ON WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP

To begin with there is the book’s wonderfully gothic title: Wisconsin Death Trip. One glance at that sucker and it’s hard to imagine anyone turning away without wanting to take a peek inside. Authored by Michael Lesy and published in 1973, this non-fiction work, labeled by many today as a cult classic, looks at the darker side of the great American Dream circa 1890 in rural Wisconsin, and the result is at times both laughably absurd and strangely unsettling. Whatever personal attachment I have to this book may be indirect and circumstantial at best, but I’ll get to that later. First, a little background.

 

Author Michael Lesy was born and raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and is currently a writer and professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. In a statement posted on Hampshire’s College’s website, Lesy describes his working theme to be one of using “historical photographs from public archives…to tell a variety of difficult truths about our country and our shared pasts.”

            Wisconsin Death Trip would become his first, and most famous, published effort to date. And it came about because one day the tireless young scholar got tired of studying.

Back in 1972 Lesy was in the midst of studying for his masters degree in American social history at the University of Wisconsin. One afternoon he decided he needed a break. “I was really quite bored,” he would later say¹, looking back on the day when he started paging through a photography book and came across an old picture published by the Wisconsin Historical Society that caught his eye. On a whim he walked over to the Historical Society building on the Madison campus and asked if he could see some more.

The object of his curiosity was a collection of portraits taken in the late 1800s by one Charles Van Schaick, who happened to be the town photographer and Justice of the Peace in the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, at the turn of the century. From his two-story studio and gallery on 1^st Street just off of Main Street, Van Schaik served his customers, snapping portraits of couples young and old, women wearing the finest fashions of the day, even dead infants dressed for burial in their tiny coffins.

For the rest of that afternoon in Madison, Lesy pored over thousands of Van Schaik’s photographs and saw something haunting in the unvarnished, downright grim faces staring back at him. The more he looked at these pictures, the more he began to think he was on to something. His first impulse was to somehow tell the story of these pioneering people in the form of a documentary film. But the more practical approach was to compile a series of these pictures in a book and let that tell the story instead.

Following up on his newfound inspiration, he started scouring through newspaper archives of The Badger State Banner from the 1890s, sifting through and picking out any bizarre reports that best complemented the dark vision he had seen reflected in Van Schaik’s subjects. What he found in the newspapers was a treasure trove of stories referencing madness, suicide, disease and crime in the hinterlands of Wisconsin. Quoting them just as they once appeared in the local press, these snippets would become the other half of his picture book. By combining the words and pictures in just the right way, Lesy hoped to create a black and white montage of images no reader would soon forget.

A few samples:

• “James Carr, residing in the town of Erin, Vernon County, was discovered dead in his log house recently, having died of starvation.”

 

• “Mrs. Carter, residing at Trow’s Mill, who has been in charge of the boarding house at A. S. Trow’s cranberry marsh, was taken sick at the marsh last week and fell down, sustaining internal injuries which have dethroned her reason. She has been removed to her home here and a few nights since arose from her bed and ran through the woods…. A night or two after she was found trying to strangle herself with a towel…. It is hoped the trouble is only temporary and that she may soon recover her mind.”

 

• “Lena Watson of Black River Falls gave birth to an illegitimate child and choked it to death.”

 

• “Alexander Gardapie, aged 90 years, died at Prairie du Chien. He walked into a saloon, drank a glass of gin, asked the time of day, sat down, and died.”

 

• “G. Drinkwine, father of Miss Lillian Drinkwine, who committed suicide few days ago, attempted suicide a few days ago at Sparta. He swallowed a large quantity of cigar stubs.”

 

Or finally, this macabre little sketch:

 

• “Frederick Schultz, an old resident of Two Rivers, cheated his undertaker by suddenly jumping out of the coffin in which, supposed to be dead, he had been placed.”

 

            Setting aside the peculiar tenor of what passed for responsible journalism in those days, the question remains - were these incidents just isolated oddities or were they more telling of what life was really like back then?  For Michael Lesy the answer to both questions was yes.

            Times were indeed tough back then, especially for the farmers and homesteaders who had little money to begin with. All across the country in 1893 a run of bank failures and the depletion of the gold reserve set off an economic depression that quietly became “one of the worst in American history,”² and the folks of Wisconsin, like those everywhere, felt hardship like never before. Doubtless a fair number did fall prey to madness and suicide as a result.

