Future serial killer Ed Gein spent his youth locked away on the family's rural Wisconsin farm with just his brother and his fervently religious mother.

Future serial killer Ed Gein spent his youth locked away on the family's rural Wisconsin farm with just his brother and his fervently religious mother.

She forbade her boys to make any friends and taught them that the outside world was evil and that all women except her were instruments of the devil.

Soon, Gein's brother was found dead on the family property under mysterious circumstances and he was left all alone with mother.

When she died soon after, Gein lost his "one true love" and further secluded himself inside the house, much of which he turned into a shrine to her.

Meanwhile, corpses started vanishing from local graves and people started disappearing around town.

When the evidence finally led police to Gein's house in 1957, they found human skulls impaled on his bedposts, kitchen utensils made of bones, and a trove of household items like gloves and lampshades made out of human skin.

They even found a "woman suit" made out of human skin that he'd begun fashioning shortly after his mother died in order to become her and crawl inside her skin.

Gein's story was so infamously gruesome that it would soon inspire both "Psycho" and "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.