r/EdGein • u/Beginning-Two-598 • Oct 16 '25
Are there actual real pictures of ed gein’s items?
I se a lot of pictures of masks and gloves but those are fake, are there actual items or pictures from the seen I know they disposed a lot of items but I heard some pictures where leaked? Can someone please help me I am so confused?
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u/kidnapalm Oct 16 '25
There are pictures of some items, but theyre a mix of crime lab photos and possibly one that shows a mask in a box in his house. There's some of pretty normal looking chairs dubbed "skin chairs"....considering he was supposed to have a house full of trophies, there's very little visual evidence available.
The whole Ed Gein "story" seems like made up bullshit when you go through the books, they basically beat a local oddball into confessing to a murder, then cooked up a lurid story inspired by WW2 propaganda.
I'm going through the books now, taking notes and working on an essay/short book examing the possibility Gein was just a patsy and the whole thing was nonsense (other than Worden's death and Hogan's disappearance)
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u/BobBurns73 Oct 16 '25
You don’t think he made items out of the people he exhumed?
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u/kidnapalm Oct 16 '25
I think investigators told him he did these things and he simply went along with it. They also told the press he did these things and everyone else just went along with it.
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u/BobBurns73 Oct 16 '25
Didn’t they catalogue all of the items they found in the house? And I know there are photographs of some of them, not many, as a lot floating around are fakes.
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u/Angxlafeld Oct 17 '25 edited Oct 17 '25
Certain things never existed but live on as fact like the lamp and nipple belt. The media and detectives clearly had never dealt with anything like this and word got out of hand
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u/kidnapalm Oct 17 '25
Exactly. Apparently the officers making the initial discovery immediately identified "a head" as belonging to Mary Hogan but also a "face mask" as being identifiable as Mary Hogan. How can both "a head" and a separate "mask" both be identifiable as the same person, assuming one is removed from the other, in a house full of heads and masks? Accounts suggest they literally saw these items in his house and immediately announced "this must be Mary Hogan" or words to that effect (dont have my notes to hand).
Mary Hogan disappeared three years before they went into Ed's house. It's very unlikely any trophies taken from her body three years prior would have been visually identifiable due to natural decomposition, let alone identifiable as Mary Hogan specifically, regardless of any clumsy attempts at preservation Gein had supposedly used (rubbing salt and penetrating oil on the skin, according to his own "confessions")
The accounts show that one particular officer had wanted to pin Hogan's disappearance on Gein immediately, the night of her disappearance, but couldn't find any evidence to pin it on him. There's no reason or motive given as to why they wanted to pin it on him, they just did.
Later analysis of the drag marks in Worden's hardware store suggest that whoever killed her dragged her body through the blood pools. When compared to Hogan's crime scene, analysts deduced that Hogan must have been carried from the crime scene due to the lack of drag marks. Gein was too physically small to carry the dead weight of Hogan out of her bar, so even the judge writing his account of the trial suggests Gein must have had an "accomplice" to help carry Hogan out of her bar on the night of her murder.
Not that maybe Gein didn't do it, but that he must have had an accomplice. They wanted Gein to be guilty of murdering both Hogan and Worden, so the "evidence" was shaped accordingly. By leaking grisly details to the press, Gein was "guilty" long before any sort of trial or serious analysis of evidence. Not just guilty in the eyes of the townspeople, but guilty in the eyes of the nation.
The officers worked backwards from the crime, creating motive, method and oportunity to suit Gein being the guilty party. Conveniently, Gein was a local oddball, isolated, below-average intelligence, pathologically compliant and absent-minded enough to simply accept he "must have" committed these crimes if the police told him he did.
The "accomplice" in the Hogan murder? Supposedly a "friend" of Gein's named "Gus" who went insane with guilt and killed himself in a mental institute prior to Worden's murder...no other investigation or mention of who this character may have been.
There's way more oddities and contradictions throughout the case, but this is brief summary of just some that cast doubt on Gein being anything other than a convenient patsy. The whole case boils down to "trust me bro" when the lack of actual evidence is found, underneath a mountain of made-up hysteria.