And why not? Faced with a crippling money crisis and a child rasping for dear life from diptheria, or maybe looking out over a season’s failed harvest, with precious little else to fill one’s mind but the sound of the wind outside or the ticking of a clock on the mantel, who wouldn’t question their ability to make it through another day?

(Though when contemplating the method of one’s suicide surely there were better ways to choose than swallowing fistfuls of cigar butts, but to each his own end.)

Reading through the accounts in Death Trip one is left to wonder – only half in jest – if the entire countryside wasn’t awash with crazies. There were no counselors or support groups back then. No prescriptions to help get through the tough times; not even a telephone or next-door neighbor to call on. For some, old age came too early; for them the endless days of toil meant death and despair could not be defeated.                                                         

In an interview in 2003, Lesy said that the aim of any book should be to allow the reader “the ability to free associate and not be lost.”³ That’s pretty much what the reader is invited to do with Death Trip once the pages start turning. The mind starts to skim across the photographs and wonder – what was going on in the life of each of these people when their picture was taken? What could have pushed some to such grisly extremes written about in the local papers? From there it’s not that much of a leap to think about the challenges in one’s own life today. Then at some point the focus comes back to the book and the reminder that maybe the good old days weren’t always so good after all.

As books go, Death Trip defies convention in nearly every way. For one thing none of the pictures carry any captions or descriptions, so the faces one sees throughout the book are nothing more than nameless ghosts. The text has no clear beginning or narrative structure. The pages aren’t even numbered. From a happenstance encounter with images taken a century ago in a town he had never heard of, let alone set foot in, one young author published a book that would be his greatest success, indeed would become the calling of his life’s work. (The book went on to enjoy enough notoriety that a feature film adaptation of Wisconsin Death Trip was made in 1999.)

Much of my interest in all this stems from the fact that part of my family tree runs right through Black River Falls at the same time period detailed in the book. At the turn of the century my grandmother, Margaret Stamstad, was a young girl growing up in the township of Irving, not more than ten miles southeast of Black River Falls and Charles Van Schaik’s photography studio. Fortunately for my mother - and me - she went on to live a long and fulfilling life, though she carried her own share of hardship. Growing up she watched helplessly while her youngest sister took sick and couldn’t keep food down, ultimately dying of malnutrition. Incredibly, a similarly tragic fate later befell her own two-year-old son. She had to raise her family without her husband after he suffered a debilitating stroke and died in 1946. Then on top of that there was a diagnosis of breast cancer.
Tough times? Relative to what life was like back then, most of us today have no idea what those words mean.

What the book does is take a hard look at the perilous journey that brought each of us to where we are today. It invites us to think of the trials and tribulations of our own lives and realize all that came before.

Michael Lesy makes much the same point when he writes in the conclusion to the book: “Pause now. Draw back from it. There will be time again to experience and remember.”  
And with that we close the book - for now - on Black River Falls and draw back from the grim images of its past. At its core, Wisconsin Death Trip is about life, how ridiculously tenuous and wonderfully uncertain it can be - for all of us, no matter what the time or place.

                                                                                                            ----

 

____________________________

¹ www.identitytheory.com, interview of Michael Lesy by Robert Birnbaum, September 16, 2003. URL: http://www.identitytheory.com/michael-lesy/

² Whitten, David. “Depression of 1893”. Economic History.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. August 14, 2001, URL: http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-depression-of-1893/

³  ibid., www.identitytheory.com

Homecoming

There are, it’s true, places where the past is always present. It flickers only in shadow and memory, but it’s there - if you take a moment and listen for it. Of course that can be good or bad, depending on the circumstances. In my life there’s a place that’s always been good to me, so I like to feel the past whenever I’m there. In fact I welcome it.

I go there when I can, which is to say not that often, maybe two times a year if I’m lucky.  The place I speak of is a relatively small town, a noticeable but not overwhelming dot on the state map. Yet the older I get the more the more important it is to me. When I go to visit, I always come back feeling a little more sure of myself and a lot more sure of my heritage and my good fortune. Does that make it – dare I say - a sacred place for me?

We’ll get back to that.

