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Description
Ed Gein, a shy and outwardly ordinary man, inspired the characters of both Norman Bates in Psycho and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. During the 1940s and 50s, he lived on a secluded farm in Plainfield, Wisconsin. Within the isolation of his family, no one noticed how odd he was, but left to his own devices, his weird and deadly proclivities began to emerge.

Ed was devoted to his mother, who was quite demented and thoroughly disgusted with sex. She thought it the world's greatest evil so she preached to her two sons that they were to keep themselves pure. Ever vigilante for signs of carnal desire, she kept after them. When her husband died, she had even more influence, and then Ed's brother died, leaving him alone with this delusional woman. Mildly retarded and mentally unstable, he was completely dependent on her. When she suffered a stroke that paralyzed her, he nursed her even as she verbally abused him. Sometimes he crawled into bed with her to cuddle.

Then when Ed was 39, his mother died. He could hardly bear it. He kept to the farm and spent his time doing odd jobs and reading magazines about headhunters, human anatomy, and the Nazis. He also contemplated sex-change surgery so he could become his mother—to literally crawl into her skin.

Then one day he spotted a newspaper report about a woman who had just been buried not far from his mother's grave. He decided to go out and dig her up so he could have a look at a real body—a female one. He got a friend named Gus, a gravedigger, to help him open up the grave. Over the next decade, he continued to visit the cemetery for more bodies, usually under a full moon. Sometimes he took the entire corpse and sometimes just certain parts. He later claimed that he had dug up nine separate graves in three different cemeteries. (Police did not believe him until they went out to exhume the bodies and discovered that some weren't there.)

Ed apparently just loved bodies. He was a true necrophile (also called a necrophiliac). Body parts excited him and he had no trouble having them in his home, no matter what their state of decomposition. From the bodies he dug up, he cut off the heads and shrank them, putting some on his bedposts. He also formed lampshades from the skin. Storing the organs in the refrigerator, and possibly cooking them, he made things like soup bowls out of the bones for his own use. Sometimes he had sexual contact with these bodies (though he denied it), and eventually he just went ahead and dug up his own mother. Rather than get a sex-change operation, he simply made himself a female body suit and mask out of the skin, and he would wear this outfit to dance around outside. Sometimes he even donned it to dig up a grave.

Finally, when it was clear that the skin would harden and crack, he decided to get bodies that were more pliable. That meant someone really fresh. In 1954, Gein shot a woman, Mary Hogan, who resembled his mother in size and brought her to his farm. No one suspected a thing. Three years later, he did it again to Bernice Worden, and this time the police decided to have a look.

What they found was a house of horror. Inside, they discovered numerous body parts: four noses, several bone fragments, nine death masks, a heart in a pan on the stove, a bowl made from a skull, ten female heads with the tops sawn off, human skin covering several chair seats, pieces of salted genitalia in a box, skulls on his bedposts, organs in the refrigerator, a pair of lips on a string, and much more. It was estimated that he had mutilated some fifteen women and kept their remains around him.

In the barn they found the corpse of Bernice Worden, hung from the ceiling feet first. She was headless and slit from her genitals to her neck, gutted and with her legs splayed wide apart. Her head was found beneath a mattress inside the house with nails in her ears.

At his disposition hearing (since he was judged incompetent to stand trial), Ed Gein was found to be insane. He seemed not to be aware that what he had done was wrong, and he died in 1984 at the age of 78 in a psychiatric institution. Since he never had actually hunted for deer, neighbors wondered what had been in the packages of fresh venison that he'd so generously brought them.

While Gein fails to display the compulsive lust characteristic of many necrophiles, he does represent the type of person who enjoys the company of the dead, sexually-speaking..

Description
Ed Gein, a shy and outwardly ordinary man, inspired the characters of both Norman Bates in Psycho and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. During the 1940s and 50s, he lived on a secluded farm in Plainfield, Wisconsin. Within the isolation of his family, no one noticed how odd he was, but left to his own devices, his weird and deadly proclivities began to emerge.

Ed was devoted to his mother, who was quite demented and thoroughly disgusted with sex. She thought it the world's greatest evil so she preached to her two sons that they were to keep themselves pure. Ever vigilante for signs of carnal desire, she kept after them. When her husband died, she had even more influence, and then Ed's brother died, leaving him alone with this delusional woman. Mildly retarded and mentally unstable, he was completely dependent on her. When she suffered a stroke that paralyzed her, he nursed her even as she verbally abused him. Sometimes he crawled into bed with her to cuddle.

Then when Ed was 39, his mother died. He could hardly bear it. He kept to the farm and spent his time doing odd jobs and reading magazines about headhunters, human anatomy, and the Nazis. He also contemplated sex-change surgery so he could become his mother—to literally crawl into her skin.

Then one day he spotted a newspaper report about a woman who had just been buried not far from his mother's grave. He decided to go out and dig her up so he could have a look at a real body—a female one. He got a friend named Gus, a gravedigger, to help him open up the grave. Over the next decade, he continued to visit the cemetery for more bodies, usually under a full moon. Sometimes he took the entire corpse and sometimes just certain parts. He later claimed that he had dug up nine separate graves in three different cemeteries. (Police did not believe him until they went out to exhume the bodies and discovered that some weren't there.)

Ed apparently just loved bodies. He was a true necrophile (also called a necrophiliac). Body parts excited him and he had no trouble having them in his home, no matter what their state of decomposition. From the bodies he dug up, he cut off the heads and shrank them, putting some on his bedposts. He also formed lampshades from the skin. Storing the organs in the refrigerator, and possibly cooking them, he made things like soup bowls out of the bones for his own use. Sometimes he had sexual contact with these bodies (though he denied it), and eventually he just went ahead and dug up his own mother. Rather than get a sex-change operation, he simply made himself a female body suit and mask out of the skin, and he would wear this outfit to dance around outside. Sometimes he even donned it to dig up a grave.

Finally, when it was clear that the skin would harden and crack, he decided to get bodies that were more pliable. That meant someone really fresh. In 1954, Gein shot a woman, Mary Hogan, who resembled his mother in size and brought her to his farm. No one suspected a thing. Three years later, he did it again to Bernice Worden, and this time the police decided to have a look.

What they found was a house of horror. Inside, they discovered numerous body parts: four noses, several bone fragments, nine death masks, a heart in a pan on the stove, a bowl made from a skull, ten female heads with the tops sawn off, human skin covering several chair seats, pieces of salted genitalia in a box, skulls on his bedposts, organs in the refrigerator, a pair of lips on a string, and much more. It was estimated that he had mutilated some fifteen women and kept their remains around him.

In the barn they found the corpse of Bernice Worden, hung from the ceiling feet first. She was headless and slit from her genitals to her neck, gutted and with her legs splayed wide apart. Her head was found beneath a mattress inside the house with nails in her ears.

At his disposition hearing (since he was judged incompetent to stand trial), Ed Gein was found to be insane. He seemed not to be aware that what he had done was wrong, and he died in 1984 at the age of 78 in a psychiatric institution. Since he never had actually hunted for deer, neighbors wondered what had been in the packages of fresh venison that he'd so generously brought them.

While Gein fails to display the compulsive lust characteristic of many necrophiles, he does represent the type of person who enjoys the company of the dead, sexually-speaking..