Since there was not Bates Motel episode this week i thought i would have a look into what or who inspired Hitchcock’s Psycho and the birth of Norman Bates and what I found was totally disturbing but very intriguing nonetheless. Norman Bates was a fictional character created by Robert Bloch for his novel Psycho and was portrayed by Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock’s 1960 film of the same name, but did you know that Norman wasn’t just purely fictional, he was actually based on a convicted murderer by the name Ed Gein.
*WARNING DISTURBING CONTENT TO FOLLOW*
Who is Ed Gein you ask? Well Ed was born on the 27th August 1906 in La Crosse County, Wisconsin. Ed also goes by The Mad Butcher, he was killer and a body snatcher and his crimes were all committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin where he exhumed corpses from local cemeteries and fashioned keepsakes and trophies from their bones and skin. Ed Gein confessed to killing Mary Hogan a tavern owner on December 8th, 1954 and Bernice Worden the Plainfield hardware store owner on November 16th, 1957. Gein had been in the hardware store the evening before Bernice Worden disappearance, the Police suspected Gein and searched his property and what they found was disturbing. Investigators found Worden’s decapitated body in a shed, hung upside down by ropes at her wrists, with a crossbar at her ankles. Her torso was dressed out like a deer and she had been shot with a .22-caliber rifle, the mutilations to her body occurred after her death. Upon searching the house the investigators were even more shocked, sickened and disturbed by what they had found.
The following is what was found in Gein’s house:
● Whole human bones and fragments
● A wastebasket made of human skin
● Several chairs covered in human skin
● Skulls on his bedposts
● Female skulls and some with the tops sawn off
● Bowls made out of human skulls
● A corset made from a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist
● Leggings made from human leg skin
● Masks made from the skin of female heads
● Mary Hogan’s face mask in a paper bag
● Mary Hogan’s skull in a box
● Bernice Worden’s entire head in a burlap sack
● Bernice Worden’s heart in a plastic bag in front of Gein’s potbellied stove
● Nine (9) vulvae in a shoe box
● A young girls dress and the vulvas of two (2) females judged to have been about fifteen years old
● A belt made from female human nipples
● four (4) noses
● A pair of lips in a window shade drawstring
● A lampshade made from the skin of a human face
● Fingernails from female fingers
All the items found at Gein’s house were photographed and then destroyed, he told investigating officers that between 1947 and 1952 he made as many as 40 night visits to three different cemeteries to exhume recently buried bodies while he was in a “daze-like” state (similar to what we see with Norman’s blackouts) On 30 of those visits he would come out of the daze while still in the cemetery and left the grave in good order and return home emptyhanded. On other occasions he would dig up recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother and took them home, where he tanned their skin to make paraphernalia. Soon after the death of Gein’s mother, he began to create a “woman suit” so that he could become his mother to literally crawl into her skin. His practice of donning the tanned skins of women was described as an “insane transvestite ritual”
Sheriff Art Schley from Waushara County, reportedly assaulted Gein during questioning by banging Gein’s head and face into a brick wall and as a result Gein’s initial confession was ruled inadmissible. In 1968 Art Schley died of heart failure at the age of 43, before Gein’s trial, its said by many who knew Schley that he was traumatized by the horror of Gein’s crimes and his fear of having to testify about assaulting Gein, caused his death. November 21st 1957 Gein was arraigned on one count of first degree murder and pled not guilty by reason of insanity, he was found mentally incompetent and unfit for trial and sent to Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and later sent to Mendota State Hospital where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. On November 14th 1968 Gein was found guilty of first-degree murder by Judge Robert H. Gollmar and spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. Gein’s house and property were scheduled to be auctioned March 30, 1958 , amid rumors the house was to become a tourist attraction but on March 27th the house was destroyed by fire and arson was suspected but was never officially solved. The car he used to haul the bodies of his victims was sold at public auction for $760 to a carnival sideshow operator Bunny Gibbons, later Gibbons charged carnival goers 25 cents admission to see it. Gein died on July 26, 1984 of respiratory failure due to lung cancer at the age of 77 in Stovall Hall at the Mendota Mental Health Institute.
Ed Gein’s story has had lasting effects on American pop culture by its numerous appearances in film, music and literature. His story first came to widespread public attention in the fictional version by Robert Bloch in his 1959 suspense novel Psycho, then in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film of Bloch’s novel. Gein’s story has been loosely adapted into a number of movies, including Deranged (1974), In the Light of the Moon (2000), Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007), Hitchcock (2012), and the Rob Zombie movies House of 1000 Corpses and its sequel, The Devil’s Rejects. Gein has also served as a model for several book and film characters, most notably such fictional serial killers as Norman Bates (Psycho), Leatherface (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs) and Bloody Face from American Horror Story.
It goes without saying that Gein was a deranged human, but he will forever be a source of inspiration for all things dark and twisted.
References:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Gein
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