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The Farmhouse at the Edge of Town: Ed Gein's Hidden World
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Ed Gein was the quiet, helpful neighbor nobody suspected — until the night investigators walked into his barn and changed Plainfield, Wisconsin forever. This is the real story behind Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most people could name the movies. Almost nobody can tell you the real story.
Plainfield sits in central Wisconsin, flat farming country, the kind of place where everyone's business is more or less everyone else's business. Or at least, that's the assumption.
Henry Gein died in nineteen forty-four. The official cause was asphyxiation, connected to a brush fire on the property.
Gein developed a consuming interest in anatomy, in death, in the transformation of the body. He read medical texts and accounts of Nazi experimentation.
Gein committed two confirmed murders. The first was Mary Hogan, a tavern owner, who disappeared in December of nineteen fifty-four.
What they found when they arrived changed everything about how Plainfield understood itself and its quiet neighbor. In the barn, hanging from the rafters by her heels, was Bernice Worden's body.
The question the town had to sit with afterward was the same one the episode title puts directly. How did this happen without anyone seeing it?
In nineteen fifty-seven, when the Gein case broke nationally, it became a sensation. Newspapers ran the details.
When Gein was arrested in November nineteen fifty-seven, he was found mentally incompetent to stand trial. He spent a decade in psychiatric institutions.
Ed Gein didn't found American horror by intention. He was a profoundly disturbed man whose illness produced acts that are genuinely difficult to process.
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