The Psychopath Sideshow

It is two weeks before Halloween and I’m standing inside a tent with a man in smeared clown makeup shouting at me: “Are you all ready to see some sick, twisted shit?” This is Rob Zombie’s Great American Nightmare, an attraction of three haunted houses way out in Villa Park, Illinois, and I'm about to go into the serial killer house. The outer façade is resplendent in sensationalistic Americana with a healthy dash of psychobilly: hay bales, jack-o-lanterns, rusted metal, a sharp-toothed taxidermy monkey, and gaudy signs advertising attractions inside. One painted clapboard sign reads, “SEE – the PSYCHO of PLAINFIELD – A TRUE CANNIBAL.” Ed Gein is the famous killer the sign is referencing; he robbed graves, murdered two women, and allegedly (though likely not) cannibalized corpses in bucolic 1950’s Plainfield, Wisconsin. A sign almost exactly like this was once hung outside a carnival tent in 1958 to advertise a strikingly similar exhibition of serial killer entertainment. The difference is that in this 2014 haunted house there is an actor in a hunting cap playing Ed Gein, leering at the audience from his wood-shed filled with eviscerated plastic bodies; at the 1958 fair, there was a murder scene reconstructed with wax dummies in the very car that Ed Gein drove when he committed his crimes. This haunted house seems almost like a nostalgic attraction, perhaps taking some of its own authenticity-credibility from the fact that its recreational thrills are based in real-life tragedy.

The "Ed Gein ghoul car" made its first public appearance in July 1958 at the Outgamie County Fair in Seymour, Wisconsin, where it was displayed for three days inside a large canvas tent covered with blaring signs – ‘SEE THE CAR THAT HAULED THE DEAD FROM THEIR GRAVES! YOU READ IT IN ‘LIFE’ MAGAZINE! IT’S HERE! ED GEIN’S CRIME CAR! $1,000 REWARD IF NOT TRUE!’” The exhibit was soon shut down by public outcry, but Ed Gein has endured as a celebrity monster in America, inspiring the creation of iconic horror movies such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Psycho (1960). Almost any famous serial killer can be substituted in this example of pop-culture entertainment – serial killers proliferate in film, television shows, true-crime novels, magazines, internet culture, and in the lexicon of Americana. Serial killers have been cast as our modern freakshow scapegoats, commodified subjects of psychological study and prurient interest in true-crime television and a wide array of media.

[The two paragraphs above mark the start of my undergraduate thesis as it stands right now (at 2.35 am, in draft form.) What follows is the rest of the "sick, twisted shit" I saw at the haunted house...]

A girl in blonde pigtails told us, "Keep your arms in at all times, or they will get chopped the fuck off."

The clown told the crowd, carnival-barker style, "Inside, you will see Jeffrey Dahmer *a few cheers* and a local favorite, John Waaaaayne Gacy! *loud cheers and whoops*"

As you walk in there's Lizzie Borden, hair hung raggedy and wild, banging an axe against the wall. Albert Fish jumped out at you from a door-frame, into a kitchen where a mother wept over a filthy, bubbling pot with a little girl's white shoe next to it. Erzebet Bathory was striding regally around a red-lit room crowing, "More blood, more blood!" as a water jet emptied into a tub from a female dummy hanging naked from the ceiling. Skinny Richard Chase was twitching in a fluorescent-lit living room with bodies torn open on the floor. We walked through H.H. Holmes' torture workshop and he told us, in a dapper derby hat and vest, "No, no, everything's fine" as he forced a screaming girl back into a cupboard.

There was even the complete Sharon Tate murder scene, spread out over two rooms and designed with intricate detail. Manson was proselytizing to the crowd, boring holes into people with his eyes, while his followers capered around the bodies gleefully. Haunted houses involve a strange combination of marveling at your surroundings while also giving into the desire to flee from perceived danger and jarring sensations. In this house, however, I felt no fear and wanted to soak it all in like a museum. The actors would occasionally seem annoyed with me and urge me along with an extra jumpscare or two.

The John Wayne Gacy room was shockingly obscene, and has been causing some controversy (obviously, this particular tragedy hits close to home for Chicagoans.) There was a tubby Gacy, dressed in his clown costume, sitting in an armchair surrounded by debris and clutter. He was wriggling his feet delightedly as he blew up balloons and popped them, smiling and hissing sexual threats to the passers-by. Facing him on the couch across from the chair were two dummies of small Boy Scouts, one with a long balloon forced into his mouth and his eyes squeezed shut in pain. Gacy said, "Ya like that? Want me to teach you how? Bet you already know how!" -- then he would taper off into shrill giggles.

