Monster: The Ed Gein Story – Did Ed Gein kill a nurse in the asylum? Details explored

Monster: The Ed Gein Story was released on October 3, 2025. The Netflix show is Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s third installment in the Monster series, digging up America’s creepiest true crime nightmares.

This time, they are all in on Ed Gein, the man who inspired most of the backwoods horror villains from Psycho to Leatherface. All eight episodes dropped in one go, as the show traced Gein’s timeline from childhood to crimes: his upbringing, his crimes, and the almost mythic grip he has on American pop culture.

After the show aired, fans raised various questions about the authenticity of certain elements, since showmakers have taken creative liberties to make it hook-worthy for TV. Among them is Gein, locked away in a mental asylum, murdering a nurse.

The way the show frames it, you are left questioning whether that actually happened or if it’s just a part of fiction. Reportedly, it is the latter. The actual story of Ed Gein is already profoundly disturbing, but the facts are a whole lot less sensational than that scene suggests.

Did Ed Gein kill a nurse in the asylum?

The short answer is no. Ed did not kill a nurse in the asylum. Sources such as his medical records and doctors’ notes from his years at Central State and Mendota show that he did not cause any harm to the hospital staff while he was admitted there.

Netflix clearly wasn’t going for historical accuracy with Monster: The Ed Gein Story. You get a super-charged scene where Gein snaps and attacks a nurse during a supposed psychotic break. But it’s pure cinematic invention. The writers added extra drama to elevate the sense of Gein’s unraveling. Hence, the nurse attack never happened.

In fact, in the show itself, it is revealed that it was all a hallucination—a twisted figment of Gein’s fractured mind. In Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the nurse’s killing is portrayed as a hallucination during one of Gein’s schizophrenic episodes.

What is fascinating, though, is how these fictional moments shape the way people think about real history. The show wants you to feel Gein’s torment, see his inner chaos, and it uses this nurse attack as a shortcut to get there.

After the hallucinated attack scene, the show continues to explore Gein’s spiraling isolation and psychological torment. All this is great for drama, but not exactly ripped from the headlines.

Netflix included the nurse attack to heighten the drama, though it did not happen in reality. The reality is, Ed Gein did not fit the rampaging lunatic cliché during his institutionalized years. He was disturbed, but not exactly in the way the show wants you to think.

What is Monster: The Ed Gein Story about?

Monster: The Ed Gein Story on Netflix is set in 1950s Wisconsin, revolving around the story of the real-life infamous killer Ed Gein. He was known as the “Butcher of Plainfield” and the “Plainfield Ghoul” due to his gruesome crimes.

The show explores Ed’s deeply troubled childhood. Augusta, his mother, is a one-woman cult who is domineering and terrifying. You watch Ed grow up under her thumb, and it’s like seeing a plant wilt in the dark.

When the story shifts to Ed’s adult life, things get even more chaotic. He is an awkward, twitchy outsider, the sort of guy who always looks like he is hiding something. The writers include a supposed romance with Adeline Watkins to give a glimpse of what he could have been if he had ever stood a chance at normalcy.

Then come the confirmed murders of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden, but that’s just the beginning. The grave-robbing scenes and making human skin lampshades are pure nightmare fuel.

Sometimes, Monster: The Ed Gein Story veers into the surreal. We see his hallucinations, violent outbursts, flashes of things that might be memory or maybe just Ed’s own hell.

What hits the most is how the series balances these outbursts of horror with glimpses of the life Ed led on that remote haunted farm. You feel a never-ending winter, isolation, and a man who is both a product of his surrounding environment and a walking nightmare. The ending, in which Ed is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital, is less a story of justice and more a sorrowful, realistic conclusion.

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Monster: The Ed Gein Story also addresses bigger issues: did Ed Gein simply become a direct victim of his own hellish environment, or was he inevitably a nightmare? The nature-versus-nurture debate is brought to the fore in the show. You see his unhealthy family environment, the stifling effect of his mother, and the trauma of his life combined with mental illness, and it all boils down to something truly frightening.

Is it the environment or the mind, or some dreadful combination of both? And how big a liability is the society that allowed individuals like Gein to go astray? One wonders whether we are mere spectators or silent partners in such tragedies.

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