Ed Gein's House of Horrors

Deviant by Harold Schecter

Biography.com - https://www.biography.com/crime/ed-gein-inspired-horror-movies

Britannica.com - https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ed-Gein

Marca.com - https://www.marca.com/en/lifestyle/tv-shows/2023/08/24/64e76afdca4741cd5e8b4585.html

Medium.com - https://medium.com/tftunderworld/ed-gein-the-sadistic-monster-that-inspired-the-texas-chainsaw-massacre-b1a6fcb6fc79

Collider.com - https://collider.com/ed-gein-horror-movies/

Wikipedia.com - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_Bates_(Psycho)

You're listening to an Oh No Media podcast.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder With My Husband.
I'm Payton Moreland.
And I'm Garrett Moreland.
And he's the husband.
And I'm the husband.

Well, it’s spooky season, and we have a special guest on the show. Everyone watching, say hi to Mr. Skelly!
And if you’re not watching, Mr. Skelly is with us on set today.

It’s not a real person—don’t worry, everybody. Oh, cover your ears. It’s a skeleton that we got. The whole bottom of him is currently duct-taped because he was leaking his insides—sand everywhere.
So, we duct-taped him. He’s good to go.

Not going to lie, if I came downstairs at night time, that would be a little freaky.
Yeah, low-key, he’s really big. Daisy is really pissed off. She does not like this skeleton. She’s very jealous.
But she needs to get over it.

Hope everyone is having a great Monday. Spooky season. Then we have November, then we have December, then we have 2026, and then at some point we all get old and we die. You know, life just kind of flashes before your eyes.
We love you guys. We hope you’re doing great.

For my ten seconds—something I’ve always wanted to do, and I say I’m going to do it every year, then it never happens—is I’ve always wanted to be that house that gives out, you know, like big candy bars. But then every year it comes, and Payton and I realize we haven’t bought candy yet. Then we go to the store a day before and buy some candy.
I don’t know, it would be cool to do huge candy bars or something crazy. What do you think, babe?

Yeah.
You don’t really care about that? I mean, did you not trick-or-treat when you were younger?
No, I did.
Oh, it was just always snowing.
Oh, I guess that’s true—in Idaho.
Yeah, I guess that’s true. I never really experienced that growing up. I had my snowsuit over my costume.
Yeah, I never really thought about that. That sucks.

If you live somewhere where it snows, I am sorry. How does that work, actually? If you live somewhere where it’s dumping snow on Halloween, you just don’t trick-or-treat, I assume?
I mean, everyone just hangs out inside, right?
We would go—even if it was snowing. But I guess if it’s a full-blown storm, no, you wouldn’t go.
If there was snow on the ground, we would still go.
Oh, okay. Anyways, I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to get big candy bars, so maybe I’ll end up doing that. I’ll keep you guys posted on Instagram or something.

Other than that, it sounds like we have a pretty wild case today. You guys should all know this—I only know what it’s going to be about because Payton mentioned it to me yesterday. And apparently there’s a new Netflix documentary that came out about it as well.
Documentary is a very—
Oh, was it like a reenactment?
Reenactment. Okay, got it. Oh, you can take it away from here, baby.

All right, you guys. If you don’t know what we’re covering, Netflix just dropped its third Monster series on Ed Gein.

Ed Gein is a prolific killer. I don’t know if he can be qualified as a serial killer, but his name is brought up often when people talk about serial killers because they believe he’s one of the very first—and most disturbing—killers that we have documented. He influenced a lot of American culture once people learned about his life.

Netflix just dropped the new Monster series based on Ed Gein, and I’m just going to give my quick thoughts on it before we start so that way I don’t have to do it throughout.

It is definitely not a documentary, and it is definitely not an accurate depiction of the Ed Gein case. So we will be covering Ed Gein, and if you’re watching this series, I’ll go through and kind of tell you what’s different from the series.

I do still think it’s a good series—it’s just not the Ed Gein case. I do love that they tie in the influence he had on American culture. One of the things I think they went for the most was how monsters influence monsters, all the way to the point where there’s even a scene where Ed actually looks right at the camera, kind of breaks the fourth wall, and says, “Am I the monster, or are you the monster because you can’t stop watching?”

Oh, that’s freaky.
So basically he’s saying like—we’re the people who are fascinated. Because he was influenced by World War II, Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis—that’s kind of what pushed him. So they’re saying that influenced him, which then influenced directors to make movies based on Ed Gein that we then watched and became obsessed with, and now we’re all obsessed with true crime.

But I still think they could have done that theme while sticking more to the facts of the case, because it’s really messy in terms of the actual story when you’re using real names. But I digress. It’s a disturbing watch, but yeah—definitely not an accurate representation.

That being said, Garrett, do you know anything about Ed Gein?
The only thing I know is that he would wear—
Okay. Yep.
Can I not say it?
No, you can.
That he’d wear people’s faces.
Yeah. How do you know that?
’Cause I said it.
Yes. ’Cause you said it when you were talking to somebody the other day.
Yeah.

That’s about the only thing I know. Okay, let’s get into today’s episode.

