bay, and the fact that it’s, you know, called “Widow’s Bay”. There has been a fair amount of chatter about witches and burning at the stake, which could have easily, in this context, been the men of the town sacrificing their women to appease the island’s evil. Tom could have continued that trend in the present day.
The Teeth
In a throwaway comment early on, Gerrie mentioned that when the settlers first arrived, they found the island totally desolate… except for the teeth. It seemed like a dark joke, but there have been a few allusions to the relevance of teeth since then.
In this Reddit post, a user delved pretty deep into the relevance of teeth in a folkloric context, saying the following:
In medieval and early modern European folklore, a person’s discarded teeth were considered the ultimate weapon for black magic because they acted as an unbreakable physical link to the victim’s soul. Under the magical principle of contagious magic, anything that was once part of a human body—such as hair, nail clippings, or teeth—retained a permanent, invisible connection to that person. Because teeth are the only visible part of the human skeleton, witches supposedly prized them above all other biological materials to inflict maximum spiritual and physical torment.
Needless to say, this ties in to the theory of witches, and could easily be applied to whatever other form of nebulous evil is in control of the island. Perhaps the sacrifice required is not human life, per se, but human teeth? This could explain the restraining chairs, and would also tie into the board game “Teeth” which was in the hotel, containing only a box of pliers. Executions by burning or drowning would, theoretically, preserve the teeth of the victims, too, perhaps explaining why the gnashers survived even when the people didn’t.
