by Paul Martin
As word of Gein’s horrific crimes spread, reporters from all over the country—and even a few from abroad—descended on sleepy Plainfield. Every local who would stand still long enough was interviewed and quoted. Most people characterized Gein as odd, though seemingly harmless.11 A woman who said she’d gone out with Gein, Adeline Watkins, swore that he was “good and kind and sweet.”12 The Chicago Tribune ran so many gory features about the “Butcher Gein” and his “murder farm” that the editors felt compelled to apologize for their zeal, issuing a brief statement headlined “Enough of Gein” on November 22, 1957. “We take no pleasure in publishing stories of this kind,” the editors declared, “and will be glad when the case is no longer in the news.”13
During his interrogations, Gein never showed the slightest remorse for his actions, or any inkling of the monstrous nature of his crimes. He talked about his savage deeds with detachment, mentioning that he’d interrupted his dismembering of Bernice Worden to work on his car and play with the cash register he’d stolen from the hardware store. A photograph taken at the time shows Gein smiling like a minor celebrity, apparently oblivious to the fear and revulsion he stirred in onlookers. When grilled on the specifics of his murders and grave-robbing episodes, Gein said that he couldn’t recall the details, claiming that he’d gone into a “daze” each time.14
It was obvious that Gein was hopelessly deranged. Doctors found him mentally unfit to stand trial, and a circuit court judge committed him to a state hospital for the criminally insane. A few months after his commitment, the county put his farm up for sale, but before anyone could buy it, the farmhouse burned to the ground. The Plainfield fire department arrived too late to extinguish the blaze. Arson was the likely cause of the fire, although no one was ever held accountable. When told that his family home was gone, Gein replied, “Just as well.”15
A decade after Gein’s arrest, his doctors determined that he was competent to stand trial. In November 1968, Gein was found guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Bernice Worden. He was also judged to be legally insane at the time of the crime and was returned to a state psychiatric institute. He remained institutionalized until he died of cancer in 1984 at the age of seventy-seven. Gein’s doctors remarked that he was an ideal patient, never violent and always cooperative.16 The only sign of his psychosis was the frightening manner in which he stared at females—not a look to invite conversation.
It was inevitable that Gein’s grisly crimes would attract the attention of the entertainment industry. In 1959, Robert Bloch, a horror and science fiction writer, published his Gein-inspired novel Psycho. The following year, Alfred Hitchcock turned Bloch’s book into the chilling movie of the same name, featuring murderous momma’s boy Norman Bates cavorting with his mummy’s shriveled corpse. In 1974, the slasher franchise The Texas Chainsaw Massacre debuted, with the killer-cannibal Leatherface sporting a mask of human skin, a direct take-off on Gein.17 And in 1991, the mind-warping movie The Silence of the Lambs introduced us to serial killer Buffalo Bill, a demented transsexual who slays and flays his female victims in order to make a garment of their skin, just like Ed Gein’s woman suit.18 Had Gein not committed his crimes, who knows, Hollywood scriptwriters might never have conceived of such ghastly characters.
That the real-life monster Ed Gein could reach such depths of depravity attests to the unknown boundaries of the evil that humans are capable of. The judge who presided over Gein’s murder trial, Robert H. Gollmar, said, “I know of no person like him in the whole history of the world.”19 After his atrocities came to light, a number of sick jokes, songs, comic books, and even fan clubs grew up around Ed Gein—examples of psychological coping, false bravado, or shock-value exploitation. But the man was no pretend slasher that we can laugh about when the house lights come up. He was and is a dark feral specter, a night-roaming apparition that flutters at the edge of consciousness and sends shivers through your soul.
William Stoughton
The mellow dawn light slanted low across the greening fields and dusty lanes of Salem Village, firing the scattered clapboard houses with a rosy glow. Despite the warmth of the late spring morning, something about the day chilled the soul. A sense of unease enveloped this tiny outpost of civilization, clinging precariously to the Atlantic coast on the edge of a forbidding wilderness. In Salem Village, a farming community of 550 inhabitants just inland from the busy seaport of Salem Town, everyone firmly believed that the Devil lurked nearby, waiting for the chance to work his malefactions. Six decades before, the Puritans had come to the land along Massachusetts Bay in search of religious freedom, and they practiced their faith with stern devotion. To escape the snares of Satan, they followed God’s word to the letter.
