Ed Gein’s cauldron came up for auction and Zak Bagans of GHOST ADVENTURES fame, or notoriety, bought it, to be used on his new show DEADLY POSSESSIONS, about haunted objects associated with death in some way. Each episode he displays and discusses two items added to his cabinet of curiosities in Las Vegas.
He’s got commercial savvy, that’s for sure. He gives good TV. He’s also not strict about confirming provenance. This cauldron comes with testimonials from a couple of Minnesota yokels whose grandparents once smelled Ed Gein. Neighbors and such.
One told of his grandmother brandishing a shotgun while telling Gein to get and stay away. Another told of relatives who helped clean out Gein’s garage and who had been in the house before it was destroyed. He saw carnage beyond imagining.
One guy claimed his relative had helped render ‘hog fat’ in that very cauldron, which he recognized later in part because the hair on his body stood straight out. Better than an art expert yapping about brush strokes, you’ve got to admit, even as we’re all thinking ‘long pork fat’.
It’s almost sure Gein was a cannibal. He’s the original for Hannibal, Francis Dolarhyde, Jaime Gum, Norman Bates, and a host of other fictional serial killers. Details from his endless atrocities are used singly because no fictional creep with all Gein’s excesses would be acceptable to an audience. Too over-the-top.
No one knows all Gein’s crimes and perversions in part due to the police in rural Minnesota being reluctant to investigate such horrors, and in part because the house was burned by angry locals soon after the crimes were uncovered, before the scene could be thoroughly explored, let alone catalogued. Much evidence was destroyed, probably including evidence of crimes we now will never know about. This is a historical as well as a forensic loss; every detail could help us figure out these monsters and how to prevent them.
Outraged that he’d been among them, his neighbors burned the house one night, despite supposed police quarantine. It is just this sort of peasant intolerance that blocked full strides in understanding aberrant criminality. It keeps us stumbling like hapless horror movie victims, instead of letting us turn and confront such beasts.
It is questionable whether Ed Gein was even the worst serial killer known. H H Holmes set up a literal murder hotel and killed an unknown number of people in nightmarish ways. Jack the Ripper tore his way through Whitechapel in 1888. Who was the worst? Too many others vie for that despicable title. Take Albert Fish, who ingratiated himself with families, stole their children away, raped, killled, and ate them, then sent taunting letters over the years to keep the pain sadistically alive in the hearts and minds of the parents and siblings. He also inserted fish hooks (pun on his surname?) and needles into his own scrotum and so on. There are far too many others, but you get the point: Ed Gein, digging up dead bodies, eventually murdering a woman, making furniture and clothes from the bodies, making a woman costume so he could dance in the moonlight as his mother, with whom he apparently had an incestuous relationship, cooking and eating the dead people, and so on, him doing those things only fits into a spectrum of sick human behavior, rather than defining him as anything special. Serial killers are boringly dull. Their solution to everything is death.
What is undeniable is how deeply affected many families are by Gein’s and others’ crimes. Neighbors, relatives, and descendants of locals alive during the crimes all haunt Gein’s property and are in turn haunted by his horrors. It seems never to let go, this dark energy.
Some young folks, raised in this era of ghost hunting as a popular pastime even on TV, visit Gein’s land to court his spirit, seeking to evoke his morbid energy.
One wonders if such shadow clings to, say, Dahmer’s apartment, if it still stands, or to John Wayne Gacy’s house, or to sites associated with Bundy or Shawcross, et alia. Certainly the people directly affected, who lost loved ones, who lived through the fear, were harmed permanently. They carried marks, and seem to pass them along for, is it seven generations? Is it both the sins and the pains of the fathers and mothers passed down?
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I saw the film MR. HOLMES, about a 93-year-old Sherlock (Ian McKellan) retired in Cornwall with his bee hives. His housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her son (Milo Parker) are his main links to humanity. It’s an excellent movie. Side note: Such gravitas from such a young actor as Milo Parker is rare to see.
There is in this movie, based on the novel A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin, a conceit that Sherlock Holmes visited Hiroshima in connection to a case of a Japanese man whose son (Hiroyuki Sanada) blames Holmes for the father having abandoned the family. This is in turn entwined with a case Holmes in his dotage is trying desperately to recall, involving a woman upon which had centered his last case, the one that prompted him to retire.
Intertwined with all this is a mentorship of the housekeeper’s son, who is without a father figure due to WW II, in which he, a pilot, was shot down on his first sortie. The housekeeper is bitter that her husband was not content to ply his trade as mechanic and serve out his service in a motor pool. “All his mates in the motor pool came home without a scratch,” she says at one point.
John Watson, whose face we never see, plays an integral if oblique role in a personal breakthrough Holmes makes, and the fact that he can still make them and, even better, act upon them for the sake of kindness, proves he’s still a viable character study.
This is not Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce dashing after the game afoot, nor is it a morose wallow in revanchism. It’s a movie about aging, growth, and life, presented expertly and with great charm and heart, if also with British diffidence and aplomb. Bravo and brava and hooray all around.
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