My father was a civil engineer. My mother was a spoiled rotten trophy wife. While I was still in the womb, they went and bought one of the largest houses in Plainfield, Wisconsin where something was terribly amiss. My father traveled a lot. And the house needed work. My mother had never so much as washed dishes in her whole life, and she was pregnant with me, so my parents needed a little help. So my father hired this odd little man named Ed who used to spend most of his time hanging out at this mom and pop grocery store to look after the house and yard. According to my mother’s cousins, my mom used to work Ed almost to death, and then shortchange him on his wages. One day, when my father was in town, it was snowing heavily, so he decided to drive to the farmhouse where Ed lived and pick him up. My father couldn’t drive all the way up to the farmhouse because the road wasn't plowed, but he drove up as far as he could, and then started honking his horn.

While my father was honking his car’s horn, he noticed what he thought was a haunch of venison hanging in the open door of Ed’s barn. When Ed finally came out and got into the car, my father smacked him and told him that hunting deer was cruel. Ed meekly told my father that he never hunted deer.

A couple of weeks later, my father is far away working in Texas when he gets a phone call from my mother. She’s in a panic. She tells my father that somebody was murdering women in Plainsfield, and that she was all alone, and she wanted my father to come home right now right away this very instant.

My father couldn’t do that. It was the fifties. It would've taken a week at least. So he called up one of the neighbors instead, and asked that neighbor to over go to Ed’s farmhouse and pick up Ed. Ed wasn’t very much, my father explained, but at least he was something.

Well, the neighbor drove over to Ed’s farmhouse, and he was rather surprised to see very nearly every cop in Wisconsin there. I was born a full month later. My mother had carried me for ten months. I guess I didn't want to come out until it was safe. But soon afterwards, my family moved to California just to be sure. Ed’s last name was Gein. He later became Robert Bloch’s real-life inspiration for his character Norman Bates for his novel Psycho and for the horror movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That was the story as I have been telling it because that was how it was told to me.

The truth is that Ed Gein was arrested almost a week after I was born (my mom had still carried me for ten months). At the time of the arrest, they did find the body of one of Ed's victims dressed out like a deer and hanging in a shed.

My parents had arrived in Plainfield in 1955. They had run afoul of the KKK in Louisiana and had moved away as far as they could without leaving the country. While they were in Wisconsin, they gave the KKK a final middle finger salute by helping the first black man get elected sheriff there. In 1956, my father had started employing Ed Gein as a handyman. And it was that November when my father tried to drive up to Ed's farmhouse to pick up Ed.

In summer of 1957, the citizenry of Plainfield began to realize that something was very, very wrong in their community. They were acting like baby chicks in a barnyard being buzzed by a chickenhawk. Thankfully the horror ended and the people of Plainfield celebrated a true Thanksgiving the following month.

Decades ago at a book fair here in Las Vegas, I finally managed to talk to Robert Bloch himself about my family’s involvement with Ed Gein. He told me that while he was in Plainfield doing research for his book, that he had indeed met and talked to my mother before my family had moved out of Wisconsin.

"Oh God, I remember that woman," Mr. Bloch said, "She thought my book was going to be about her."

And although he had never heard this particular take on the haunch of venison story before, he did tell me that as far as he knew, Ed had never shot a deer in his life. Mr. Bloch then said that doing research in Plainfield was a little bit like investigating the Jack the Ripper murders. There was an official count of victims, and then there was the unofficial count of victims. Many of Plainfield’s residents felt that they never caught the real murderer, and that people had kept on going missing, and that graves continued to be disturbed in the outlying cemeteries. Some of the townies went as far as to tell Mr. Bloch that Ed Gein was only somebody’s or something’s Renfield. But whatever the case was, it’s been almost six decades since Ed Gein was caught and sent to a mental asylum where he spent the rest of his life. And I imagine that the good people of Plainfield have never stopped locking their doors and windows before going to bed.

Happy Halloween 🎃