The Farmhouse: What Deputies Found on November 16, 1957

(00:00:00) The Farmhouse: What Deputies Found on November 16, 1957
(00:00:50) The Man Nobody Suspected
(00:01:40) The Grave-Robbing Years
(00:02:38) Augusta
(00:04:10) What Was in the Farmhouse
(00:05:39) The Hitchcock Connection
(00:07:02) Leatherface
(00:08:03) Buffalo Bill
(00:09:21) What Plainfield Didn't See

On November 16, 1957, a deputy sheriff walked into a hardware store in Plainfield, Wisconsin, and found an open cash register, blood on the floor, and his mother gone. By nightfall, Bernice Worden had been found hanging from the rafters of Ed Gein's barn, dressed out like a deer carcass. What investigators discovered inside the farmhouse that followed would become one of the most disturbing crime scenes in American history — and the raw material for decades of horror fiction.

This episode moves through the full shape of what Ed Gein actually did: the two confirmed murders, the nine or more bodies exhumed from local cemeteries, the human skin masks, the skull bowls, the vest constructed from a woman's torso. But it also goes deeper — into Augusta Gein's suffocating psychological grip on her son, the sealed bedroom he kept immaculate after her death, and the slow dissolution of a man who had decided to rebuild the person he had lost.

Gein was found unfit to stand trial in 1957, eventually convicted of first-degree murder in 1968, and ruled legally insane. He died at Mendota Mental Health Institute in 1984. But his influence didn't die with him. Robert Bloch, living fifty miles from Plainfield, read the newspaper accounts and began writing Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock read Bloch's novel. Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, and Leatherface followed.

This episode is the chapter where the crime scene opens — and where American horror finds its founding father.

This episode includes AI-generated content.