Now Playing
The Farm, the Graves, and Augusta: What Made Ed Gein
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Ed Gein robbed graves for years before anyone noticed — and what investigators found in that Plainfield barn in 1957 would permanently reshape American horror. This chapter traces the mother who shaped him, the cemetery runs no one saw, and the night Bernice Worden went missing.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before nineteen fifty-seven, Ed Gein was a quiet farmer. Neighborly, even.
Central Wisconsin in the nineteen fifties was farming country. Small communities.
To understand what was happening on that farm, you have to go back to Augusta Gein. Ed's mother was a domineering woman with rigid religious convictions.
The grave robberies gave him material. The question investigators would later struggle to answer was what exactly he was trying to do with it.
Gein's confirmed kill count is two. Mary Hogan disappeared from a tavern in Pine Grove, Wisconsin, in December of nineteen fifty-four.
Gein was found nearby that same evening and arrested without incident. He was cooperative.
Here's where the story pivots. The Gein case was national news by late nineteen fifty-seven.
Psycho was released in June of nineteen sixty. It broke box office records.
One thing that deserves to be said clearly: Plainfield didn't fail because it was negligent. It failed because Gein was good at being invisible.
Hitchcock's gamble paid off. But the reason it paid off is worth being precise about.
Ed Gein died in a psychiatric institution, never fully tried in the conventional sense, never executed, never fully explained. Two confirmed murders.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.