I wrote down every sensory detail I could recall once I was out of the house -- there were also representations of David Berkowitz, Ed Gein (mixed with Norman Bates,) and Jeffrey Dahmer. After some minimal online research, I found that Rob Zombie had lifted the sets, costumes, and even physical stunts from a much more effective and interesting serial killer haunted house that was put on in New York City in 2012. It was called "Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House" and offered better acting, more engagement with the audience, and some small critique of the cultural fascination with killers. Rob Zombie primarily make horror fanfiction anyway, with his Halloween remake and his first film, House of 1,000 Corpses, being a blatant-but-mediocre send-up of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre... and it's obviously worked to his advantage, however unimaginatively.

I'm disgusted with myself for having so much fun at this serial killer haunted house. Morally, it should not exist; but it does and it is turning a considerable profit.

Painted Skeletons & Amputation Saws

I entered the room and gasped -- it was Death draped in red.





















A skeleton posed elegantly on a chair, in an attitude suggesting a woman lost in a private thought at a cocktail party, her feet lapped in red velvet pooled at the base of the display. It was shockingly beautiful. The bones were threaded with blue veins and covered in vermilion arterial vessels, so delicately wisped that it looked like a red feather skirt puffed out around the skeleton's hips. I couldn't stop thinking of it as a woman. The bones were yellow like dead skin, gristly and crackling at the fingertips and toes. Teeth look gawky and protruding without a sheet of skin to cover them, but hers are still pearly-white and perfectly straight.

The International Museum of Surgical Science is possibly Chicago's strangest museum (possibly -- I'm still willing to test this.) Alongside the gleaming affluent sprawl of Lake Shore Drive is a statue of a stoic-faced man holding a quailing sick man up by his arms; behind that are four stories of artifacts and information about surgery. I started getting excited and taking notes once I passed a placard about congenital analgesia -- a rare genetic disorder that makes you unable to feel pain. Most sufferers are dead by age 25 because of little things like burns or joint pain (they never feel uncomfortable, your body's signal to shift position.) I am not a scientific-minded person at all, so I went through this as an art and history museum.

You are greeted by a glistening gurney on the first floor. Then, a little further up, is a sign on the door to an exhibit:

VISITORS PLEASE NOTE: You are about the enter the prenatal gallery...

Which of course sounded promising. The room was dimly lit with a subterranean glow, each exhibit in its own floodlight. There was a long table of fetuses in various stages of development contained in glass vials, their minuscule little bones tinted red. They seemed to glow with blood. The whole exhibit was haunting, but these especially. So delicate and small... like human tadpoles. In a glass case in the corner of the room was a 7-week-old fetus lying on its side, attached to a placenta. Its skin was like a wrinkled white peach, with a thin dusting of brown hair on its head and eyebrows inclined heartbreakingly upwards. There was also a fetal victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, next to a conjoined-twin fetus that looked like something you'd see unveiled with a flourish at a carnival freak show.

The museum was not solely populated with dead bodies, though. There was a whole cabinet of artificial legs and arms, a gynecological instrument from ancient Rome -- vagina specula -- and a plaster copy of Napoleon's death mask. I was struck by how flat-out attractive Napoleon was in death; with his paunch gone, cheeks narrowed down with the smooth bones accentuated, narrow lips, and aquiline nose, he was really beautiful. Walking through this museum produced a strange combination of feelings in me: I felt at once reverent, repulsed, and sensuously preoccupied with the structure of the human body. In the same room as Death draped in red (pictured above,) I saw the arteries of an infant's legs hanging suspended in a glass case and could not stop shivering until I turned away.

Entire passages and floors of the museum were relatively untainted with the odor of death, but naturally those don't stick as much in my mind -- exhibits about eyeglasses, hearing trumpets, X-rays, polio, painkillers (very interesting for tracing the history of intoxication, addiction, and big-business drugs in America)... One thing I realized: nurses are, aesthetically, very much like angels. That has to be on purpose. There was a bust of Florence Nightingale on one of the staircases, in white of course, and she had her eyes rapturously-yet-demurely upturned like the Virgin Mary. There is an atmosphere of care as opposed to violence in this museum, even though the history of the profession is bloody and gruesome by necessity.

Without the cushioning distraction of a gift shop to speak of I walked back out into the sunshine three hours later, my breath shallow and caught in my throat, feeling almost unbearably attuned to life.

