Plainfield, Wisconsin: The Town That Inspired a Genre

The town of Plainfield, Wisconsin sits in Waushara County with a population of about nine hundred people. It is, by most measures, an ordinary small town on the central Wisconsin plain. But in November of nineteen fifty-seven, police searching for a missing hardware store owner came to a farmhouse on the edge of town and discovered something that would permanently alter American horror fiction.

Edward Gein, a quiet handyman and part-time grave robber, had for years been collecting human remains from local cemeteries and had killed at least two women. The details of what investigators found became the basis, in various forms, for Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. Three of the most influential horror characters in film history share a single source: a farm just outside this small Wisconsin town.

Gein died in a state psychiatric facility in nineteen eighty-four. The town itself has long tried to move past the association.