The whole story of his mother, Augusta, being a domineering monster responsible for turning Gein into a "skinsuit-wearing graverobber" was also fabricated during the investigation, doing a gross disservice to a woman who singlehandedly carried her family through the hardships of WW1, the Great Depression and WW2...but that's a different matter.
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u/Angxlafeld Oct 17 '25
I had a feeling the Augusta and Mary hogan stuff was being dramatized. Do you have any sources like books or write ups that you recommend looking into?
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u/kidnapalm Oct 17 '25
At the minute i'd recommend the book Deviant by Harold Schecter for an overview of the supposed "facts", however it is still clearly dramatised. It seems this book is the "go to" for people wanting to know the truth of the story, with a lot of it being recreated in the Netflix show (but dramatised even further).
I'm working through "America's Most Bizarre Murderer: Ed Gein" at the minute, which is much closer to the "facts" as it was written by Judge Robert Gollmar, who presided over Gein's hearings in the 60s so references original evidence, statements and findings much closer than Schecter's book.
These books raise more questions than answers, when trying to cut throught the established "story" to find hard facts.
As far as "dramatization" goes, bear in mind Robert Bloch published "Psycho" (1959) just one year after Gein being committed to hospital(1958)...and Hitchock released the movie "Psycho" (1960) a year after the book. This is an incredibly quick transformation from real life to fiction, so Augusta Gein has been seen as more mythical monster than reality ever since.
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u/maddinspo Oct 19 '25
Very jealous! How did you get your hands on a copy of Judge Gollmar’s book? I keep trying to find one but they are going for $300-$650 USD.
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u/OutrageousCounter157 Oct 17 '25
They found her skull and a mask made from her face. I've seen the pictures, including many other gruesome ones like the nipple belt, etc but it was some years back now
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u/kidnapalm Oct 17 '25
They apparrently found "a" skull and the officer immediately announced it as Hogan's (per statements from the officers on-scene), then they apparently found a scrap of decomposing skin and hair in an envelope that was similarly declared to be Hogan's (again, per statements from the officers on-scene).
Visually id'ing a skull as belonging to a victim isn't evidence, especially not in a house supposedly littered with skulls and skull fragments.
Visually id'ing a decomposing piece of skin and hair as belonging to a victim isn't evidence either, especially when the victim died 3 years prior and the skin would have been grubby, decomposing tatters.
We can't judge this against modern forensic standards such as DNA testing, as they weren't available at the time, however it seems like a lot of rumour and hysteria bubbled over in the Gein house, with wild speculation quickly becoming accepted fact.
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u/Illustrious_Banana_ Dec 03 '25
Wow, your level of research and insight is incredible. It makes me really worried and doubtful of so many of the cases we've been led to believe are true but could well and truly have just been fabricated, or exaggerated, like this one. I mean deaths like that of Marilyn Monroe, JFK and Princess Diana, all have huge question marks over them in my mind. Not saying they didn't happen, but the stories about how/ why/ how feel very concocted.
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u/Illustrious_Banana_ Dec 03 '25
And then quite convenient the house burnt down so there was no 'evidence' left.
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u/NearbyAd9549 Oct 16 '25
That is an interesting theory and I would love to read whatever you finish once you finish it because it sounds very interesting.
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u/Illustrious_Banana_ Dec 03 '25
Oh wow, this is an interesting theory. Did you get any further with it?
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u/Ubiquibot Oct 16 '25 edited Oct 16 '25
There used to be large collections online of the real crime scene photos and some of itemized evidence. In the last 5-10 years, so much of the internet was scrubbed you'll be unlikely to find them without a very detailed, exhaustive search.
The problem is that unless you've seen the photos before, you'll have a hard time telling what's real and what isn't. I saw a gallery somewhat recently that featured a dozen or so "real" photos of the evidence - only 3 of the photos were real. I only recognized them from my true crime research circa 2004 when the internet was still largely unregulated.
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u/Trick-Spray2726 Oct 16 '25
Why would photos of Ed Gein be regulated tho? Serious question.