Our sources for this episode are Deviant by Harold Schechter, Biography.com, Britannica.com, Marca.com, Medium.com, and Murderpedia.com.

All right, let’s face it—every day doing this show feels kind of like spooky season to us. When you’re constantly talking about the worst products of mankind, it’s easy to feel like the world is just one big horror film. But the man we are talking about today might be in a league of his own.

He’s a son so twisted he gives new meaning to the term “mama’s boy.”
He’s a man so deranged that his biography feels more like a legend meant to scare children to sleep.
He’s a monster so disturbed that he inspired not one but several well-known horror films.

But today’s subject was no storybook myth. He was a human just like the rest of us—who somewhere along the journey lost his way.

Ed was a handyman. He was a farmer. He even dabbled in babysitting. He was a seemingly average, though odd, man blending in with the rest of society. And honestly, that might be the most horrifying part of it all.

So, let me set the scene. It is 1954 in central Wisconsin, in the area of Plainfield, to be exact. And I just need to say—Plainfield is a quiet, desolate area, even for the ’50s. It’s definitely out in the middle of nowhere.

The roads are lined with picturesque farmland, silos sprouting from the rolling hills, cattle grazing in the pastures. Outside of the one main street in Plainfield, there’s really not a lot to do. There’s a hardware store, a gas station, a bank. They have a couple of churches scattered around the area, one weekly newspaper delivering the mundane updates of Plainfield, and a tavern or two where people go to spread news and gossip—especially after a long day on the farm, which is what most people there do.

Now, one of the popular locations is called Mary Hogan’s Tavern. It’s located in a little stretch seven miles or so outside of Plainfield Village called Pine Grove. Mary’s Tavern is often bustling with people just looking to blow off steam. It honestly doesn’t look like much from the outside—it looks more like a roadside warehouse than an inviting tavern where people hang out. But it’s what’s inside that counts.

Mary Hogan was actually the face of that bar, so it was named after her. She was a portly woman with a thick German accent, a foul mouth, and a pretty shady past. The facts about Mary’s past may have been rumors since not much is really known about her. Some said she was divorced twice, which in the ’50s was a big no-no. Some said she had connections to the mob. Others said she had worked in the big city as a madam before moving out to the middle of nowhere to tend bar.

But on a cold December afternoon in 1954, the rumors whispered about Mary Hogan would take on an entirely new meaning.

It’s a few weeks before Christmas—Wednesday, December 8th. A farmer named Seymour Lester strolls into Mary’s bar in the middle of the day, just like he usually does. He slaps his hat down on the counter and sighs as he waits for Mary to pour him a beer.

He’s used to being the only one alone there this early in the day, but today seems unusually quiet—and Mary isn’t even there to say hello. So he’s looking around, looking for someone, an employee. And that’s when he peers over the bar and sees a pool of blood on the floor.

He’s not going to waste another second in that place. It’s a pretty large pool of blood. He decides to get out of there. He races to the nearest farmhouse up the road and calls—not the police—but the town chairman of Pine Grove first, which just screams small town.
Yeah, that’s funny.
And then after that, he calls the sheriff’s office.

Before long, Mary’s Tavern is swarming with deputies taking a closer look at this pool of blood. And that’s when they find their first real piece of evidence: a .32-caliber cartridge on the ground next to that patch of blood.

What Seymour didn’t stick around to notice was that there was also a trail of blood leading out the back door of the tavern and into the parking lot. Over the next several days, the tavern goes from a local hangout to a full-blown crime scene. The state crime lab comes in to search for fingerprints and other clues. Police go door to door, farm to farm, questioning people in the area.

Now, on December 8th, 1955—so this is a whole year later—Mary Hogan’s case is no closer to closure than it was a year ago. Another year goes by, and nearly another, and still no one knows where Mary went. There are no clues, no substantial leads—until November of 1957, when another crime leads police down a path that will forever change Plainfield and its legacy.

So now I’m going to introduce you to another woman named Bernice Worden.

Unlike a lot of the locals, Bernice wasn’t born in Plainfield. She was actually originally from Illinois but moved to Plainfield when she was a young girl, so it was the place she always thought of as home.

When she was in her twenties, Bernice married another local named Leon Worden. They bought and ran a little hardware store in town, and over the years they had two children — a boy and a girl — named Frank and Miriam.

By 1957, though, things had really changed for their family. The kids were now adults. Frank was a police officer in Plainfield, and Miriam was a mother with kids of her own. Their father, Leon, had passed away over two decades earlier.

So now Bernice ran the hardware store mostly on her own, sometimes with the help of her son. Because of the way she handled herself, everyone in town had a lot of respect and admiration for her. They knew she was a family woman with good Methodist values. Again, religion was very important in this small town in the ’50s.

Bernice loved the simple pleasures in life — spending time with her grandkids, going fishing out on the lake. In fact, people in Plainfield liked her so much that she was given the Citizen of the Week award in the summer of 1956.
Citizen of the Week?
Okay. And I do want to point out that she was the first woman to ever get it.
Okay, cool.

But on the morning of November 16th, 1957 — years after that first murder — Bernice’s story would meet a tragic end.

