Ed Gein and the Real “Psycho” House
What follows is a small but previously unknown facet of the story of notorious “Psycho” murderer Ed Gein based on a series of interviews I had with Linda Foster and her mother Georgia, who, in 1957, happened to be his next door neighbors. The interviews took place in Linda’s home in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, in June and July of 2012.
In November darkness comes early in north central Wisconsin. The days grow short, the wind bites a little harder, and sooner or later the first sure sign of winter settles on harvested fields like a thin white sheet. Not that folks who grew up and live in these parts give it all that much thought. For them it’s just nature’s way.
On a chilly night in 1957, what passed for nature’s way took an incredible twist with the discovery of a crime scene inside a lonely two-story house six miles west of the town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. What local police bumped into that night changed forever the notion that human behavior in this part of the world had its limitations. It also created one of the most unlikely, and enduring, cult figures in the annals of true crime.
Welcome to the home of Ed Gein.
A Walk Through the House
Actually Ed wasn’t quite that gracious when he cracked open his weather-beaten door and saw Don and Georgia Foster standing there on his front stoop on a warm spring afternoon six months earlier. In fact, he was more than a little wary when he heard a knock at the door and saw the Fosters holding their ten-month-old son and smiling like the good country neighbors they were trying to be. Eddie never had many visitors.
Don Foster grew up in nearby Plainfield and worked in a paper mill. His wife Georgia was a homemaker in their small house that sat on land next to the Gein property. Just recently Don had run into Ed at a local crossroads country store and the two got to talking about things: the weather, crops, the latest odd job Ed had picked up around town. Ed was his usual shy self, but as the conversation went on he warmed up to Don and together the two men got to talking about their respective homes.
The Fosters were a growing family and Don said he had started thinking about finding a bigger house to live in, maybe some land to do a little farming too. This prompted Ed to chime in that since he lived alone in his big house and wasn’t farming his land at all, he really ought to think about getting a smaller place.
It probably came out as little more than a joke at first, but one of them said they would be better off if they just swapped houses. An unusual idea, to say the least. But after a little while they both started seriously wondering what would happen if indeed they did buy each other’s house. A house swap.
Ed had already seen the inside of the Foster’s home. More than once, in fact, he had come over and helped babysit their young children, including daughter Linda. Now it was time for the Fosters to check things out on their end, hence their arrival that day at Eddie’s door. Like other farmhouses in the hinterlands back in those days, the Gein house had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. There was no connecting phone line either, thus no way for the Fosters to have phoned ahead and tell him they were coming over.
After they explained their reason for stopping by, Ed reluctantly opened the door and invited the Fosters into the 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 think about the fetid smells and filthy frying pans on the stove, the crusted jars and used soup cans lying all around the place. 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? 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.”
How It All Began
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, the newly married couple left bustling La Crosse, Wisconsin, and moved to the tiny hamlet of Plainfield where they bought their dream home — a farm. Though truth be told, that dream was really nothing more than Augusta’s intense desire to live as far away from everyone as possible. To her unyielding way of thinking, people were inherently troublesome, if not downright evil. Especially women.
An overbearing, religious zealot who herself had suffered abuse as a young girl, Augusta 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 criticism. He became a bitter and incurable alcoholic and died of drink in 1940.
Ed’s older brother, Henry, was the next to go, dying under mysterious circumstances while fighting a brushfire side-by-side with Ed in 1944. Then when Augusta suffered a stroke 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 house surrounded by winter winds, bad memories and 196 acres of barren farmland.
Second Thoughts
According to Georgia Foster, Eddie didn’t seem all that nervous or distracted while he conducted his house tour, 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 hapless village clown. But never was he thought to be a threat to 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.
As Georgia was carefully making her way 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 after 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 many years later.
The customary 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 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 half an hour before they said their goodbyes and drove off. According to Georgia, they left still thinking the house swap might just work out. Days later it was Eddie who backed out of the proposed deal.
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Fast forward six months. A little before eight o’clock on a Sunday evening. Waushara County Sheriff Arthur Schley and Police Captain Lloyd Schoephoerster were driving out to Ed Gein’s house. They needed to talk to him 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. Even the hint of such foul play was anything but commonplace in Waushara County in 1957. Knowing Ed’s meek, if peculiar, nature, the men weren’t expecting trouble bringing him in for questioning. Still, the startling situation did call for some urgency. It was, after all, part of the job. Or so they figured.
The lawmen pulled up to the darkened house. Guided only by their flashlights they crunched across the snow and circled around the building until they found the door to an attached shed unlocked. Entering the unheated room, they started aiming their lights all around.
That’s when Sheriff Schley took a step back and felt something bump his shoulder. Turning around, the beam of light fell upon the headless and naked remains of Bernice Worden. It was trussed up and hung upside down with vital organs removed. Dressed-out, as it were, like a trophy deer. Reportedly the first words Sheriff Schley gasped were, “My God, there she is.”
But that was only the beginning. By the time police had gone through the entire house they found human bones, body parts, and no less than ten severed heads — all women — buried amidst the squalor.
Ed Gein’s Legacy
“HOUSE OF HORROR STUNS THE NATION” screamed 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. An incredible tale emerged involving grave robbing, murder and collected body parts. Linda Foster recalled a steady stream of curious out-of-towners driving in day and night for weeks afterward just to get a look at what had become overnight the most infamous house in Wisconsin.
Robert Bloch, a Wisconsin-born novelist who at the time was living only forty miles away, started reading local newspaper accounts of what was going on in Plainfield and quickly came up with an intriguing idea for a new story, a thriller he titled Psycho.
Two years later, film director Alfred Hitchcock took up Bloch’s story and started shooting scenes in black and white while doing his best to keep the nature of his project a tight-lipped secret. The film was released in June of 1960, and in the words of one film historian, “’Psycho’ changed everything.”
Then there is the garish irony of the whole affair: Ed Gein, who died quietly of respiratory failure in 1984 at the of seventy-eight in the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, lies buried in an unmarked location somewhere in the Plainfield cemetery — this after someone sneaked in and stole his tombstone and attempted to sell it on the internet. To this day, the macabre fascination and celebratory status of Eddie won’t go away.
The story in LIFE magazine included a picture of Georgia Foster and her young son, Howard — two of the only three visitors who were ever inside Ed’s house and later able to tell the tale.
“Who knows what all went on in that house?” said Georgia Foster fifty-five years after she and her husband briefly 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 caught on fire. By the time volunteer firefighters got out there the fire was too far gone. Newspaper reports quoted firefighters saying there was nothing they could do but watch it burn to the ground.
The plot of land was seeded with new trees shortly thereafter. 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 the local population wants it. Doubtless they keep wishing the endless fascination with Ed Gein would disappear as easily. But where some dreams die hard, so do nightmares.
That, too, is nature’s way.
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Note — Various facts concerning the background story of Ed Gein were taken from the book Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho, by Harold Schechter.