            Black River Falls is located in the west central part of Wisconsin. For the record, it serves as the county seat of Jackson County and tallied an official population of 3,622 according to the 2010 census. While there are two other rivers named Black flowing elsewhere in the United States, there isn’t another town called Black River Falls anywhere else in the country, or in the world for that matter. So that makes it a unique place in its own right.

Originally named “La Riviere Noire” or “The Black River” by French explorers in 1659, the body of cold, dark water gave rise to an outpost that was eventually incorporated into a village in 1866. By 1883 the tiny hamlet grew to become a city of sawmills sending lumber downstream for a growing country.  But with prosperity came peril, and in October day of 1911, following days of uncommonly torrential rains, the river rose up and went on a rampage that nearly wiped out the town. Black Friday they called it.
On a lighter note, according to the official town website the list of notable people to have come from Black River Falls since that time include major league baseball players Ernie Rudolph and Phil Haugstad (Rudolph pitched in seven games for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945 and Haugstad pitched sparingly for the Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds from 1947 to 1952). There were legitimate heroes, too, like United States Marine and Congressional Medal of Honor winner Mitchell Red Cloud Jr., who died in action in Korea in 1950.

            Not that any of that brief history lesson has a damn thing to do with my story, except for the fact that my mother, Carol Stolt (Nee Thompson), was born on a small farm on the outskirts of Black River Falls in June of 1922. As for me, I was born and raised in Milwaukee some years later, so I never once called Black River Falls home. Yet for as long as I can remember, the times spent up there with aunts, uncles and cousins, the many days and nights spent swimming, fishing, playing cards, anything that lent itself to sharing a good laugh, those are among the best memories I will ever have.

            So really this is more about family than it is about the town itself, though in my mind the two always seemed to fit so well together. The heritage of my mother’s family, and the majority of the townsfolk, is Norwegian - hardy people who are steady-working, slow to anger and quick to laugh at themselves.

I like that.
 

            I think back on all the times we, as an extended family, have shared in Black River Falls over the years. Too many to count.  There were weddings, vacations, picnics and holidays. Of course a few funerals too. For instance, I think of Christmas Eves long ago when I was a kid and we gathered in the cramped but cozy quarters of my grandmother’s house on Fillmore Street in the middle of town. For a few years in the mid-1960s all us cousins put on our own little Nativity play for the grown-ups, complete with homemade costumes, painfully bright lights for the home movies, and even a bale of fresh straw for the manger. All that my cousins and I wanted to do was get this over with so we could tear into the presents under the tree, but somehow we made it through the production and played out our parts as best we could. (Mine was a non-speaking role where I was a youthful shepherd come to see the birth of the Christ child – for that part a doll was used.)

            But like it or not time moves on, and nowadays any trip to Black River Falls requires my stopping out at the cemetery grounds of Little Norway Lutheran Church where my mother was laid to rest in 2011. As the name might suggest, Little Norway lies at a quaint crossroads surrounded by farmland and a stretch of woods a few miles west of town. The whitewashed building with its grand steeple was built in 1873, and in the yard are cracked and badly weathered tombstones from that era to prove it. I like to go out there by myself and walk around, listening to everything and nothing at all as a summer breeze blows through the same trees it did years ago. Stillness. Quiet. The perfect place, I find, to walk around and take stock of things, do a little self-inventory of past and present. In the spirit of Thoreau and his Walden Pond, Twain and his Mighty Mississippi, I have here my own Little Norway to draw from. 

 

To be clear, Black River Falls means more to me than just a trip to the cemetery. Everything about this town is still a source of pride and great memories and I trust it will be again the next time I return.
The dictionary definition of the word “sacred” includes the phrases “highly valued and important” and “entitled to reverence and respect.” Well, when it comes to the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, I guess that word covers it just fine for me. 

 

 

           

 

͠

A Little Bit of Ghost Writing

I wrote this on behalf of a friend who wanted to pay tribute to his grandfather.

In Memory of Charlie Morris Freeze

(1917 – 2008)

“Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows.”

― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food

W

hen I think of my grandfather – and I often do – I still see him wearing those weathered overalls, the well-worn baseball cap, and the wrinkled smile of a truly contented man. It all seemed to fit him so perfectly, so naturally. I see him behind the wheel of a huge blue Chevy truck, and his not thinking for one second that he couldn’t handle that beast. For most of his 91 years of life, Charlie Freeze, who went by his middle name Morris, lived where home and place of business were one and the same – on an Iowa farm. They say any farmland, no matter where it is, raises more than just crops and cattle. It raises character. Well, in the case of my mother’s father, that was never more self-evident. And for me he was, and always will be, the face of the American Farmer.

His first farm was just outside the town of Coin in the southwest corner of Iowa. Later he and his wife, Alice, moved to Shenandoah, also in Page County, and they started farming primarily beans and feed corn. Once or twice a year when I was a kid, our family would make the long trip across the state to Shenandoah to visit them. While my friends were going to places like Disneyworld for summer vacation, I was going to Iowa, and that was fine by me. Because every time we visited the farm Morris left such an indelible impression on me, first with his hard and meaty hands and tanned skin, then later on in my life, as I started understanding what it was he did on the farm every single day, it was his relentless and uncompromising work ethic. Morris became, in my mind, the ultimate example of what hard work, devotion and self-sacrifice are really all about.

It may be obvious to some, but until you see it firsthand you can’t really grasp the magnitude of the job – for a farmer the work never ends. From sunup to sundown, seven days a week every week, the crops need tending and the livestock need feeding; the machinery needs repair and the fields needs cultivating. Through seasons of cold and heat I can only imagine, Morris did all of that for the better part of fifty years, and did it without complaint. He never got rich or received any special recognition. He never had any regrets, either. He was, quite simply, proud to be the man he was.    

He always cared enough to do the little things right so they wouldn’t become bigger problems down the road. He cared for his wife, herself a woman of unfailing faith, in her later years as she suffered from acute arthritis that left her barely able to walk. Again, he did so without question or complaint.

I loved listening to him tell jokes and baseball stories from his youth. I loved sitting with him on a summer day, drinking iced tea and listening only to the wind. He was definitely a say-what-you-mean, mean-what-you-say kind of guy, and though he was never loud, when he talked, you listened.

Yet I think the fondest memory I have of my grandfather was a hot August day in 2007 when I took him to see a rodeo show in the nearby town of Sidney, Iowa. I had been visiting him for a few days during what was a very challenging time for me personally. I heard about an upcoming rodeo on KMA, the all-news radio station that Morris always had turned on in the kitchen. He was frail and battling cancer now, his beloved wife had passed on, and it didn’t take a genius or palm reader to figure his days on Earth were dwindling. All the more reason, I thought, that we had to do it - go to a rodeo, just him and I.

We sat in the bleachers in that Iowa sun for only 45 minutes or so, but looking back on it, the time seemed like hours. Here he was, this wonderful old man who had meant so much to me growing up, and he was so happy just to be there, to be treated not like some tired old ghost but like the everyday man he always was. We went back to the farm and sat out on the porch for a while. Somehow it all came together for me then, the realization that my grandfather would always be part of my life, and with him at my side everything was going to turn out fine.

            So, yes, I still see Morris all the time. And if in my lifetime I can help inspire others like he inspired me, I will be most pleased. And so would he.

Still Riding High

I recently had the privilege of interviewing a young woman named Liz Siefert for a newsletter article put out by The Brain Injury Resource Center of Wisconsin. Hers is truly a remarkable story.

Liz Siefert loves riding horses. Always has.  Always will. For her nothing offers the freedom and inspires the confidence like working in tandem with a well-groomed thousand pound animal as it goes through its graceful paces. It’s been that way ever since Liz was eight years-old and her father took her on a vacation trip to Florida. The hotel they were staying at happened to have a small equestrian center where kids could go on pony rides and, well, fair to say that from the moment Liz first climbed in the saddle she was hooked. By the age of ten she was competing – and winning awards – in riding and jumping competitions across the country. It was clear from the beginning that Liz had a gift when it came to working with horses.

Now, twenty years after that first pony ride, this remarkable young woman is still riding high. Higher than ever, in fact, when one considers the real-life obstacles she has had to overcome.