That day was a special one for the people of Plainfield because it was the start of hunting season. I want to note that almost every man in Plainfield was in the woods on opening day. So many shops in town were actually closed because of it.

But 58-year-old Bernice knew the men might need supplies from her hardware store, so she opened her doors like usual that morning.

Later in the day, though, the man working across the street at the local gas station noticed something strange. Bernice’s shop seemed quieter than usual, so he walked over and checked the front door. It was locked. Maybe she had decided to close up for the day since all the men were out hunting. But there was one thing that seemed unusual — Bernice had left the lights on inside the hardware store.

Word of this got back to Bernice’s son, Frank, later that day. Around 5:00 p.m., he stopped by the store to check on his mom. Remember, he was a deputy sheriff, so he knew pretty quickly that something was off. Not only was his mother not at the store like she should be, but the cash register inside was wide open — though it didn’t seem like anything had been stolen. He also noticed bloodstains on the floor.

By 7:00 p.m., the main street was flooded once again with cop cars, all investigating Bernice Worden’s disappearance. Was this the same person who had killed Mary Hogan? That’s all anyone could think.

But there was one thing different between Bernice’s case and Mary’s: inside the shop there was a sale receipt for antifreeze made out earlier that day to another local man — a well-known, kind of weird oddball named Ed Gein.

Okay, so this is how police go, “Was this the last person to visit? And now Bernice is missing?”
This is how they initially connect him.
And he’s from—
Yes, this small town.
Thank you.
He was mostly raised there?
Yes.
Okay. He wasn’t born there, but he was mostly raised there.
Got it.

So before I get into what police did once they caught this lead on Ed — they weren’t necessarily thinking he was the murderer, but he was the last one, and there was a receipt — they were going to look into it. But before we go there, we need to understand the man inside the monster. We need to know who Ed Gein himself was, because his history and past actually influenced his crimes pretty heavily.

Okay, so Ed was born on August 27th, 1906.
Oh man.
In La Crosse, Wisconsin — about 90 miles away from Plainfield.
Okay.
And his childhood was pretty rough from the start.

His mother, Augusta, and his paternal grandparents were all German immigrants who had come to America to start a new life. Augusta found her way through religion in America, while Ed’s father, George, found his way through the bottle — alcohol.

Augusta was incredibly devout. I’m talking strictest of the strict. She read the Bible to Ed and his older brother, Henry, who was six years older, basically every day.

At a very early age, Augusta instilled in her two boys the idea that all women were corrupt — that they were sinful, that they were sent to Earth with no goals other than to tempt men with sin.
Sounds like an amazing person.
So she basically says, “Sex is horrible. You will never, ever, ever be intimate with a woman because they are evil. They are of the devil.” She even said things like, “The only time I ever slept with your father was when I was trying to make you boys. Other than that, sex is evil.”

Like, she was just very—
This is not religion. This is mental illness.
Yeah. I was going to say, why? Like, what?
Well, she’s using the excuse of Christianity, but it’s obviously not Christianity.

This didn’t change when the family finally moved to Plainfield in 1914. Now, I do want to note that the reason they moved is because she started to tell George, Ed, and his brother Henry that their small Wisconsin town—about 90 miles away from Plainfield—was starting to turn into Sodom and Gomorrah. She said things like, “Oh, it’s this huge city and everyone’s sinning and we can’t raise our kids here,” when really there were like fifty people in the town.
Yeah. Still a small town.
It’s just not as small as Plainfield.

So they ended up moving to Plainfield in 1914 and settled on a 159-acre plot of farmland on the edge of town. They lived in a two-story, L-shaped white farmhouse—just think of a creepy haunted farmhouse in any scary movie. It was equipped with a barn, a chicken coop, and an equipment shed. It was quiet and very remote. Their nearest neighbors were about a quarter mile down the road, and Plainfield Village—where Bernice Worden would one day open that hardware store—was about six miles away.

But Augusta liked keeping the family away from the rest of Plainfield and all the “sinners” in it. She didn’t trust anyone with her boys. It was Augusta against the world.
Okay.

Even her husband George had a hard time finding his place in the family. Augusta judged him harshly. She berated him, destroyed his confidence as a man, and was the disciplinarian in the home. As a result, George spent his evenings after working as a carpenter and tanner over at the pub. He’d go there to forget about his life and would procrastinate returning home—which meant that Ed and Henry didn’t see much of their father. And when they did, he was kind of a shell of a man.

Although, that was better than him coming home drunk—because that allegedly meant Ed, Henry, and Augusta were going to catch a beating from their drunk husband and father. Which is probably why Augusta kept her sons so close.

To the point where Ed didn’t even go to school until he was eight years old. As you can imagine, he had a really hard time fitting in with other kids who had already been around each other for years and developed social skills. While Ed was smart and got good grades, making friends wasn’t his strong suit.

I’m not saying he was mean—he was just odd. And if Ed did ever make a friend, Augusta shut it down really fast. When he would run home to tell his mother about some boy who offered him a ball on the playground, Augusta would make up lies about the little boy, saying, “I know his parents. They are sinful. They are not people of God.” And then she wouldn’t let Ed play with him.
She was like possessed. Why? There’s zero rhyme or reason to be doing this.
And mentally ill.
I mean, I think she was just so far gone.

