"The Haunting of the Horicon Marsh"
I grew up in a haunted farmhouse overlooking the Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin. I can still remember autumn days, with bare branches brushing the horizon like webs of black lace, wild geese see sawing through moody skies, and the scent of burning leaves full and rich on the wind.
It was during this time we had the most paranormal activity.
When the October moon rose full and orange and pregnant, long dead Native Americans would rise out of their burial mounds on the edge of the marsh to ride amongst the world of the living on their painted Indian ponies.
More than once we were jolted awake from a dreamless slumber as we thought we heard the dairy cows stampeding through the farm yard. By the time we raced out of the house and into the eerie glow of the harvest moon we realized the sounds we heard were not cows but the snorts and whinnies of horses. We stood in awe as we watched a paranormal procession of long dead Indians gallop past us. Even now a chill on spidery legs walks down my spine as I remember those phantoms staring at me with long dead ,endless eyes. Often they would circle around the house for what seemed hours until the sun of morning turned them to mist, their yearly mission once again complete.
And so the years passed, with my brothers and me marching up the creaky old steps to our bedrooms upstairs. On cold winter nights the wind would gnaw at the windows like a living thing. Its icy breath invaded the rooms seeping into everything.
We huddled deep in our quilts of feathers and told each other stories about ghosts, hauntings and of course, Eddie Gein. Ed Gein was from Plainfield, Wisconsin and was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's demented character Norman Bates of Psycho fame. That very same Ed Gein was now incarcerated at the prison in Waupun, just west across the Horicon Marsh and a mere six miles away from our farm.
In the fall of the year, my grandfather would drive us by the old Gein homestead whenever we went to Plainfield to buy potatoes for the coming winter. It is hard to imagine that such a sleepy little town, average in every way could have something so evil festering just beneath the surface. The only strange thing about the place where Ed Gein once lived were all the crows that flocked where the house once stood. Crows, cousin to the larger and more glorious raven, are intelligent creatures, but these seemed even more so. They looked at us with their knowing beady black eyes, as if they were sizing us up. Could they have been the souls of the dead come back to roost?
Certainly Ed Gein's mother did not rest easy as Ed dug up her corpse along with other older women in the Plainfield area. Just like Norman Bates, the real psycho, Ed Gein, was devoted to his mother, and could not live without her.
No one really knew how many graves he desecrated in the end, but it was quite a few. He would bring the corpses home and skin them, and then construct funiture and lampsahdes from the remains. He even fashioned and wore a bizarre suit of human female skin.
Finally, Ed Gein went on a killing spree, killing two local women and beheading them, and then hanging and dressing them out in the basement, as if they were being butchered like deer. This last, bizarre, insane act is what bothered my brothers and me the most, as we grew up with deer hunting being a normal part of our lives. We knew how deer were hung upside down with the head removed so the blood would run out. After that the deer was gutted and left to hang before it was butchered for meat. It did not help matters either that Eddie Gein brought the livers of the butchered women to his neighbors for a pot luck dinner. Enjoyed by all I might add!
After that we never ate liver again.
I used to lay awake at night, looking out the west window of my bedroom into a whirlpool of stars. They glittered hard and cold in a setting of lush velvet blackness.
I can still remember hearing the lonely whine of the train whistle, as if it were the last thing in the world living. Huffing across the marsh tracks deep in the dark, wondering if perhaps Ed Gein had escaped from prison, hitched a ride on that train, and was coming closer and closer to our farm. Perhaps he would jump off just before he got to the edge of the marsh and turn down our cow lane, find his way to the barn and from there to the farm yard, and then who knows? Anything was possible, after all it was not unheard of for prisoners to escape from the Waupun prison, and they almost always headed for the Horicon Marsh first before the went anywhere else.
My brothers and I had nightmares for the rest of our childhood. The nightmares were always about Ed Gein finding a way out of prison and into our lives. We lived in terror that we would be his next victims, with our livers on his dinner plate.
Finally Ed Gein died, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. I think we even slept soundly for a while, until we started scaring ourselves all over again, thinking that perhaps Ed Gein would come back from the dead and get us that way.
In the end, nothing happened. I guess old Eddie Gein is sleeping peacefully in his Plainfield grave.
As for the spirits of the Native Americans, perhaps they still ride their painted ponies through the marsh and around the farmyard. Or perhaps they have moved on, like I have, only to return some day in the future.
Maybe there are children there in that old farmhouse even now, sweating from an over abundance of blankets pulled over them, hiding in fear from the unseen. And perhaps, one day, they too will have ghostly tales to tell their children and great-grandchildren.