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.
-end-
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