This Is Where Ed Gein Is Buried

Ed Gein was, to those who knew him, a reclusive and weird neighbor who didn't seem to bother anyone. However, when bodies and body parts started turning up on his family farm, the narrative surrounding the itinerant worker and handyman went from one of confusion and avoidance to one of horror and dread.

As Judge Robert H. Gollmar wrote in his book, Edward Gein: America's Most Bizarre Murderer, a search of the Gein farm and property revealed a horror show of bodies, body parts, and objects made from them: lamps, bowls, baskets, and garments made from human skin; multiple whole bones and bone fragments; detritus from the unknown number of women and girls he may have killed, and others whom he didn't kill but whose bodies he exhumed for his sick crafts.

Gein is credited with being the inspiration for a number of horror movies over the years. Fortunately for thrill-seekers, truth-hunters, and the morbidly curious, Gein's grave can easily be found in a publicly-accessible cemetery near the old family property in Wisconsin.

Plainfield Cemetery is easy to reach, just a few hundred feet from Interstate 39 in Central Wisconsin, about a hundred miles west of Green Bay. There, in an unmarked grave, lies the body of Ed Gein.

Ironically, Gein is buried in the same cemetery from which he exhumed the bodies of some of the women whose body parts he used to make his crafts, according to Mike Bie's book, It Happened in Wisconsin.

Perhaps even more ironically, Gein is buried between his parents, the overbearing, religious zealot mother whose fanatical preaching informed his, shall we say, complicated views of women, and his allegedly neglectful, alcoholic father.

However, unlike those of his parents, Gein's grave is unmarked. That's because, according to Atlas Obscura, his tombstone attracted unwanted attention, often getting vandalized or even stolen. The stone marker has since been moved to a museum, but the grave of America's strangest serial killer remains, without any attention being called to it, in an unassuming final resting place.

Decider reports that Discovery+ will stream the documentary Ed Gein: The Real Psycho beginning April 9.