The first devastating blow came in 2001 when Liz was 16 years-old. That’s when she fell ill and shortly thereafter was diagnosed as having leukemia. At an age when most girls’ thoughts are focused on boys and fashions, Liz was looking cancer right in the face. What followed was a prolonged and grueling protocol of radiation and chemotherapy treatments at Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee. As the treatment intensified, however, so did the aggressiveness of the disease. The frequency and dosage of treatments had to be accelerated, so much so that it unavoidably compromised the internal chemistry throughout her body, including her bone marrow cells. Eventually doctors came to the conclusion that more drastic measures had to be taken.

Three and a half years after the initial diagnosis, Liz underwent a bone marrow transplant as a final step in what would ultimately be her hard-won victory over cancer. Recovery from all this was slow in coming, but when it finally did Liz was more than ready to move on with her life.

Now jump forward to August of 2004. Liz was about to begin her sophomore year at Marquette University where she was studying another passion of hers – photography. But on this particular day Liz and her family were in Madison helping her older sister move into an apartment for her upcoming school year. It was a sunny, flip-flops sort of day on campus and the energy of incoming students was everywhere. At one point Liz went off on to do some shopping on her own for a while. Meeting up afterward, the family staked out a place to eat at an outdoor café on State Street. Just that morning Liz had undergone a scheduled colonoscopy back at Children’s Hospital as part of the follow-up to her bone marrow transplant. Sitting around the café table everything seemed full of promise again for the Sieferts.

Then Liz suddenly grew silent. Something wasn’t right. Seconds later she fell to the ground and lost consciousness. By all appearances she was having some short of seizure. Panicked 911 calls ensued and quickly brought paramedics to the scene. Once there, the Emergency Technicians could tell right away that her heart had stopped, thus cutting off vital oxygen to the brain. (Later speculation had it that the flushing out process involved with the colonoscopy had drastically lowered her level of electrolytes or neurons that keep her heart muscles working.)

 It wasn’t until Liz was at the emergency room that her heart was brought back to full resuscitation, but unfortunately by then the brain damage was irreversible. Liz had suffered an anoxic brain injury. A few days later she was stable enough to be transferred back to Children’s Hospital where she would stay for the next two months, finally being released on October 27^th – her birthday.

While Liz’s memories of this whole time remain sketchy at best, her mother, Linda, remembers it all too well.

“Even with all we had been though to that point, nothing could have prepared us for what happened that day in Madison,” Linda Siefert said. “It was so sudden, so terrifying. And then there’s that feeling of utter helplessness. Especially as a mother that’s really the tough one.”

What followed for Liz was yet another seemingly endless cycle of treatments, prescriptions and therapy sessions. And as if that wasn’t enough, during this time she had to have both hip joints replaced due to bone deterioration precipitated by the marrow transplant.

However, even with the best of efforts from dedicated doctors and rehab specialists, there was still something missing in Liz’s recovery. Enter the Friendship Network of the Brain Injury Resource Center. Liz’s sister was looking for help in getting Liz re-acclimated to the norms of daily life when she learned of the BIRC.

Liz admits she was nervous when she attended her first session of the Friendship Network on a weeknight in September of 2012, but any doubts or self-conscious thoughts quickly melted away when she opened the door and stepped inside.

“It was so great just to see and meet people who really knew what I had gone through,” Liz said. “I needed to know I wasn’t alone in this, and meeting and talking with others really helped a lot.”

Liz’s mother added that just bringing survivors of a similar age together to share their stories amongst themselves serves an essential role in recovery.

“Once they’re out of the hospital and the therapy sessions are over survivors still need something more to keep themselves moving forward,” Linda Siefert said. “They need that common bond with others. That’s what we were looking for, and that’s exactly what we found with the Brain Injury Resource Center.”

Today Liz is a deservedly proud cancer and brain injury survivor. She’s also a student at UWM where she has resumed her study of photography. And perhaps best of all, she’s riding horses again. Whereas riding her horse, named Dylan, had been a vital part of her recovery from leukemia, for a while after the brain injury she was physically unable to ride. But now she can share with others of the Friendship Network how she is back in the saddle and doing what she loves most of all.

 That’s when her bright smile tells the story best of all.

-end-

Think About It

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably why so few engage in it."

                                                                                                - Henry Ford

A while ago I finished reading Thinking for a Living: Creating Ideas That Revitalize Your Business, Career, and Life  by Joey Reiman (Longstreet Publishing, 1998).

