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The Farmhouse: What Deputies Found on November 16, 1957
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When investigators entered Ed Gein's Plainfield farmhouse on November 16, 1957, they found a scene with no precedent in American criminal history. This is the chapter that explains what was there, why it was there, and how a quiet Wisconsin farmer became the architect of modern horror.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
November sixteenth, nineteen fifty-seven. Waushara County, Wisconsin.
Ed Gein had lived in Plainfield his entire life. He was the quiet farmer.
Between those two murders, and likely before the first, Gein was regularly visiting local graveyards at night. He exhumed somewhere between nine and ten bodies.
Augusta Gein was a force. A widow with two sons, she raised Ed and his brother Henry on a farm outside Plainfield with a severity that bordered on complete psychological control.
When Waushara County deputies walked through that farmhouse on the night of November sixteenth, they weren't prepared for what they were seeing. There was no precedent for it.
Robert Bloch was a writer living in Weyauwega, Wisconsin, about fifty miles from Plainfield, when the Gein case broke in the national press. He was already a horror writer with a working relationship with the pulp tradition.
Tobe Hooper was thinking about Gein when he made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in nineteen seventy-four. The connection is most direct here, and it runs specifically through the skin masks.
Thomas Harris came later, with The Silence of the Lambs in nineteen eighty-eight. Buffalo Bill is the most directly Gein-derived of all three characters.
Mary Hogan disappeared in December of nineteen fifty-four. She ran a tavern in Pine Grove, about eight miles from Plainfield.
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