Okay. And this continued in pretty intense ways—all because Augusta had a really extreme connection with Ed from the time he was little. And Ed didn’t really know any better. In his mind, his mother was nearly equivalent to God. He held her on this pedestal. He thought she was the perfect woman, the perfect Christian woman.
Was the relationship sexual?
Allegedly.
Okay.
So I’m going to say probably. Most people do believe so. The show does somewhat insinuate it, but there’s never been confirmation. It’s also hard—it was so far back then that we’ll probably never have confirmation.
No.
But I would say probably.

So because of this intense mama’s-boy connection—he thought his mom was God—he both feared and loved her simultaneously. But even if Ed had wanted to make friends, it wouldn’t have been easy for him because of how socially behind he was.

His classmates saw him as odd. He would sometimes laugh at inappropriate times, like he didn’t always catch on. He had a lazy eye, a speech impediment, and an odd, lopsided grin that he often wore. The more he was picked on, the more he realized his mother was right about these other kids—and maybe about the world as a whole. The more he was shut out from society, the more he believed his mother and became like her.

Ed dropped out of school just a few years after he began. At fourteen years old, he finished eighth grade and then went to work on his parents’ farm, while also picking up small jobs around town as a handyman and a babysitter.

But even once he and Henry reached adulthood, neither of them were adjusted enough to move out of their parents’ farmhouse.
Got it.
So despite the emotional and physical torment at home, they stuck around through their twenties and into their thirties.

A lot changed for the Gein family in 1940, when Ed was around thirty-four years old. By that point, years of drinking had taken a toll on sixty-six-year-old George Gein, and after years of wasting away, he died on April 4th, 1940.

His death seemed to bring a sense of relief for the family more than anything else. It was no secret that George had been treated as a burden for years—he wasn’t working, he was wasting the family’s money on booze, and between that and the abuse he inflicted when he was drunk, Ed claimed he was happy to step into the role of man of the house after his father’s passing.

This was a role Augusta actually pushed on him more than on his older brother, Henry, because her relationship with Henry wasn’t the same as the one she had with Ed.
So that means he needs to step it up financially.
Right.

For the first time, in 1942, thirty-six-year-old Ed traveled away from home to see if he could join the army—this was during World War II—but he was rejected because of a growth on his left eyelid that affected his vision. So he was sent back to Plainfield with his tail between his legs, ready to continue the odd jobs he’d been doing his whole life.

Babysitting seemed to be one of Ed’s favorites. Again, if you’ve watched the show, this is a totally different babysitting story than what they depict. Now that he was an adult and no longer a peer, Ed actually loved kids because he was very childish in his own ways. They seemed to accept him more than the rest of the community did.

But there was something about Ed’s immaturity and stunted growth that really bugged his older brother, Henry. Ed was an unhealthy mama’s boy, but since the passing of their father, it had gotten much worse. He saw Augusta as more faultless than ever, constantly defending her and standing up for her—maybe because she was the only parent left. Ed did everything for her, to a fault.

Ed had always looked up to Henry, but when Henry brought up how unhealthy his relationship with their mother was—like, “Hey, your relationship with Mom isn’t normal. We’ve got to get out of here.”—Ed took it as a full-blown attack on his existence. His entire sense of security and identity revolved around his mother, and it seemed to fester from there.

Then, in 1944, something happened that made people look at Ed Gein differently for the first time.

That May, a fire broke out on the Gein property. Again, the way this is shown on the series isn’t accurate—there’s no evidence of what they depict, just suspicion—but the show presents it as fact.

At first, the fire was controlled. Ed said he was burning off the marsh to clear dead brush, but before long, according to him, the fire got out of hand. Henry, who was still living at the farm and helping his little brother, and Ed got separated. According to Ed, he didn’t realize Henry was missing until he had put out the fire.

He went into town and asked for help from a few locals, including a deputy sheriff. They all returned to the farm that night to help Ed look for his missing brother. But something strange happened during the search—Ed led the group straight to where Henry was lying on the ground.
Okay. Got it.

He led them directly to the body, and when they found Henry, his clothes were covered in dirt and soot, but his body didn’t look burned at all. He did have a few bruises on his head. At this point, he was definitely dead.
So when they confront Ed—
But he’s not burned.
No.

So they confront Ed, and I want to mention Henry was forty-three years old at this point, still living at home under his mother’s rule. They asked, “How did you walk us straight to him?” Ed looked at them and said, quote, “Funny how that works.”

Again, he was odd. Everyone just kind of had sympathy for him because he was so strange and because of his home life. But the response was weird—people were like, what?

The autopsy reported that Henry likely died of asphyxiation from smoke and maybe hit his head when he passed out on the ground. Some said that wasn’t surprising—Henry was said to have a bad heart. But there were a few who felt that, based on Ed’s response and their family situation, maybe this wasn’t an accident. Maybe Ed had been responsible for his brother’s death—possibly because Henry had been critical of his relationship with Augusta, or because he was threatening to leave.

