13/10/2025
What you're looking at isn't a horror movie prop; it's an actual piece of furniture made from human skin, faces, and bones, discovered in the home of Ed Gein, one of the most disturbing criminals in American history. When police entered his rural Wisconsin farmhouse in 1957, they found chairs, lampshades, bowls, masks, and even a belt, all made from human skin, faces, and bones. Ed Gein wasn't a prolific serial killer, but what made him infamous was what he did with the bodies. Most of his gruesome "crafts" came from corpses he dug up from local graveyards. However, he did kill at least two women, including a local hardware store owner whose body was found decapitated and gutted like a deer. The horror inside his home was beyond anything authorities had seen. Among the findings were a box of noses, a wastebasket made of flesh, and a human face used as a window shade pull. Gein confessed that he wanted to create a "woman suit" so he could become his dead mother, a fixation that would later inspire some of Hollywood's most iconic killers, including Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill. He was declared legally insane and spent the rest of his life in a mental institution, dying in 1984.