Beyond Salem Village, a two-wheeled wooden cart creaked up Gallows Hill, a lonely patch of ground overlooking Salem Town and the sea. Trailed by a crowd of somber onlookers, a well-dressed older woman stood alone in the cart. Her name was Bridget Bishop, and she was, as had recently been determined in a court of law, a witch. What else could explain the strange occurrences that townsfolk had experienced? One villager claimed to have seen Bishop’s specter appear at the foot of his bed at midnight, and another reportedly saw the woman turn herself into a black cat. It was even said that she’d caused part of Salem Town’s meetinghouse to fall down merely by glancing at it.1 It hadn’t taken her judges long to reach their verdict: the woman was to be hanged for consorting with the Evil One.
When the noose was slipped around her neck on the morning of June 10, 1692, Bridget Bishop became the first of nineteen women and men to be tried, convicted, and executed in the notorious Salem witch trials, an episode in our nation’s past that still puzzles historians.2 Was it religious zealotry that sparked the trials . . . mass hysteria . . . petty jealousies . . . greed . . . some mysterious illness? All have been offered as possible explanations.
One factor, though, is indisputable: the influence of William Stoughton, the chief judge of the court that conducted the Salem trials. Stoughton’s determination to stamp out witchcraft led to the deaths of twenty-five people and the imprisonment of more than one hundred and fifty others.3 In his courtroom, the accused were presumed guilty and any personal grievance or imagined supernatural occurrence was admitted as evidence. Stoughton discouraged innocent verdicts, and he never apologized for the excesses of his court even after the public—along with his fellow judges—had turned against the trials and the Massachusetts governor had repudiated the court’s extreme methods.4
Stoughton may have been Salem’s most rabid witch-hunter, but the entire community shared in the creation of this bizarre event. Curiously, it all began with a few girls at play.
In 1689, former West Indies merchant Samuel Parris moved to Salem Village to take up his duties as minister in the community’s church, which had been formed a few years before so villagers wouldn’t have to make the inconvenient journey to attend services in Salem Town (in the 1750s, Salem Village would achieve separate status as the town of Danvers). Parris’s family included his wife, Elizabeth, their nine-year-old daughter, Betty, and an eleven-year-old niece, Abigail Williams. Reverend Parris also brought along two slaves he’d purchased in Barbados, a man they called Indian John and his mate, Tituba.
Tituba was reputed to be a fortune-teller. According to some accounts, she began teaching her skills to young Betty and Abigail, along with a few of their friends, during the harsh winter of 1691–92.5 With the winter winds moaning outside and firelight flickering on the walls of the Parris kitchen, the Indian woman is said to have told the girls frightening stories about voodoo and witches. In an age when virtually everyone believed in witchcraft, Tituba’s disturbing tales may have caused her young charges to take the next steps down Salem’s road to calamity.
In the latter part of January 1692, Betty and Abigail began experiencing seizures, delirium, and the sensation that someone was pinching them. Soon, several other girls in the village exhibited the same symptoms. A local doctor examined th
e girls. Unable to find any physical cause for their ailments, he decided that they were bewitched. The townsfolk looked on in alarm as the girls had fits during Sunday church services, crying out that they saw ghostly forms floating in the air. Reverend Parris attempted to ease their symptoms with prayer. One concerned villager resorted to an old folk remedy, encouraging Tituba to identify the source of the afflictions by baking a rye “witch cake” containing the girls’ urine and feeding it to a dog.