Unfortunately, that relationship between Ed and his mother wasn’t long for this world either. Despite the cold-hearted woman many believed Augusta to be, she supposedly had a really hard time coping after Henry’s death.

In 1945, less than a year later, she began suffering from a series of strokes.
Wow.
During that time, Ed became her full-time caregiver.

So this mother that he loved—this already unhealthy relationship—became even more consuming. No matter how much he did for her, though, he couldn’t restore her health, and in December of 1945, she died after a second stroke at the age of sixty-seven.

Now, Ed Gein—who had never lived on his own, who might not even have been a fully functioning adult—was all alone. All his family was dead. He had no friends. And he was living by himself in this farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but time on his hands.

By now, he was about forty years old. He started going into town more often. He was odd, but people knew him. And he began spending a lot of time at Mary Hogan’s Tavern—the same Mary Hogan we talked about earlier, his first victim.

He spent countless nights there, sitting in the corner, watching the rest of Plainfield’s community laugh and hang out. It probably brought him back to his school days—only this time, he couldn’t run home and cry to his mother and have her say, “Well, the rest of the world is full of sinners.”

But Ed did play nice. Many people said he was a good neighbor. Despite losing his entire family, he would help out if someone needed a hand hauling grain or fixing a fence.

Still, there were signs that Ed had been deteriorating since his mother’s passing. Both he and the family farmhouse looked run-down. It was obvious Ed wasn’t showering or shaving. The home looked like it was falling into disrepair. And Ed’s lurking around town became more noticeable. People started asking, “What’s he always doing here?”

Especially around 1957, when he seemed to develop an obsession with a local businesswoman—a fifty-eight-year-old grandmother who bore a striking resemblance to Augusta, his now-deceased mother. This woman was Bernice Worden, the second victim.
Okay.
Okay, here we go.

That year, fifty-year-old Ed had been making an unusual number of trips to the Worden hardware store—and not always to buy something. Instead, he would go in and hang around, kind of annoying Bernice. Maybe he was making conversation, maybe flirting, but in a childish way—like when little kids have a crush and act out.

He’d ask this older woman, who reminded him of his mother, to go out to the movies with him, or to go ice skating. Bernice was polite but stern, typically turning him down with excuses. Again, this is vastly different from what they show in the series.

It wasn’t clear if Ed was asking her out because he was romantically interested, or because she was one of the few people in town who gave him the time of day, even when she didn’t need something from him.

I feel like a lot of these shows that do fictional reenactments—
Yes.
—to dramatize serial killers, they always try to make the killer a little likable, or make you feel bad for them.
I think they do that on purpose, but yeah.
They always make you empathize with the killer.
And I find that really interesting, because they’ve killed people, and I just don’t know the reason behind trying to make us feel like we should like them.

So, I was actually having this discussion on my Twitch stream the other day. I was saying that this Monster series—which has done very infamous portrayals of killers on Netflix—has gotten some heat for that. Not only for dramatizing a story, but for literally changing facts in ways that make you feel sympathy for the killer.

It’s not like it’s a Harry Potter book where you’re changing details for a movie. These are real-life events that happened—and they were tragic.

I’m not sure why we’re doing that. A lot of the time, it’s not even about the story itself—what I’m telling you right now gives more background on these victims than the show even did. And not only that, they changed the victims’ characters into people they weren’t.

That’s so disrespectful—to portray a victim as someone they weren’t, especially in a show where not everyone watching is a true crime fan. I’d even say it’s the minority who actually know the real facts of the Ed Gein case. So, for most people, this dramatization is their only exposure to it.

And that’s what I mean—people watch and say, “Oh, I mean, that’s what happened.” But it’s not. People start to—what’s the word?
Empathize.
Yeah, empathize. But they also start to reason with it. Like, “Well, maybe this makes sense. Maybe it made sense why they killed them. I kind of get it.”

And I also said this: mental illness or a study of someone’s psyche might be an explanation for the bad things they did, but it is definitely not an excuse or reason. We need to walk that line a little more carefully, because when you start justifying things, that’s where we get into trouble. It might be an explanation—there’s an explanation for everything—but that doesn’t make everything excusable.
Yeah. I just find it interesting.

Anyway, we can keep going. I was just most distraught about the fact that—for instance, I’m telling you about Ed’s relationship with Bernice right now, and that he had this fascination with her. But in the show, they have a full-blown sexual relationship. They show her as this older woman who becomes obsessed with Ed, and then his dead mother tells him that she has STDs, so he kills her.

And Bernice didn’t have anything like that going on. It’s just the portrayal of the victim—completely inaccurate.

Anyway, Bernice’s kids found it creepy that Ed had taken such an interest in their mother. So you can imagine what was going through Frank Worden’s mind when his mother went missing—and Ed Gein’s name was on the receipt the day she disappeared. It was alarming, to say the least.

That, and the fact that just the day before, Frank had spoken to Ed—who had asked him point blank if he’d be going hunting with the other men in town on opening day tomorrow. Now, Frank started wondering if Ed had been planning something against his mother for a while. Maybe he’d asked because he wanted to make sure Frank would be gone, and he knew that on opening day, all the men would be out in the woods.

That’s what was running through Frank’s mind when his mother went missing and he saw that receipt.

Upon hearing Ed’s name, a few detectives began looking around town for him—they wanted to talk to him. Some of them got word that Ed might be at a neighbor’s house, the Hills, having dinner with them and their kids.

When police arrived, they found Ed sitting in the driveway with the Hills’ son. He was about to give the boy a ride into town. They knocked on the window, Ed rolled it down, and he seemed confused as to why the officers were even there. They asked if he’d come down to the station to answer a few questions. Without any fight, Ed got out of the vehicle and walked into the back of the squad car.

As the officers asked Ed to walk them through his day, he said something strange. He immediately said, “I’m being framed.” When they asked, “What for?” he replied, “For Bernice Worden,” followed by, “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

At that point, no one knew whether Bernice was alive, missing, or dead. But obviously, Ed Gein had just cleared that up for police.

Later that evening—this is probably the most infamous part of the case—around 8:00 p.m., two officers went to Ed Gein’s property while he was at the station, to see if there was any sign of Bernice.

This was the same rundown farm people had noticed from the outside. When the officers opened the door, they were immediately hit in the face with a horrific smell.

It was completely dark inside, so they used their flashlights to look around—and they saw trash and junk everywhere. You’d have to look at the photos to really understand the state of this house. It was absolutely horrific.

There was rotting food, newspapers piled high, tools, garbage—everywhere. But that wasn’t all. As police walked through, smelling the rot, surrounded by flies, they started noticing some very odd things inside the home.

ChatGPT said:

They see this chair and realize that the center of the seat has been cut out and replaced with what looks like leather.
Oh no.
But as they look closer, they start to realize—it’s not leather. They think, Is that skin? Like, pig skin? Then it hits them. It’s human.

So they see this chair and they’re like, Okay… this is very weird. Then they notice the drawstrings on the blinds—the cord—is made of human lips.
Holy—
Like, tons of lips.
No way, dude.
Yes.

Then they find a lamp.
Oh my gosh.
A lampshade—stitched together—and they realize it’s made of human skin, too.

They go into the room where he sleeps, and on the bedposts—think of an old wooden bed—there are actual human skulls mounted on top.
First of all, how is he getting this many? Like, what—hello?
We’ll get there.
This is insane. There are only two women missing!
We’ll get there.
Oh… was he going to graves?
Yes.
Oh my gosh.
Okay, you can keep going.

So it wasn’t even really about the murders. It was about his fascination with dead bodies.
Okay—because he didn’t even murder that many people, right?
Right.

I mean, what he did was absolutely horrible. But if I were to make a scale, I’d say killing someone is worse.
One hundred percent.

He obviously killed two people, so he’s still—completely—
I mean, mentally ill. That’s disgusting. No. Get out of here.

Anyway—yes, he did kill. I just wanted to know if it was more killings or…
I can’t believe you caught on to that. I mean, it’s illegal. There’s a reason you can’t desecrate—
That’s disgusting.
Yeah, there’s a reason it’s illegal. It’s absolutely horrifying. I can’t believe someone would ever do that.

Okay, so—they see these skulls. Now just imagine the cops in this tiny town, this long ago, walking through this place like—what is going on?

They open shoeboxes sitting around the house, and when they open them, they find women’s noses—like, literally cut off and kept in boxes.

It gets worse.
There’s also a shoebox full of vaginas—just collected, removed, preserved.

They find pants made from human skin—like actual leg-skin cut off and sewn together so he could wear them.

There’s also a belt—completely made of nipples. A full belt, just cut-off nipples stitched together.
Holy—
It doesn’t even—there’s just no way to comprehend this.

And he’s living alone, babe. He’s in his fifties. Alone in this house. He’s odd. It’s just… so disturbing.
You can’t even wrap your mind around something like this.
No, like—he’s from hell.

The list goes on and on. I haven’t even told you everything. Everyone knew Ed Gein was different, but this was a nightmare beyond what anyone could have imagined. This was a house of horrors.

And just when they thought it couldn’t get worse, one of the detectives felt something graze his back. He turned around to look—and this was in the shed—and there was a body hanging upside down from the ceiling, by the heels.

Each foot was hooked onto a bar, the body suspended upside down. There was no head. The body had been eviscerated—cut open from chest to groin.
He was skinning them, basically.
Yeah. Cut open like livestock hanging in a meat house. That’s what they were looking at—a human body treated like a slaughtered animal.

It probably smelled—I can’t even imagine the smell.
Police were absolutely horrified. If you saw the crime-scene photos, it’s beyond comprehension. Every single officer who entered that property probably needed therapy for the rest of their lives.

And when they examined the body, they realized it was fresh—fresh enough to identify. This was Bernice Worden. He had cut off her head, slit her open, and hung her upside down like meat in a butcher shop.

Officers were running outside to vomit. Others were frozen in shock.

Then one officer noticed a bag behind a kitchen door. He reached down, picked it up, saw a clump of hair inside—pulled it out—and found a woman’s head, hanging inside the bag.
Unbelievable.
But it wasn’t Bernice Worden’s head. It was Mary Hogan’s—the woman who’d gone missing from her tavern years earlier.

And the horrors didn’t stop there. On the stove, they found a frying pan—with a human heart sitting in it.
No—you can’t tell me he wasn’t eating these.
Yes.

It’s alleged—he never admitted to it, and there’s no definitive evidence—but still.
He one hundred percent was. Why else is there a human heart in a frying pan? Why else is he collecting noses and body parts?
He one hundred percent was eating them.

It's just safe to say that his house was essentially human bodies strewn about—cut up everywhere. It just doesn't even make sense.

I very much understand how being raised can affect who you are: different traumas, different things. Huge believer in therapy and all of that. But this is next level. This is leaps and bounds beyond what I thought was possible. Yes, he was raised in a horrific setting—no one should ever be put through that kind of isolation. You might be able to find some explanation for why Ed Gein was odd or why he might struggle with mental illness, but this is beyond that. This is sick. You can't even attribute it.

Okay. So this news quickly makes its way back to the station where Ed Gein is currently being questioned. To say these officers were shocked would be an understatement—they probably didn't even believe it when they heard what was being discovered at his house. From what I can tell, Ed Gein was never suspected of having anything to do with Mary Hogan's disappearance, so to find both her and Bernice Worden's body parts inside Ed Gein's house is mind-boggling. All of these officers knew Ed; this wasn't some stranger. In a small town he was the quirky oddball neighbor. Never in a million years did they expect his house to be a scene of mutilation and murder. But looking back now, there might have been signs.

Some people around town who'd hired Ed for a job remembered him making an odd statement after Mary disappeared. One of them had said to Ed something like, "If you had spent more time courting Mary, she'd be cooking for you right now instead of missing." To which Ed replied, "She's not missing. She's down at the house right now." He was so mentally disconnected that he wasn't even catching what people were saying. Apparently he would reuse this statement on other people. Of course, everyone back then just thought Ed was making a weird joke. Now it's clear he wasn't kidding.

When police pressed him at the station, Ed had one request before he started talking about his house: he wanted some apple pie with a slice of cheese. When Ed was asked how the murder of Bernice Worden went down, he said this: he walked into Menise's store that day and had her refill a jug of antifreeze. He left, but then immediately went back because he forgot something. He wanted to see one of the guns she had on display—he was thinking of buying a new model. While Bernice had her back to him, he took a bullet out of his overalls, loaded the gun that she'd just taken off the wall to show him, and pulled the trigger.

He also claimed, "I don't know though; my memory is a bit foggy." He said he vaguely remembered dragging her body across the floor to the back of his truck. He remembered taking her back to his house, stringing her body up like that. But then he'd say, "I don't know; details are a little foggy." I don't even know if he actually felt bad—like the logical side of him that grew up hearing, "Hey, don't kill people," which is what he kind of comprehended. But I don't think he actually thought he did anything wrong. I truly don't think he knew. When we're talking about the insanity defense, this is the perfect case for it: you're still responsible for what you did, but it looks different.

During the confession, he also admitted to killing Mary Hogan. He said the events were really similar—he went in, she was alone, and he killed her. But clearly there was a lot more to the story, because police had found over forty different body parts inside Ed's home. So they pressed him: "Ed, there's not just two women inside your home. We found a lot of things. Can you tell us about the skulls? Can you tell us about the nipple belt?" He told them something none of them anticipated. Garrett guessed, "Oh, I didn't murder those people. I just took them out of the cemetery." Ed said, "I didn't do that. I just dug them up out of the cemetery."

He said he'd been reading obituaries looking for women who matched his mother. He would watch for women around his mother's age who had died and then go that night and dig up their freshly buried bodies, and take the bodies home.

And sometimes he wouldn’t even take the bodies home. Sometimes he would mutilate them right there at the grave, then bury them back and leave.

Which is so strange—because that’s almost like… half respectful, in a deeply twisted way.

To confirm Ed’s stories, police later dug up several graves—and horrifyingly, it turned out to be true.

After spending nine hours getting a full confession from Ed—because they had to account for everything they found—he was taken to the county jail to await next steps.

Ed was formally charged with first-degree murder for Bernice Worden, but interestingly, not for Mary Hogan. It came down to cost and resources, and since he was clearly never getting out, it probably didn’t matter.

It didn’t take long for Ed to lawyer up and enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The next step was to determine if he was fit to stand trial. The judge ordered a 30-day observation period at Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

There, doctors and officials tried to get answers to an even bigger question—not just is he sane enough to stand trial, but why kill? Because this case had no clear motive.

It didn’t take long for investigators to realize that both Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden were of similar stature, close in age, and both bore an eerie resemblance to Ed’s mother, Augusta.

During his time in the hospital, doctors dug into a deeper issue—the fact that Ed Gein seemed to have an Oedipus complex: feelings of attraction toward his mother and hatred toward his father.
Yeah, and we kind of talked about that earlier.
Can that happen without them being sexually active?
Considering everything in this case, there’s no doubt in my mind that the mom was at least emotionally—and likely physically—abusive and manipulative.
Allegedly.
Allegedly, yes. But it’s 2025. Who’s suing us?

His doctors also described him as “a very suggestible person who appeared emotionally dull, with rigid moral concepts that he expected others to follow, and a tendency to project blame for his own inadequacies onto others.”

But if Ed loved his mother so much, why target women who resembled her?

This is where behavioral psychology started to shift. Ed Gein’s case was huge for the early Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU). The theory was that Ed developed obsessive and conflicting attachments to his mother—an emotional state that evolved into mental illness.

Remember, Augusta had complete control over Ed’s life and constantly shamed him. Because of that, he developed both unconscious desire and rage toward her. That inner conflict—wanting to preserve her, worship her, and punish her all at once—manifested in his violence toward women who looked like her, and in his desire to wear their skin. It was his way of becoming her, or keeping her close, while also destroying what she represented.

After that 30-day assessment, doctors officially diagnosed Ed with schizophrenia and deemed him unfit to stand trial. It was a huge blow to the victims’ families, who would never get to see him face justice. Instead, he was committed indefinitely to Central State Hospital for treatment.

I one hundred percent understand, but honestly, this might be one of the few cases where that verdict makes sense. He was truly insane—like he wasn’t even living in the same reality as the rest of us.
Exactly.

A lot of people in the Plainfield area were outraged by the decision. This was massive news—not just for the town, but for the entire nation. Ed Gein became a household name. Some locals even decided to take revenge on what was left of the Gein property.

In March 1958, five months after Ed was committed, his farmhouse was scheduled to be auctioned.
How? No—burn it down.
Instead, it mysteriously caught fire in the middle of the night.
Honestly, that’s the better outcome.

By the time firefighters arrived, the house was beyond saving. Most of it burned to the ground. There are still pieces of Gein memorabilia out there—items collected by police before the fire—but for the most part, only photos remain.

When Ed heard about the fire from the hospital, his response was, “Just as well.” He couldn’t have cared less that the place burned down. That house was his mind—its physical reflection—and he was detached from it entirely.

A decade later, in January 1968, circumstances changed. His doctors decided that after ten years in the hospital, Ed was “better”—no longer unfit to stand trial.

So, on November 7th of that year, Ed’s trial for the murder of Bernice Worden began. His defense attorney argued that the trial be conducted with just a judge—no jury. The whole thing lasted about a week, and the results were rather disappointing. The judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity again.
Yeah. I mean, he’s not just going to get better. This guy is insane.

So he wasn’t going to prison—he was going back to Central State Hospital. And that’s where Ed lived out the rest of his days.

In 1984, at the age of seventy-seven, he died at the institution from cancer and respiratory problems. He was buried next to his mother—now all of the family buried together. So many people visited and vandalized his grave that his tombstone was eventually removed. It’s now just an empty plot.
Okay.
Yeah, obviously.

And while Ed Gein might be dead, his horrific story lives on.

This is where the show—like I said—I found it fascinating how they tied certain things together. But Ed Gein’s horrific story went on to be immortalized in the horror film genre. He became the inspiration behind one of the most iconic villains ever created—and I don’t think Garrett knows this.

Norman Bates in Psycho was based on Ed Gein.
No way.
Yep. Norman Bates’ obsession with his mother, the unhealthy attachment—it’s directly inspired by Gein.

He also influenced other legendary horror figures like Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
No, I don’t think so—
And Silence of the Lambs.
Yes! Thank you. Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs.

Exactly. Maybe because of that, Ed Gein’s story feels more like a fever dream—it’s been portrayed in three major horror films. And he changed the entire horror genre.

Before Ed Gein, horror was about monsters—vampires, Frankenstein, creatures of fantasy. After him, the monsters became human.

That’s covered in the show, too—he was a nightmare so dark that it’s hard to believe it actually happened in real life.

So I want you to take a second and let that sink in. Remember—there are real monsters out there, lurking in the real world. Monsters so evil they inspire fiction. And the scariest ones can blend in seamlessly with the rest of society. They babysit your kids. They fix your roof. They offer you a ride into town.

So be careful—because if there’s one thing we can take away from Ed Gein’s case, it’s that the most terrifying monsters are the ones who look and act just like us.

And so Ed Gein is lumped in with all of these serial killers. But really, he killed two people. The infamous name of Ed Gein is alarming when you realize that—because he’s remembered alongside people like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed far more victims.
Exactly.

It’s the horror of his reality—his mind, his world, his upbringing—that makes him stand out.
Yeah. Disgusting. Crazy. Honestly, crazy.

So again, you did a good job, babe.
Thank you. I wanted to stick to the facts. Again, I do think as a fictionalized work of art, the show is good—but people need to remember that it’s fiction.

It doesn’t really follow the truth. Yes, the obsession with World War II and the Nazis was real—he did own magazines showing the experiments Nazis performed, and that inspired some of the grotesque “work” he did in his home—but still, take everything with a grain of salt.

This is the factual story. There were real victims who were not portrayed correctly in that show, and that’s my only hang-up with it.

But yeah—that was the case of Ed Gein.

If you want to go watch the show now, I do think the production is good—the music, the cinematography, the set design—but now Garrett knows the Monster Ed Gein.

And that is it for today’s episode.
I love it.
And I hate it.
Goodbye.

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