The story of Ed Gein, one of the worst maniacs in history
Biography of Edward Theodore Gein began in Wisconsin on August 27, 1906. The boy’s family can hardly be called prosperous: his unemployed father George suffered from alcohol addiction, and August’s mother, who owned a small grocery store, was known as a tyrant.
Their marriage initially went wrong, but the couple lived together out of religious convictions. When Ed was born, the family already had a son, Henry , who became the boy’s older brother.
When Ed was 33 years old, his father died. After this event, in order to cover housing costs, the brothers more often left the farm, being content with random work. As for Gein, he often worked as a nanny for the neighbor’s children. Henry, on the other hand, tried to distance himself from his family and live a normal life.
However, for his disobedience, he paid a terrible price — in 1944 he was found dead in the possession of the Heins. The official version was that Henry had a heart attack. However, she did not explain in any way the strange wounds on the young man’s head.
Ed was left alone with his mother. A year later, she suffered a blow and August was bedridden. Ed courted her around the clock, but in December 1945, after a second, even stronger blow, August died.
39-year-old Ed was left alone and it was then that his slow fall into the black abyss of madness began.
Ed was very withdrawn and rarely left the farm. Leading a reclusive lifestyle, he came to town only when he needed the services of a mechanic. No one seemed to notice that he was weirder than before before his mother died.
Looking back, you can see that he allowed his weirdness to be revealed through his own negligence. Even the stories about the oddities happening on his farm did not bother anyone.
Local children, who looked into the windows of Hein’s house, talked about seeing human heads hanging on the walls. Edward just laughed and said that his brother served during the war somewhere in the South Seas and sent him these heads as a gift.
Old Ed Gein wouldn’t hurt a fly, the townspeople thought. This is just a strange little man who cannot even bear the sight of blood. He never even participated in a traditional deer hunt, as everyone in Planfield believed until Bernice Warden disappeared.
She disappeared on November 16, 1957. In the afternoon, Frank Warden returned from hunting and stopped at a hardware store run by his mother, 58-year-old widow Bernice. It is strange that his mother was not there. She left the workplace, leaving the front and back doors unlocked.
Frank discovered something else, something that scared him terribly — a trail of blood that stretched from the window to the back door. Quickly looking around the room, Frank found a crumpled receipt lying in the backyard. The receipt was in the name of Edward Gein.
Frank called the police and went with the sheriff to Gein’s farm to ask him a few questions regarding Miss Warden’s whereabouts.
Upon arrival at the site, a terrible find awaited them on the summer terrace behind the house. Bernice’s naked body hung upside down on a huge pulley, gutted in the way a deer is butchered.
The shocked policemen called for reinforcements. Half an hour later, a dozen policemen were combing Gein’s dwelling, which later became famous as the “House of Horrors”. What they found that night was unparalleled in the history of American criminology.
The soup pots were made from human skulls. The chairs were upholstered in human skin. The lamp shades were made of flesh and gave off an eerie rotten smell.
One of the boxes in the corner was filled to the brim with severed noses. The belt was decorated with female nipples. The coverlet was adorned with women’s lips.
A shoebox under the bed contained several dried female genitals. The faces of nine women, carefully crafted and made in the form of effigies, hung on one of the walls … there was also a leather bracelet, a drum made of flesh and much more.
The shirt with breasts was made from the skin of a tanned middle-aged woman. Gein later admitted that he often wore this shirt at night, pretending to be his own mother.
But that was not all. The refrigerator was filled to the top with human organs, and a heart was found in one of the pans. The sheriff estimated that the remains belonged to about fifteen women, and possibly more.
At about 4:30 am, after several hours of searching, the police found a bloody bag. Inside was a recently severed head. Large nails were stuck into the ears, tied together with a string. The head belonged to Bernice Warden. Gein planned to decorate one of the walls of his eerie lair with it.
During many hours of interrogation, Gein confessed to the murder of two women — Bernice Warden and Mary Hogan (however, Gein confessed to the murder only a few months later).
The rest of the nightmarish evidence found on the farm, he allegedly collected at the local cemetery for 12 years after the death of his mother. Robbing graves at night, he collected his terrible collection with the help of the feeble-minded farmer Gus, whose task was to dig up the bodies.
One day Gus, to his misfortune, went to Hein’s house. He just needed fresh trophies and decided on the first murder.
A few months after Gein’s arrest, the local boys grew so emboldened that they were already throwing stones at the windows of the House of Horrors. The townspeople considered the farm a symbol of evil and debauchery and avoided it at all costs.
Ultimately, the authorities decided to auction the estate. People protested, but there was nothing they could do about it — or so it seemed at first. On the night of March 20, 1958, Hein’s house mysteriously burned down. It was rumored that it was arson, but the culprit was never found.
According to the residents of Planfield, the fire saved their town from becoming a monument to Ed Gein’s madness.
However, he did not stop the flow of curious people who want to participate in the sale of the surviving property. A huge number of rusted cars were sold, and the Hein estate itself was acquired by real estate dealer Edmin Shi. Within a month, he destroyed the ashes and nearby undergrowth of 60,000 trees.
The only unusual incident at the auction involved the sale of Ed Gein’s car, which he drove on the day of Bernice Warden’s murder. 14 people fought for this lot, and, in the end, Ford left for an unheard-of amount of $ 760 at that time. The buyer chose to remain anonymous, with some identifying him as the “Cooch Brothers” of Rothschild, Wisconsin.
The buyer appears to have been the organizer of the Seymour fair, as evidenced by Ford’s emergence as an attraction called Ed Gein’s Ghoul Car. The further fate of the car is unknown.
A huge poster next to the sedan said:
Look at the car carrying the dead from the graves!
Ed Gein’s outlaw’s car!
The reward is $ 1,000 to anyone who proves otherwise!
In 1984, Ed Gein died, becoming a legend even though he spent most of his life behind bars. He died on July 26, 1984 and was buried in Planfield City Cemetery. Ed Gein became the prototype for the maniac in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
