The 5 Horrifying Secrets ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ Didn’t Dare to Show You

Ed’s father died from heart failure in 1940

The Netflix series shows the death of Ed’s brother, Henry (Hudson Oz) and his mother, Augusta (Laurie Metcalf).

Before his brother and mother, Ed’s father, George Gein, died of heart failure in 1940. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Ed later told investigators that his father had abused both him and his older sibling.

Per The Hollywood Reporter — and a newspaper date glimpsed in the first episode — Monster: The Ed Gein Story starts in 1944, four years after the death of George.

Adeline Watkins claimed she was romantically involved with Ed Gein before retracting her statements

In Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) is a major character and love interest for Ed.

After Ed’s arrest in 1957, Adeline told The Minneapolis Tribune (via the Wisconsin State Journal) that she had a 20-year romance with the murderer. She revealed that he proposed to her in 1955, but she turned him down.

Two weeks later, Adeline gave another interview, saying their relationship was “exaggerated.”

According to the Stevens Point Journal, Arlene thought the Tribune story “was blown up out of proportion to its importance and containing untrue statements.”

She clarified that she had known Ed for 20 years, but starting in 1954, he “had called on her for only seven months, and then only intermittently.”

“There was no 20-year romance,” she told The Plainfield Sun.

Henry Gein’s official cause of death was heart failure from asphyxiation

In the first episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Ed kills his older brother, Henry, by hitting him on the head with a piece of wood.

Ed later drags his brother’s body out to the field and stages a fire to cover it up. In real life, Henry’s body was found after a brush fire was put out on the farm, but the official cause of death was “asphyxiation leading to heart failure,” per the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal.

After Ed’s arrest in 1957, suspicions arose that he could have played a role in his brother’s death years earlier, but he wasn’t officially connected.

Ed kept his mother’s room as an untouched shrine to her

Monster: The Ed Gein Story features multiple scenes where Ed visits the body of his dead mother, Augusta, who has been propped up in her rocking chair looking out the window in her bedroom.

In one scene, Adeline runs screaming from the Gein house after she discovers the body of Augusta, who she thought was still alive — albeit quiet — the whole time.

According to the Stevens Point Journal, Adeline said she was never inside the Gein house and would not have been in Augusta’s room. Ed boarded up that section of the home, keeping it as an untouched shrine to his mother, per Investigation Discovery.

Ed’s burial plot eventually became an unmarked grave

In the final episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story, a group of teenagers has a Halloween party in a cemetery. They tie a rope around the headstone of Ed’s grave and use a pickup truck to dislodge it from the ground.

The United Press International reported that he was buried in his family’s plot in the Plainfield Cemetery. In the years after his death, Ed’s grave became something of a tourist attraction.

Per the New York Post, visitors would take pieces of his headstone, and in 2000, it was stolen entirely.