When Reverend Parris and others pressed the girls to reveal who was tormenting them, the girls accused three women of being witches—Tituba, a beggar named Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborn, an old woman with a poor record of church attendance. The women were arrested at the end of February and interrogated by local magistrates. Surprisingly, Tituba admitted to being a witch (she later said that Reverend Parris had beaten a confession out of her).6 The Indian gave a vivid account of her activities as a sorceress, describing the Devil as a tall, white-haired man dressed in black who sometimes assumed the form of a hog or a large black dog. She said that Good and Osborn were witches, too, despite their denials. They’d all zoomed around together on broomsticks, Tituba claimed. And there were still more witches in town, according to the Indian woman.
Tituba’s confession paved the way for the hysteria that followed. Over the next few weeks, the afflicted girls implicated several more suspected witches, mostly people living on the fringes of Salem Village or in surrounding communities. Adults started hurling accusations at each other as well (and probably influenced who the afflicted girls singled out). In short order, the jails in Salem and nearby towns were crammed with people who’d been denounced by their neighbors. The magistrates even arrested Sarah Good’s four-year-old daughter, Dorcas, who was bound in chains and locked up with her mother, an experience that drove the girl mad.7
As the incriminations mounted, it became apparent that Salem needed some mechanism to deal with its plague of witches. On May 27, 1692, the new governor of the royal colony of Massachusetts, William Phips, formed a special body—the Court of Oyer and Terminer, meaning “to hear and determine”—to handle the witchcraft cases. (Some historians say the governor wasn’t empowered to establish such a court. If true, the Salem trials were conducted without valid authority.)8 Phips named his new lieutenant governor, William Stoughton, to head the court. By any measure, Stoughton was a strange choice to conduct a legal proceeding. Rigid and prideful, the sixty-year-old bachelor with the sober countenance and flowing gray hair had no training whatsoever in law. He’d been educated for the ministry.
It’s believed that Stoughton was born in England in 1631 and immigrated to Massachusetts with his family as a boy. His father acquired a considerable amount of land in the colony and became a prominent political figure. In 1650, young Stoughton completed a degree in theology at the recently founded Harvard College. Not long afterward, he returned to England to continue his studies at Oxford. He earned a master’s degree in 1653 and remained at Oxford for the next few years. In 1659, he became a minister in a Sussex parish. Three years later, he returned to Massachusetts. Dabbling at preaching and farming, Stoughton gradually became enmeshed in colonial politics.
A consummate opportunist, Stoughton zigzagged his way through the constantly shifting power structure of colonial rule for the next two decades.9 If he had shown that same dexterity in the Salem trials, things might have turned out better. Abetted by Cotton Mather, the influential Puritan minister who had witches on the brain, Stoughton quickly demonstrated the ham-fisted tactics of a grand inquisitor.10 Stoughton’s most controversial decision was to permit the introduction of “spectral evidence”—the unprovable claims of witnesses that they’d been haunted by apparitions of the accused. He also allowed the use of the “touching test,” which was based on the belief that an afflicted person’s symptoms would disappear if the victim were touched by a witch.
Stoughton and his fellow judges aggressively interrogated the accused, as if they were prosecutors rather than impartial arbiters. They allowed witnesses and even members of the audience to introduce any bit of gossip or conjecture. The defendants, on the other hand, had no legal representation. Alone, frightened, and often confused, they had to fend for themselves as best they could. Stoughton accepted what were obviously false confessions—a suspect’s only means of escaping the death penalty. According to an up-is-down Puritan tradition, no one who confessed to sorcery was hanged; only those courageous enough to maintain their innocence went to the gallows. All in all, it was a kangaroo court on steroids.11
Artist T. H. Matteson envisioned the atmosphere of the Court of Oyer and Terminer in his 1853 painting Examination of a Witch. The painting shows a young woman stripped to the waist as three older women inspect her for “witch marks”—unusual moles or other skin blemishes. One of the inspectors points to the accused’s back as if she’s found an incriminating spot. A man writhes on the floor, overcome with emotion, and another young woman, either a friend of the accused or a second defendant, swoons into a bystander’s arms. People stare accusingly, the judges scowl, and a magistrate holds back spectators trying to get in the door. In real life, the chaos would have included the shouts and screams of the accused, along with the theatrical convulsions and caterwauling of the afflicted girls—a scene of total bedlam.