Murderabilia & Serial Killer Groupies

There is a lot of noise made about the phenomenon of "murderabilia" trade on the Internet. Murderabilia is exactly what its gimmicky name is supposed to sound like, memorabilia of murders -- artifacts or products connected with serial killers. You can buy letters from David Berkowitz, clown paintings by John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein's mother's crucifix (a pretty high-end item). Not to mention the trading cards and action figures. I agree, it's grisly and sick and should not be allowed, but the element of deviance and perversity is probably what fuels it in the first place, and so making a show of being offended will not stop it. But anyway. I discovered something far more interesting and sick than murderabilia: there are people who become penpals with serial killers. I just spend the last hour reading a lot of threads and blogs from teenage girls who write letters to serial killers in jail -- keeping up multiple correspondences at once, complaining about how their parents freaked so they had to get their own P.O. box, delighted in the anecdotes of the whole thing. Here are a few samples: 


freedomlovinggypsy: "I actually wrote to a few. I wrote to Charlie Manson, and trust me...You don't really want to write to him. His letters are all jibberish and sloppy and almost impossible to read!! Then I wrote to David Berkowitz, and he kept sending me pamphlets about getting saved and preaching to me! And I wrote Richard Ramirez, and he was so obsessed with the damn devil it was unreal..He asked me if I was willing to sell my soul to get anything I wanted..Yeah, ok..Like, it really worked for him...lol! And I wrote to one, I can't remember what his name was. But he sent me a letter telling me what to do! Like, he told me to come to California, and bring money, and rent a hotel, and come and see him, and marry him!! Insane in the brain....that one was...I know alot of serial killes are psychopath but I really think some of them are just insane."

Lysosome: "I used to write to Richard Ramirez when I was 16-20, he was nice, told me to get an education and that Im sweet and should sort my life out and not end up in prison lol. I really liked him I told him I wanted to chop his wifes feet off and he was cool about it. he's a nice guy :-). Obsessed with the Devil, wanted rude pix of me, blah blah blah. Asked me if I was mad? haha."

ursulabear: "kemper is my favorite! pleasepleaseplease adress please!"

Serialthriller187 (one of the few boys on the forum): "My current pen pals are: Roy Norris, Phillip Jablonski, and Jack Owen Spillman III. I am waiting letters from 5-10 others. I have thousands of addresses. It's not 'risky' writing to any of these people at all, People are paranoid. If one is on death row, or life without parole, or life without change of parole. They rarely get released, If so, The feds watch their every move. Kemper won't write. You won't get a reply." 


And my absolute favorite, from dogbeith: "i am fascinating by serial killers becuse thay are so deffrent then other human beings but i do not want to talk to them or write letters to them cus thay murder human beings"

I've been mired in serial killer research for at least a year now... and a few of my friends have said that they've had episodes of this same intellectual compulsion (often coinciding with a bout of depression). So I understand the fascination, and I certainly understand trying to see inside the minds of these psychopathic people. Edmund Kemper is possibly the most flagrantly, fantastically fucked-up individual I have ever heard of, and the serial killer case that I have been most engrossed by. Apparently, he has this hard-to-get reputation among serial killer groupies/penpals. He's selective, choosy. 

Celebrity serial killer culture really makes me cringe internally, but I come into contact with it a lot as I'm researching this stuff. The fans, the people who absolutely relish it... for instance, someone made a MySpace page for Kemper: 

There are YouTube accounts that are much worse... people who make tribute videos to Ted Bundy, or write comments gushing over the minutiae of serial killers' lives. There are also streams of Tumblr pages to wade through... Kemper is being used for memes and banners, just like every other famous face known to American culture (for notoriousness and notoriety alike). 

(By the way, these pictures might not make complete sense if you don't know the story of his case, but you still get some idea of the horror in the facts behind it. Here's my favorite documentary about him, from the TV series Born to Kill?, if you're curious [and I love it when you're curious]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoqJXLaLq-M&feature=plcp). 

It's really good to be able to joke about this kind of thing, actually -- cannibalism, murder, necrophilia, psychopathy, mutilation. If it retains the untouchability of a taboo, it just gives the crisis more power and, by extension, the killer a more powerful status. They are sad, fucked-up individuals with sad, fucked-up lives. For a country galvanized by reality TV train-wrecks, exposes about hoarders and beauty competition mothers, this is exactly the brand of entertainment and intellectual manna that we're accustomed to. It seems natural that serial killers are a widespread obsession, a national mascot (what a revolting-idea-ringing-true THAT is!). 

I've thought about Edmund Kemper quite a lot -- far more than is healthy. I came up with some psychological insights into his case about a month ago, after watching every single shred of video about him on YouTube and reading everything I could find in the weirdest, darkest corners of the Internet. I want to post it sometime soon, but it's not ready yet. It sleeps inside my journal, fruits of a very late night on YouTube and the slow, gestating, timed release of a really well-structured revelation.

By the way, I found it:

Edmund Emil Kemper III, #B52453
P.O.B. 2000
Vacaville, CA 95696


I'm just not sure what I'm going to do with it.