1957: The Real-Life Horror Behind Psycho: Ed Gein Arrested After a House Built From Human Remains
Bernice Worden, who ran the hardware store in Plainfield, Wisconsin, vanished from behind her own counter on the morning of 16 November 1957, the till left open and blood pooled on the floor. Her last customer the evening before had been a quiet local farmhand named Ed Gein, due back that morning for a gallon of antifreeze. Police arrested him that night, and in a shed on his property found Worden's decapitated body strung upside down by the ankles, gutted like a deer carcass.
What they found inside his farmhouse was worse. Chairs upholstered in human skin, bowls carved from skulls, masks peeled from women's faces, and a crudely stitched bodysuit Gein had made so he could, in his words, become his dead mother. He confessed to decades of nighttime grave robbing and to shooting tavern owner Mary Hogan three years earlier, her skull found wrapped in his house alongside Worden's.
Declared unfit for trial, Gein spent over a decade in a mental hospital before finally facing court in 1968. He was found guilty of Worden's murder but legally insane, and was committed for the rest of his life.
At trial Gein insisted the killing was an accident, claiming the rifle discharged while he examined it in the store and that he had no memory of the moments after.
Gein's crimes, and the farmhouse full of human remains, became the direct inspiration for Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho and Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film of the same name, turning a quiet Wisconsin farmhand into the template for Norman Bates and a generation of fictional killers that followed.