Stoughton convened this circus in Salem Town’s two-story courthouse, a building large enough to hold the crush of suspects, jailers, witnesses, and gawkers. The first trial—that of Bridget Bishop—began on June 2, 1692. Eight days later, the elderly woman was dangling from a rope on Gallows Hill. Over the next four months, Stoughton signed a flurry of death warrants, including those for two dogs, which were thought to be witches’ “familiars,” or supernatural assistants. Many of the accused were either paupers or outcasts, but a high social standing didn’t guarantee immunity, as was demonstrated by the case of the Reverend George Burroughs, a former Salem minister.
Years before the trials began, Burroughs had argued over money with one of Salem Village’s leading families, the Putnams. After the dust-up, Burroughs had moved to Maine. He’d obviously made other enemies in Massachusetts besides the Putnams, since a horde of villagers accused him of performing black magic. Arrested and hauled back to Salem, he listened with disbelief as teenager Mercy Lewis described how he had flown her to a mountaintop and promised her dominion over all she saw if she would sign the Devil’s book. The imaginative Mercy proclaimed, “I would not writ if he had throwed me down on one hundred pitchforks.”12 On August 19, Reverend Burroughs was hanged on Gallows Hill, despite having recited the Lord’s Prayer, which sorcerers were supposedly unable to do.
Another defendant confounded Stoughton by rejecting the court’s authority. When brought before the dour judge, octogenarian Giles Corey expressed his contempt for the trials by refusing to speak—some say to avoid a conviction that might lead to the confiscation of his property.13 The downside to his tactic was the punishment he faced because of his silence: he was subjected to a procedure called peine forte et dure—being crushed under a tremendous weight. Corey was covered with boards, and large rocks were piled on top, a few at a time. It took two days to crush the life out of him, but Corey never submitted to the court. The defiant old codger’s last words were supposedly a curse on Salem and his torturers.14
Fourteen of the nineteen convicted witches that Stoughton hanged were women. Four more of the accused died in jail, where they faced deplorable conditions (a baby girl born to Sarah Good also died in custody).15 Then suddenly, like a fever that had broken, the Salem trials came to an end. The last eight persons to be executed were hanged on September 22, 1692. In early October, Puritan minister Increase Mather, the father of Cotton Mather and president of Harvard College, argued that spectral evidence should not be allowed in a court of law. Governor Phips agreed, and he barred its use, along with the touching test.
At the end of October, the governor suspended the Court of Oyer and Terminer, prohibited additional arres
ts for witchcraft, and freed many of those being held. When Stoughton ordered the execution of women prisoners who’d been exempted from hanging because they were pregnant, Phips countermanded the decision, infuriating the implacable judge (Stoughton later vented his anger by undermining Phips politically). In May 1693, Governor Phips pardoned all of the accused who were still in jail.
In the aftermath of the trials, many citizens of Massachusetts expressed shame for what had taken place. Samuel Sewall, a judge on the Court of Oyer and Terminer, publicly apologized for wrongs inflicted on the innocent, as did Ann Putnam, one of the most vocal of the girls who’d denounced their fellow villagers. In 1711, the colonial government of Massachusetts absolved all but a few of the accused of any guilt and paid restitution to their heirs (it wasn’t until 2001 that the last victims of the witchcraft hysteria were absolved).16 The only person involved in the Salem trials who refused to accept any blame or admit to any wrongdoing was William Stoughton. For the rest of his life, Stoughton clung to his position like a hidebound zealot.
It’s clear that Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, and their circle of friends started Salem’s witchcraft hysteria with their fits and visions. Most historians seem to think the girls simply faked their afflictions to attract attention, but recently, another explanation for their behavior has been suggested: they could have been suffering from a condition caused by ergot, a parasitic fungus containing an alkaloid similar to that found in LSD.17 The fungus grows on cereal grains such as rye, a common colonial-era food crop. Usually affecting women and children, ergot poisoning produces crawling sensations on the skin, vertigo, and convulsions, along with hallucinations and delirium—the same symptoms reported by the village girls.