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November 16, 1957: The Night Ed Gein's Barn Was Opened
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When deputies arrived at Ed Gein's Plainfield farmhouse on November 16, 1957, they found one of the most disturbing crime scenes in American history. This is the chapter that changed everything — the grave robbing years, the two murders, and what was inside the barn.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before November sixteenth, nineteen fifty-seven, Ed Gein was the quiet man around Plainfield. He babysat neighborhood children.
To understand what Ed Gein actually was, you have to go back before the murders. You have to go back to the cemeteries.
The first murder came in December of nineteen fifty-four. Mary Hogan was a tavern owner, a middle-aged woman who ran a bar in Pine Grove, a small community near Plainfield.
Bernice Worden was in the barn. She'd been hung from the rafters by her heels, her body dressed out like a deer carcass.
Gein was arrested that evening. He gave investigators a confession.
Here's where the story doubles back on itself. While Gein was being evaluated in nineteen fifty-seven and fifty-eight, newspaper coverage of the case was spreading nationally.
The reason Gein keeps generating cultural response isn't the horror of the objects themselves, though that's undeniable. The reason is the gap he exposed between appearance and reality.
Ed Gein died in a psychiatric hospital after spending nearly three decades institutionalized. He's buried in Plainfield, in the same town where all of it happened.
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