In November darkness comes early to the people of north
central Wisconsin. The days grow short, the wind bites a little harder, and sooner
or later the first sure sign of winter settles on harvested fields like a thin
white sheet. Not that folks who grew up and live in these parts give it all
that much thought. For them it’s just nature’s way.
On one particular November night in 1957, what passed
for nature’s way took an incredible twist with the discovery of a crime scene inside
a lonely two-story house six miles west of the town of Plainfield, Wisconsin.
What local police bumped into that night changed forever the notion that human
behavior in this part of the world had its limitations. It also created one of
the most unlikely, and enduring, cult figures in the annals of true crime.
Welcome to the home of Ed Gein
A Walk Through the House
Actually Ed wasn’t quite that gracious when he cracked
open his weather-beaten door and saw Don and Georgia Foster standing there on
his front stoop on a warm spring afternoon six months earlier. In fact he was more
than a little wary when he heard a knock at the door and saw the Fosters
holding their ten-month-old son and smiling like the good country neighbors
they were trying to be. Eddie never had many visitors.
Don Foster grew up in nearby Plainfield and worked in
a paper mill. His wife Georgia was a homemaker in their small house that sat on
land next to the Gein property. Just recently Don had run into Ed at a local
crossroads country store and the two got to talking about things: the weather,
crops, the latest odd job Ed had picked up around town. Ed was his usual shy
self, but as the conversation went on he warmed up to Don and together the two
men got to talking about their respective homes.
The Fosters were a growing family and Don said he had
started thinking about finding a bigger house to live in, maybe some land to do
a little farming too. This prompted Ed to chime in that since he lived alone in
his big house and wasn’t farming his land at all, he really ought to think
about getting a smaller place.
It probably came out as little more than a joke at
first, but one of them said they would be better off if they just swapped
houses. An unusual idea, to say the least. But after a little while they both started
seriously wondering what would happen if indeed they did buy each other’s
house. A house swap.
Ed had already seen the inside of the Foster’s home.
More than once, in fact, he had come over and helped babysit their young
children, including daughter Linda. Now it was time for the Fosters to check
things out on their end, hence their arrival that day at Eddie’s door. Like
other farmhouses in the hinterlands back in those days, the Gein house had
neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. There was no connecting phone line
either, thus no way for the Fosters to have phoned ahead and tell him they were
coming over.
After they explained their reason for stopping by, Ed
reluctantly opened the door and invited the Fosters into the kitchen.
“It was the middle of the day but still it was pretty
dark in there,” recalled Georgia, now 85 years old and still living in northern
Wisconsin. “There were maybe one or two small windows in the kitchen, but they
were covered with ragged old curtains. There was so much stuff lying around you
had to be careful where you walked.”
Ever mindful of her manners, she clutched her baby
tightly and tried not to think about the fetid smells and filthy frying pans on
the stove, the crusted jars and used soup cans lying all around the place. The
Fosters were there only to look at the physical structure of the house, she
reminded herself. Did the joints and beams look solid? Were the walls and ceiling
in good shape? If they did end up swapping houses they wanted to be sure they
were getting a safe and solid home.
Was Georgia nervous about going out there? “No, not
really. Everyone in town knew Eddie was a little different, but we just
accepted that. He was harmless.”
Then she added, “It didn’t cross my mind at the time,
but I don’t think anyone had ever been out to see his house, certainly not
since his mother and brother died.”
Ed Gein – The Beginning
If one were to believe in such a thing as a family
curse, what happened to the family of George and Augusta Gein might well stand
out as exhibit A. In 1914 the newly married couple left bustling La Crosse,
Wisconsin, and moved to the tiny hamlet of Plainfield where they bought their
dream home – a farm. Though truth be told, that dream was really nothing more than
Augusta’s intense desire to live as far away from everyone as possible. To her
unyielding way of thinking, people were inherently troublesome, if not
downright evil. Especially women.
An overbearing,
religious zealot who herself had suffered abuse as a young girl, Augusta taught
her two boys early on that all women, except her, were nothing more than wicked
harlots. Even husband George was not spared. Unable to satisfy his wife with
anything he did, he fell victim to her ceaseless contempt and criticism. He
became a bitter and incurable alcoholic and died of drink in 1940. Ed’s older
brother, Henry, was the next to go, dying under mysterious circumstances while
fighting a brushfire side-by-side with Ed in 1944. Then when Augusta suffered a
stroke it fell upon Ed to care for her as best he could, until she died from a
second stroke in 1945.
For the next twelve years Ed lived alone in that house
surrounded by winter winds, bad memories and 196 acres of barren farmland.
On Second Thought
According to Georgia Foster, Eddie didn’t seem all
that nervous or distracted while he conducted his house tour, though he did
quickly shut the doors to several rooms without showing what was inside. The
Fosters did get a peek into what was his mother’s bedroom downstairs.
Curiously, that was the only room in the house that was neat and tidy, if more
than a little dusty.
