Fantastic Beasts Leak: Could These Be The American Hogwarts Houses?

Harry Potter fans love to delve deeply into the mythology of the series. Even after all these years, they still come up with scholarly theories about characters, and conspiracies hidden on the page and on-screen. It's no surprise, then, that they're also turning their analytical minds to the upcoming Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. One such fan may have just accidentally unlocked a spoiler about the American-based spin-off: the names of the houses of the Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. While poking around the source codes of J.K. Rowling's Pottermore website, software engineer Ian Cervantez uncovered what looked to him like an unpublished online quiz asking "Where do you belong, Horned Serpent, Wampus, Thunderbird, or Pukwudgie?" He immediately shared this discovery on Reddit. Based on a tweet from Rowling last year, stating that she knows which houses from the American school the Fantastic Beasts characters belong to, fans are pretty sure that this quiz is the counterpart of the oft-asked question, Which Hogwarts house are you? (If you want more technical details about how Cervantez found this page in the first place, see his post on LinkedIn.) Now, considering that this is not a public quiz yet, there's a chance those are placeholders, not the real houses. But they are real creatures in the Potterverse. According to fansite The Leaky Cauldron, the Horned Serpent is a creature in Native American folklore that's a "bringer of wisdom and healing"; the Wampus is a variation of a cougar; the Thunderbird is a magical bird related to the phoenix; and a Pukwudgie is a "2-3 ft tall malicious troll-like being from Wampanoag Native American folklore." The action of Fantastic Beasts, which stars Eddie Redmayne as beast-collector Newt Scamander, seems to take place far outside wizard school walls, so who knows how relevant this "leak" is to the actual story. Still, to a Potter fan, every fact about this world is one worth knowing.