In this short and somewhat self-inflating memoir turned futuristic business guide, Reiman tells how he rose through the ranks in advertising, made millions for his clients, then went on to build his own company called BrightHouse, known for its work “in the areas of ideation, purpose-inspired leadership, innovation and marketing.” In other words, the man is, and always has been, big on ideas.

Well, who isn’t? I mean, really, who doesn’t like the idea of coming up with a good idea once in a while? Whether it concerns business or pleasure, whether it’s big or small, a good idea goes a long way in making one’s life a little better. But how do we get them? Do we dare call it a process? Or does it all come down to some sort of spontaneous combustion?

One major premise of the book is that ideas are the currency of the future. Following that thread Reiman gives his take on the concept of creativity and ideas – what it takes to get them and make them happen. He says there are four stages of creativity – what he calls the four I's:

1) Investigation

            “Do your research. Learn as much as you can about what interests you.”

2) Incubation

            "The best way to create a high-quality idea is to create a high quantity of ideas.            And the best way to do this is to think. Thinking takes time, so the longest stage   of the idea process is incubation."

3) Illumination

            "Illuminations are the Aha's! Nothing [else] feels like them, but you can't have a full illumination until you've taken the time to investigate and incubate…that is             why the greatest repository of ideas are graveyards. Here ideas remain buried with       the people who had them but did nothing with them."

4) Illustration

            Take action. Make it happen.

Whatever is involved, big thinking does take time. And if you take the time, the ideas will come.

"Big ideas don't appear, they evolve."

                                                - Joey Reiman

Faith and Follower

Think entrepreneur and what comes to mind – the inspired idea, the thoughtful inventor, the self-started business venture? Maybe if you’re lucky it’s that tickle of electricity that runs through you and says hey, given half a chance my idea could be big – really big. However one defines it, the concept of the entrepreneur has always stood at the core of capitalism.

Indeed, the entrepreneurial spirit has its roots sunk deep in the history of this country. One could easily argue that it is part of our national DNA. After all, what is the Declaration of Independence but a brilliantly conceived business plan for a radical new product, a revolutionary new way of life? Who were men like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin but visionary statesmen and risk-takers of the highest order? Who was Clara Barton but a woman who saw an imperative need for healing after the Civil War and thus founded The American Red Cross?

The list is endless – entrepreneurs big and small, men and women whose ideas and yes, their good fortunes, have shaped our lives, and our history to this day.

The stories and motives behind each successful business venture have been as intricate and varied as the inventions themselves. No doubt the lure of financial gain stands tall in that regard. Such is the enduring lure of capitalism. To ignore the compulsion of greed behind many entrepreneurial tales throughout our history would be naïve, to say the least. But in so many cases there has been another fundamental element to the American success story: the steadfast belief in a Higher Power that tells someone this idea I have, this thing I created – whatever it is – was meant to be. And from my idea many may benefit.

“God has strewn our paths with wonders and we certainly should not go through Life with our eyes shut.”

The man who spoke those words was Alexander Graham Bell. In 1876 he was awarded a patent for his communication device. Today we can access every known bit of information by reaching into our pocket and touching a screen on our phones. Call it evolutionary thinking. Call it a Divine Spark. What cannot be argued is that all ideas do come from somewhere. Just as it was laid out in perhaps the greatest entrepreneurial words ever written:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

FOR SALE BY OWNER – THE MOST EVIL HOUSE IN WISCONSIN

In November darkness comes early to these parts. The days get shorter, the wind bites a little harder, and the first sure sign of winter settles on harvested fields like a white carpet. For people living in the farmlands of central Wisconsin it’s the same every year. It’s nature’s way.

Fifty-five years ago, on a cold November night in 1957, what passed for nature’s way took an incredible twist with the discovery made inside a desolate, two-story house located six miles west of the town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. What local police bumped into – literally – that night defied explanation, and dismissed once and for all the notion that human behavior had its limitations. Along the way it created one of the more unlikely, and enduring, cult figures in the annals of true crime.

Welcome to Ed Gein’s house.

Actually Ed wasn’t quite that gracious when he opened his front door to Don and Georgia Foster on a warm spring afternoon six months prior. In fact he was a little wary when his neighbors drove up and knocked on his weather-beaten front door. Eddie didn’t have many visitors.

