When police entered Ed Gein’s isolated farmhouse in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in November 1957, they thought they were investigating a missing person case. What they uncovered instead would go down as one of the most horrifying crime scenes in U.S. history.

Inside Gein’s small, cluttered home were objects so grotesque they seemed like props from a nightmare — a mobile phone made of human skin and bones, lampshades stitched from faces, bowls carved from skulls, and even a belt adorned with human nipples. The stench of decay filled the air as investigators realized they weren’t looking at movie makeup — they were standing inside a house of real-life horror.

Ed Gein, a quiet, reclusive man in his 50s, wasn’t a prolific killer. But what made him infamous was what he did with the bodies. Most of his “creations” came from corpses he exhumed from local graveyards under the cover of darkness. Yet Gein confessed to murdering at least two women — tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954 and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957, whose decapitated and gutted body was found hanging in his shed “like a deer.”

Among the macabre discoveries were chairs upholstered with human flesh, a garbage basket made of skin, a box filled with noses, and a window shade fashioned from a woman’s face. Gein admitted he had an obsession with becoming his deceased mother, saying he wanted to create a “woman suit” so he could literally wear her skin.

Declared legally insane, Ed Gein spent the rest of his life in a mental institution, where he died in 1984. But his monstrous legacy endured — inspiring some of Hollywood’s most terrifying villains, including Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

Even today, decades later, the name Ed Gein remains synonymous with the most chilling question of all:

What kind of darkness could drive a man to turn the dead into his art?