To the local townsfolk Ed had always been a bit of a
curiosity, the hapless village clown. But never was he thought to be a threat
to anyone. Not even after a 15-year-old local boy started a strange rumor by
telling people he had been in Ed’s house one day when Ed showed him his
collection of shrunken heads. No one believed it was true, of course.
As Georgia was carefully making her way down the
stairs after seeing what she could of the five rooms on the second floor, she
quipped, “Hey Eddie, where do you keep those shrunken heads?”
Normally Eddie would never look anyone in the eye when
talking to them, but right after she said this, Georgia remembers, the
afternoon sun was coming through a window and lit upon his face in an eerie
way. For a brief second or two she saw the strangest red glint in his eye. Like
that of a feral dog; an animal gone bad.
“That was the only time I ever got a bad feeling from
Eddie,” Georgia would say many years later.
The customary simpleton grin quickly returned to
Eddie’s face, however, and he seemed to be playing along with the joke when he
said of the shrunken heads. “Oh, they’re down here in the pantry.”
To this day Georgia Foster insists neither she nor her
husband ever saw anything in Ed’s house that day that aroused suspicion. Though
for the record Ed never did show the Fosters what, if anything, was in that
pantry.
The Fosters were in Ed Gein’s house for a half-hour
before they said goodbye and drove off. According to Georgia, they left still
thinking the house swap might work out. Days later it was Eddie who backed out
of the proposed deal.
͠
Fast forward six months. A little before eight o’clock
on Sunday evening, November 17, 1957, Waushara
County Sheriff Arthur Schley and Police Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster were
driving out to Ed Gein’s house. They needed to talk to him about Bernice
Worden.
Mrs. Worden ran the hardware store in Plainfield. Her
son had just gone to the police with a strange story about his missing mother,
blood stains on the floor, and an unclaimed receipt for a gallon of anti-freeze
with Ed Gein’s name on it. Even the hint of such foul play was anything but
commonplace in Waushara County in 1957. Knowing Ed’s meek, if peculiar, nature,
the men weren’t expecting trouble bringing him in for questioning. Still, the
startling situation did call for some urgency. It was, after all, part of the
job. Or so they figured.
The lawmen pulled up to the darkened house. Guided
only by their flashlights they crunched across the snow and circled around the
building until they found the door to an attached shed unlocked. Entering the
unheated room they started aiming their lights all around.
That’s when Sheriff Schley took a step back and felt
something bump his shoulder. Turning around, the beam of light fell upon the
headless and naked remains of Bernice Worden. It was trussed up and hung upside
down with vital organs removed. Dressed-out, as it were, like a trophy deer.
Reportedly the first words Sheriff Schley gasped were, “My God, there she is.”
But that was
only the beginning. By the time police had gone through the entire house they
found human bones, body parts, and no less than ten severed heads – all women –
buried amidst the squalor.
Ed Gein’s Legacy
“HOUSE OF HORROR STUNS THE NATION” screamed the
headline in LIFE magazine two weeks
later. Such was the near-instant notoriety of the case that reporters from
Chicago and New York City descended upon Plainfield within twenty-four hours of
Gein’s arrest. An incredible tale emerged involving grave robbing, murder and
collected body parts. Linda Foster recalled how a steady stream of curious
out-of-towners drove in day and night for weeks afterward just to get a look at
what had become overnight the most infamous house in Wisconsin.
Robert Bloch, a Wisconsin writer, started reading
newspaper accounts of Ed Gein and came up with a clever idea for a novel. Three
years later, in 1960, film director Alfred Hitchcock took up the story and
forever immortalized Ed Gein in the guise of a character named Norman Bates in the
film “Psycho.”
 |
| Alfred Hitchcock and the "Psycho" house |
Then there is one of the more garish ironies of the
whole affair: Ed Gein, who died in 1984 in the Mendota Mental Health Institute
in Madison, lies buried in an unmarked location of the Plainfield cemetery.
This after someone had snuck in and stolen his tombstone and attempted to sell
it on the internet. Even today the macabre fascination with Eddie won’t go
away.
The story in LIFE
magazine included a picture of Georgia Foster and her young son, Howard – two
of the only three visitors who were ever inside Ed’s house and later able to
tell the tale.
“Who knows what all went on in that house?” said Georgia
Foster fifty-five years after she and her husband briefly considered swapping
their house for his. “Nobody knew back then. We were just looking for a bigger
house to move into, that’s all. I don’t think about it much anymore, but I
guess everything happens for a reason.”
Indeed it does. In the pre-dawn
hours of March 28, 1958 – two days before the scheduled estate sale of the Gein
farm – the two-story white frame building caught on fire. By the time volunteer
firefighters got out there the fire was too far gone. Newspaper reports quoted
firefighters saying there was nothing they could do but watch it burn to the
ground.
The plot of land was seeded
with new trees shortly thereafter. Today in the woods and fields around
Plainfield there is no physical trace of where the house once stood. And that’s
just the way the local population wants it. Doubtless they keep wishing the
endless fascination with Ed Gein would disappear as easily. But where some dreams
die hard, so do nightmares.
After all, that too is nature’s way.
---
To see photographs of Ed Gein and his house at the time of his arrest:
