Saturday, December 19, 2020

INSIDE ED GEIN'S HOUSE OF HORRORS

 
We have read here in previous posts about the heinous crimes of Ed Gein, a Plainfield, Wisconsin recluse who quietly went about killing and butchering the local residents in the late 1950's. But that wasn't the most shocking of his ugly deeds: he also exhumed bodies from the cemetery and cut them up to use as pieces for his grisly interior decor.

When he was finally caught, the subsequent search of his home revealed some of the most horrifying sights in criminal history: a chair upholstered in human skin, a woman's skinned and tanned torso used for his twisted gender bending fetish, skulls for soup bowls and another woman, found in the barn, strung upside down and split down the middle like a deer carcass.

Gein's mania has been attributed to a mother fixation, and when she died he began to unravel. However, it's most likely that he had been unhinged long before that and the loss of his mother only tipped the scales from sanity to insanity.

The photos shown here are from a post at the All That is Interesting website. While many of them can be found from other sources, this particular feature collects numerous photographs from the interior of Gein's home.

A worker boards up the Gein house to keep the curious out.



His mother's room was kept spotless.


The local crime lab loads evidence.

An auction of Gein's belongings drew hundreds.


The garage floor was dug up to find more bodies.


The unassuming Gein house.


Investigators looking for more evidence.




Curious townspeople peer through a window of the Gein home


A cheerful Christmas wreath.

The chair upholstered in human skin.

A mysteriously-set fire destroys the Gein home.

1 comment:

Wendy said...

I think you're absolutely right -- his mother's death may have tipped the scales, but he was most certainly perverted long before that. And I think that the house burning down was probably the best thing that could have happened. No need to preserve such places. Photos are enough to keep us from forgetting what kind of people are in the world.