Professor Death February Letter

Dear Professor Death,

I hate horror movies because they scare the bejeebers out of me, but last weekend my boyfriend convinced me to watch Silence of the Lambs with him. Afterward he claimed the movie was based on a real life cannibal. Is this true?

Can’t Sleep in Fargo

Dear Can’t Sleep,

I’m not sure why your boyfriend would make you watch something that would scare you to death, but that’s between you and him. I’m also not sure you want to know the whole story, but in case I’m wrong, here it is. All of this information is available online.

In 1957, an American cannibal and serial killer in Wisconsin named Edward Gein was arrested for the murder of Bernice Worden. Worden, the local hardware store owner, was found hanging by her ankles in Gein’s kitchen, decapitated and eviscerated.

The police were shocked when they entered Gein’s home and found not only a hoarder’s nest, but garments crafted from human skin, a wastebasket and lampshades also made from human skin, and skullcaps fashioned into bowls.

Gein decorated his rural home with masks made from the skin stripped from faces, and used skulls as bedposts. He upholstered his furniture with human skins. At the time of Gein’s arrest, Mrs. Worden’s head was found fermenting in a burlap bag (he’d have been better off placing it in a bucket of pond water and letting the anaerobic bacteria clean it for him) and her heart sitting on the stove. There is more, but frankly I’m afraid that if I share it here I will be the one having nightmares.

The only normal places in Gein’s house belonged to his mother, deceased twelve years previously. The rooms she used had been nailed shut and kept as shrines, the furniture all coated in a thick layer of dust. For more than a year after her death she talked to her son as he drifted off to sleep.

Left on his own, with no social interactions, Gein developed a fascination with anatomy and took to grave robbing to provide bodies for his experiments. He decorated his house with body parts and items he stole from the graves, sometimes cutting off interesting body parts, sometimes lugging the entire body home.

Gein admitted to killing two women when the remains of a local tavern keeper were found in his home. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to Wisconsin’s State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In 1967 he was deemed fit to stand trial and was convicted of the murder of Bernice Worden.

Gein died in 1984, having admitted only to the two murders. How many did he kill? We’ll never know. The police found forty bodies in Gein’s home, bodies Gein claimed he stole from graves.

So your boyfriend is right. Edward Gein was the inspiration for Norman Bates in Psycho, as well as Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

All movie classics.