06/23/2022
Somewhere in the Plainfield Wisconsin cemetery lies and unmarked grave belonging to the man who thinks to his Hollywood influence may be America’s most infamous serial killer. In the same burial ground lies what remains of the women he dug up in the 1950s— and turned into a perverse variety of handicrafts. Not surprisingly the place is said to be haunted by the restless soul of one of the fiends victims— unnamed in death as in life— prowling the lonely graves.
In November 1957 Plainfield was shaken to its core after a 58 year old Bernice worden, owner of the local hardware store disappeared. Her son told the local sheriff that he found blood in the store— and that a 51-year-old local handyman named Ed Gein had recently come in looking for antifreeze.
Tracing Gein down to the ramshackle isolated farmhouse where the odd men have lived alone since the death of his mother the sheriff found warden hanging by her feet decapitated and eviscerated, in the shed.
But that was only the beginning of the horror.
In the garage Strewn house, law enforcement officers found chairs reupholstered with fatty human skin; A soup bowl made from a human skull; A shade Pull made of lips; masks made from human faces; A belt made of female ni***es; A vest made from a female torso; embalming supplies; and anatomy books and detective magazines that Gein read by kerosene lamps. There were also human heads— One belonging to Mary Hogan who had run a Plainfield tavern and have mysteriously disappeared in 1954.
In the end the remains of 11 women were discovered in the house. Two of them (Hogan and Worden) Gein claim to have shot to death nine head then he said on earth from local graves. Many of them had been tanned as with taxidermy their flesh used by Gein as garments.
The only immaculate part of the dwelling was the nail the shot room that had belong to Geins mother. The phonetically religious woman had subjected her unstable son to a ceaseless rants about the evils of women. Her alcoholic husband George died in 1940 followed by geins brother Henry, under mysterious circumstances in 1944 leaving Gein to share the house with his mother, The love of his life. But when mother two died in 1945 Gein found himself alone.
well almost. The necrophiliac bachelor started digging up graves using the remains of female bodies for company. He dressed in women’s clothes some fashion from corpses wishing that he had been born a woman.
Geins oblivious neighbors found him mostly harmless. Locals did however acknowledge that he was odd. He talked obsessively for instants about crime and women. Former girlfriend adeline Watkins said ” we discussed every murder we heard about. Eddie explain the mistakes the murderer made”.
Declared insane in 1958 Gein died of cancer at age 77 in Mendota mental health institute. But his perverse legacy indoors having inspired some of the greatest horror films ever made among them the Texas chainsaw massacre, The silence of the lambs and a little known classical called deranged.
But the most enduring product of the Gein legend began in 1959 when writer Robert Bloch published a pot boiler called psycho, which Alfred Hitchcock turned into the classic 1960 film. In it Norman Bates the character based on Gein, says “ A boy‘s best friend is his mother” 
Life magazine the worlds most haunted places