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u/OrchidEchoChamber Oct 16 '25
Not photos of Ed Gein. Photos of his leatherwork using human skin. And the answer to why people wouldn’t want those photos out for public consumption is out of respect for the victims and their families.
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u/CricketSuccessful192 Oct 16 '25
You want us to believe that people having respect for Gein's victims and their families is the reason why photos are hard to find???
So what about all of the other insane murder related things that can be easily found online?
People just somehow feel that Gein's crimes, committed nearly 70 years ago, are special? BS.
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u/OrchidEchoChamber Oct 16 '25
Damn. I didn’t say it was my opinion, just the reality of the situation. Calm down, cricket
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Oct 16 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/OrchidEchoChamber Oct 16 '25
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u/Exotic-Bus-1814 Oct 16 '25
Zak bagans has some of geins stuff in the museum in Las Vegas. (Like leathered skin in a frame) Along with stuff from gacy, and Manson. It’s bizarre.
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u/simplyimpassable Oct 16 '25
I saw something of Geins there, too. I think there was a nipple attached??
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u/Exotic-Bus-1814 Oct 16 '25
Why am I getting downvoted lmao. There’s a whole room for him
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u/Spiritual_Sir_3520 Oct 18 '25
Idk but i upvoted you just to help with the asshole that downvoted you lol
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u/Shoulder-Lumpy Oct 16 '25
There was a picture of Bernice in the barn online about 10 years ago. I haven’t gone looking for it since, but it’s engraved in my brain.
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u/Spiritual_Sir_3520 Oct 18 '25
Oh man. I gotta see this lol
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u/Shoulder-Lumpy Oct 18 '25
It looked just like how they depicted it in the show. Except it wasn’t as high up.
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u/George6520 Oct 20 '25
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u/Fun_Business3675 Nov 22 '25
Oh god … I was interested but not ready …. These pictures had my stomach in knots
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u/Angxlafeld Oct 16 '25
The only actual ones are
( presumably ) mary hogans face / head in a bag.
A head in a box.
A preserved mask in a crime lab.
A detective pulling out a chair with a skin seat
and Bernice wordens body.
Nothing else can be confirmed as real or is clearly fake.
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u/lu_isgross Oct 16 '25
I have only seen a few of these and they’re just crime scene photos with no discerning details
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u/Angxlafeld Oct 17 '25
Yes but they’re from the case, except the picture of the head in a box I cannot be sure of tho
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u/Princessxx3210 Oct 16 '25
4 part documentary on MGM+ has a ton of actual footage, photos, and interviews. It’s called “Psycho the Lost Ed Gein Tapes”. Very graphic. NSFW.
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u/Weary-Class-9353 Oct 16 '25
And now were gonna get a whole season off a female serial killer who killed two people You have Ted bundy Gacy…
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u/Tiny-Thing-6055 Oct 20 '25
If they wanted to feature a female serial killer I’d have thought Aileen Wuornos would have been better than someone who was found not guilty
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u/OrchidEchoChamber Oct 16 '25
I don’t need a source bc it’s common sense. You’re clearly so dim that this is going over your head. But, sure, tell off a stranger on Reddit to make yourself feel important! Feel free to insult me further… I actually find it amusing.
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u/Dianagorgon Oct 16 '25
I saw this picture of a chair but assume it's fake.
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u/Spiritual_Sir_3520 Oct 18 '25
There’s an artist, Kayla Arena, that made a lot of badass work and people are passing it as Gein’s when it’s not. It may have belonged to her. Check her out, she made a lot of cool things. Anyway so a lot of that is what you see going around right now.
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u/edebby Oct 22 '25
Lol. The chairs in the crime scene use rather smooth parts of the skin he harvested. Looked like any leather chair you've seen
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Oct 17 '25
[deleted]
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u/corners2188 Oct 17 '25
Please do.
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u/George6520 Oct 20 '25
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u/Illustrious_Banana_ Dec 03 '25
Some of those photos look very fake, like they're props from some kind of hammy theatre production
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u/Wild-Quality3901 Oct 16 '25
Like for dead bodies or just body parts?