But there they were: Don Foster, a Plainfield native and nearby paper mill worker, and his wife Georgia, holding her ten-month-old son in her arms. A few weeks earlier, Don Foster had run into Ed at a nearby crossroads country store where the two got to talking. The Fosters were a growing family and needed a bigger house to live in, maybe some land to farm. Conversely, Ed lived alone in his big house and wasn’t farming his land at all. He had been thinking about getting a smaller place.

Well, maybe they could buy each other’s house. A house swap.

An interesting idea. Why not?

Ed had already seen the inside of the Foster home. More than once he had stopped over and helped babysit their young children. Now it was time for the Fosters to check things out on their end. Like other houses in the hinterlands back in those days, the Gein house didn’t have electricity or a phone line (or running water or indoor plumbing). There was no way for the Fosters to phone ahead and tell him they were coming over. They simply showed up.

As she approached the house that afternoon, young Georgia Foster had no way of knowing she was about to step into a soon-to-be piece of American gothic history – Ed Gein’s 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 notice the dirty frying pans on the stove, the boxes of old magazines, the blackened jars and used soup cans lying in piles all around the room. 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? After all, 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.”

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 they left La Crosse, Wisconsin and moved to Plainfield where they found and bought their dream farm, though truth be told, that dream was little more Augusta’s intense desire to live as far away from everyone as possible. To her unbending way of thinking, people were inherently evil – especially women.

 An overbearing, religious zealot who herself had suffered physical abuse as a young girl, she 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 ridicule. From there he became a bitter and incurable alcoholic. He died in 1940. Ed’s older brother, Henry, died under mysterious circumstances while fighting a brushfire with Ed in 1944. Then Augusta suffered a stroke, and 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 quiet house, surrounded by bad memories and 196 acres of barren, unused farmland.

According to Georgia Foster, Eddie didn’t seem all that nervous or distracted while he conducted his house tour that day, 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 village clown; but never was he thought to be a threat to harm 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.  

So, as Georgia was coming 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 as 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 years later.

The 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 any 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. At a little before eight o’clock in the evening of November 17, 1957, while people throughout Wisconsin were relaxing after Sunday dinner, Waushara County Sheriff Arthur Schley and Police Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster were driving in the dark of night toward Ed Gein’s house. The two lawmen wanted to talk to Ed 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.

  The lawmen pulled up to the darkened house. Guided only by their flashlights they crunched across the hard snow and circled around the building, looking for a way to get in. They found the door to a connected summer kitchen unlocked. Entering the unheated room they started aiming their flashlights around at the garbage and filth lying all around. That’s when Sheriff Schley took a step back and felt something bump his shoulder.

Turning around, he saw what could only be called sickening and unimaginable by today’s jaded standard, to say nothing of 1957 in the middle of America’s Heartland. There it was in the beam of light: the headless and naked human body that was Bernice Worden hung upside down with the insides taken out. Dressed-out like a trophy deer.

Reportedly, the first words out of Sheriff Schley’s choking mouth were, “My God, there she is.”

 But that was only the beginning. By the time police had cleaned out the house they found no less than ten severed heads – all women – and more, buried amidst the squalor.

“HOUSE OF HORROR STUNS THE NATION” read 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 on November 17th. As an incredible tale eventually emerged, one involving grave robbing, murder and collected body parts, a near-steady stream of curious out-of-towners flocked in day and night for weeks afterward just to get a look at what had become overnight the most infamous house in Wisconsin.

A Wisconsin writer named Robert Bloch 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 that same story and forever immortalized Ed Gein in the guise of a character named Norman Bates in one of the most famous and frightening movies ever made – “Psycho.”

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.

That big story in LIFE magazine included a picture of Georgia Foster and her young son, Howard – two of the only visitors who ever set foot inside Ed’s house. 

“Who knows what all went on in that house?” said Georgia Foster matter-of-factly, fifty-five years after she and her husband 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 somehow caught on fire. By the time volunteer firefighters got out there the fire was too far gone. There was nothing they could do, they said, but watch it burn to the ground.

The plot of land was seeded with new trees shortly after that. 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 people living around there want it. They can only wish the bizarre fascination with Ed Gein would disappear as easily. But where dreams die hard, so do nightmares.   

It’s nature’s way.

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