By: Fidel de Sousa Montiel (Grade 5)

We all know the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, right? Gas, ovens, starvation, and many others filled up their disturbing torture list. However, something much more disturbing isn’t what the Nazis did, it’s what they created.

After World War II ended, the German atrocities came to light and many people were extremely traumatized and mentally scarred because of what they saw: images of piles of dead Jews on trucks as if they were simple pieces of wood, images of murdered children and even photos of people burnt up inside the ovens. It did not take long until those photos were shown to people all over the world, and one of them was Ed Gein.

Ed Gein was a typical man who lived in the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin, with his older brother Henry and his mother Augusta. Augusta was a very controlling and religious mother who told Ed that all women were snakes or Jezebels and she was the only good one, leading to the fact of Ed starting to have a fascination with his mother.

However, it was not the normal type of fascination, he would dress up in his mother’s underwear and masturbate himself to his mother. You can already see that this man is deranged. One day it all got worse, though. A friend of his called Adeline Watkins showed him images of Nazi atrocities. Ed was already very interested in stories of Japanese cannibals, but the Nazi images were something brand new to him and, according to some researchers, these images triggered his schizophrenia. 

One day, Ed’s brother Henry told him that he would leave home to escape their controlling mother, but Ed did not like this. Nobody could say bad things about mother! So he got a piece of wood and smacked it on Henry’s head, killing him. Ed, afterwards, made a fire to make it seem that he was killed from asphyxiation. Right after his mother Augusta had two strokes and died, leaving Ed heartbroken, he still heard and saw his mother as if she had never died, and she told him to find her a body. So, that night, he went to the Plainfield Cemetery, dug up the body of a woman and dressed her in his mother’s clothes. 

From the late 40s to the early 50s, it is estimated that Ed Gein dug up about 30 bodies and made several objects from them such as masks, lamps, chairs but his favourite was his women’s suits. He was making a woman suit so he could become his mother, and he used to dress up in woman suits and masks and put on his mother’s clothes. He would also eat the bodies of the people and give human flesh to his neighbors saying it was deer meat so they would eat it. And he also had sex with the bodies. 

In all, it is estimated that Ed killed 6 people, the most infamous case being when 2 hunters went into his barn, where he kept the bodies, so Ed chased them in the woods with a chainsaw and he killed both of them, and the coat of one of the campers was found in his barn. He inspired movie serial killers such as Norman Bates, Leatherface and Buffalo Bill.

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