Plainfield residents shun Gein attention

Last Updated: Oct. 31, 2000 at 2:22:04 p.m.

PLAINFIELD, Wis. (AP) - On an autumn afternoon when oak leaves scuttle down the lonely roads and a sun like weak tea does little to warm the sky, it's easy to give yourself the creeps on a tour of the Ed Gein homeland.

It was fall 43 years ago, during the deer hunting season, when Gein was finally caught, after murdering a woman at the local hardware store and taking her body home to hang in his shed. Witnesses said the body was "dressed out like a deer."

The hardware store is still there, and so is the ramp where he backed up the pickup truck to load the body.

Gein was also a grave robber who would dig up women's bodies and take home their body parts. He would tan them and sew clothes so he could parade around his farm in women's skin and body parts. He also made them into furniture and sometimes ate them.

People who believe that the Internet and Hollywood are the source of all evil should note that Ed thought all of this up on his own; his rural farm, near the Adams and Waushara county line, didn't even have electricity.

You can't visit the house filled with the morbid furniture because years ago, when it was about it be sold at auction, the house mysteriously burned to the ground.

You can see some of the cemeteries Gein used to haunt. Spiritland Cemetery, north of town, was the site of one grave robbery, and has the best Halloween atmosphere - and name.

But the place where Gein did most of his grave robbing is the Plainfield Cemetery just west of town. Gein himself was buried there when he died at Mendota Mental Health Institute in 1984 at age 77.

In an irony worthy of Alfred Hitchcock himself, the grave robber's own tombstone was stolen this summer.

"To my knowledge, nothing has surfaced" about the stolen tombstone, says Chief Deputy Ron Thurley of the Waushara County Sheriff's Department, with unintended double meaning.

That's just fine with the residents of Plainfield, who have never liked the attentions of ghoulish curiosity seekers.

"I can't imagine the sort of person who would take it," says Plainfield Village President Max Harrington, of the tombstone.

Like many Plainfield residents of his generation, Harrington, 61, has memories of the little handyman whom locals still call Eddie.

"Before all this happened, he was just an eccentric gentle little man," Harrington recalls. "You would not have been afraid of him at all. He was a little guy with a smile and a funny story to tell."

Others in the area still tell stories of having Ed Gein as a babysitter, or of eating "venison" that Gein would share with his neighbors.

Several people in town, including Harrington, have been contacted by a California filmmaker who is working on a film about Ed Gein.  (Gein, incidentally, is believed to be the inspiration for movie psychos ranging from Norman Bates to Hannibal the Cannibal to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy.)

In fact, you can see more about Ed Gein on the Internet than you can in his own hometown. A photo of his gravestone reading "Edward Gein, " is at www.findagrave.com and trailers for the unreleased movie are at www.edgeinthemovie.com.

The people back home in Plainfield would just as soon you visit their most infamous son in cyberspace.