The Ghoul of Plainfield | Plainfield Cemetery, Wisconsin

Season 2 Episode 29

In this episode of The Grim, Kristin opens the gates to Plainfield Cemetery in Plainfield, Wisconsin—a modest Midwestern burial ground rooted in pioneer history, where the quiet rows of headstones conceal one of the most disturbing legacies in American true crime.

Home to the earliest settlers of rural Wisconsin, the cemetery is perhaps best known today as the final resting place of Ed Gein—a body snatcher who robbed the very graves he now lies among, buried unmarked between his mother and brother in the family plot.

Visitors and true crime enthusiasts continue to make pilgrimages to the site, drawn by morbid curiosity and renewed interest following Netflix's dramatized portrayal of Gein's life. Locals, however, have long struggled with the unwanted notoriety—vandalism, desecration, and a steady stream of strangers searching for a killer's grave in a cemetery that was never meant to be famous.

Featured Stories:

Ed Gein: Confessed to robbing nine graves and making up to forty nocturnal cemetery visits between 1947 and 1952. The 1957 discovery at his farmhouse revealed murders, grave robbing, and the construction of grotesque objects from human remains—a crime scene that shocked the nation and defined a genre.

Bernice Worden: The 58-year-old hardware store owner whose disappearance on November 16, 1957 led investigators to Gein's farm and unraveled the full horror of his crimes.

Augusta Gein: Ed's domineering, deeply religious mother—the defining psychological force behind his life, preserved in shrine-like rooms after her 1945 death.

The Plainfield Pioneers: The earliest settlers buried here since 1837, their quiet legacy now forever overshadowed by the man interred among them.

Descending once more into the hauntings of history—on The Grim.