August 16, 2023 • 12 mins
In the 19th century news spread of an unfortunate man who was born with an evil second face on the back of his head that spoke to him. The real story is that people keep falling for it.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck,
and on the back of each of our heads is
a little devilish fiend named Jerry.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I knew that was coming.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Each of us has a Jerry on the back of
our heads and we hate it so much.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Oh, I just punched the back of my head all
day long. Yeah, and you know how end up hurting
just me.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Yeah, it's true. She can move just in time.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Big thanks to Dave Rus. But this is from the
house stuffworks dot com. Side sure, and we're talking about Edward,
not more Drake. It's more Dake. I thought it was
more Drake until twenty five seconds ago before we recorded.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I'm glad we sorted that out, by the way.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I look this over and over and over, and I
said more Drake in my brain every time. But there
is no ruh and there is no Edward more Dake.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Oh okay, sure, no, I think that's fair. He does
exist in some way, shape or form m hm, at
least on paper, specifically a paper called the Boston Sunday Post.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
There is an article in eighteen ninety five that was
published in The Sunday Post that was written by an
author named Charles Lowton Hildreth, great name, super nineteenth century name. Yeah,
And the article was about, essentially, what's the word I'm
(01:32):
looking for?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Chuck a gentleman suffering from a rare defect.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Not just him, a bunch of different ones. So the
headline was the Wonders of Modern Science. The subhead was
some half human monsters once thought to be of the
Devil's brood.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
And so in this article there were a number of
different poor people who were half crab half person. One
guy who had hands where his feet were and feet
were his hands were about.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
How about the melon child of Radnor, whose head looked
like a right melon and had a small vertical slit
for a mouth.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, there was one. There was a vicious creature that
was half man, half crab, with monstrous nippers and big
claws below the elbow. The Norfolk spider is particularly creepy.
You want to tell them about him?
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Uh? The Norfolk spotter. Yes, that was the spider with
the human head, of course, and a clergy person confirmed
this by saying, I wish s. Migel was around to
read this, but I will I saw this monstrous thing myself.
Otherwise it would not have credited so awful a manifestation
of the creator's wrath.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
That was very good, thank you. So there were some
illustrations too, including of the Norfolk spider, and he looked
more confused than scary. But a giant spider with the
human head is just unsettling on all sorts of levels.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, but we're focusing on Edward more Dake. I want
to say, are in there so bad? But Edward had
a condition congenital defect, wherein he had a shrunken second
face on the back of his head, which is why
you joked about Jerry being on the back of our head.
And this face would actually speak, and it was sort
(03:22):
of like an evil twin. They called it the devil
twin that would whisper in his ear, such that Edward
Moore Dake would eventually take his own life at twenty
three years old. However, and of course none of this
is true.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
No, despite the fact that in this article The Wonders
of Science, that was published in eighteen ninety five in
the Boston Sunday Post, written by Charles Lawton Hildreth sites
the Royal Scientific Society that had reported on all of
these different people, it was totally made up. In fact,
(03:56):
Charles Lawton Hildreth was a science writer, Yeah, speculative fiction
at the very least.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, poet too, yeah, and measure.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
He had a really great imagination. And the paper he
was working for, the Boston Sunday Post is Dave Rush
equates it with the National Inquirer today. Yeah, maybe even
the World Weekly News almost in this case.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
But I still love the weekly World News.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah. I always say it backwards, kind of like you
want to say more, Drake.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
What'd you say, World Weekly News? Yeah, same thing.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
So Hildreth just basically sat down and let his imagination
pour out into an article cited the Royal Scientific Society.
The Boston Sunday Post published it, and it came out
in a newspaper. A year later. Hildreth dies, but the
story goes on.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Hmmm, shall we be right back, yes, all right? After this.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Stop you should know? Still stop you should I should know?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
All right, like you said, uh, the author of that
original Sunday what was it, Sunday.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Post, Boston Sunday Post.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
It on Fridays, the paper of Record is how they
called it. He died in eighteen ninety six, and this
was a year after he wrote that story. But in
that same year there were a couple of doctors who
published a legitimate book called The Anomalies and Curiosities of
(06:01):
Medicine and said it was quote derived from an exhausted
research of medical literature, and they included an entry on
Edward Moore Dake. And what they did was basically the
modern Internet, because they copied word for word what Hildreth
had written and pasted it into their own work as fact.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Yeah, so what they copied and pasted that was in
the original article was essentially this that Edward Moredake was
a very handsome young man. He had it all. He
was a scholar, he was amusing and then yeah, yeah, right,
he was very handsome, very graceful. He just had a
big problem, and that was he had an evil twin
(06:46):
face on the back of his head that said all
sorts of terrible stuff to him. No one else could
hear what it was saying except Edward. But you could
watch its lips gibber without seizing, and the eyes of
the face would follow you around the room if you
were in its in its field of vision. And Edward
(07:06):
just couldn't stand this thing. He asked the doctors to
crush the second face, even if it meant he was
he was going to die as a result. He didn't
care at that point so much. So, like you said,
he took his life by drinking poison at age twenty three,
and he left the Royal Scientific Society said a note
that said, when you bury me, destroy the face on
(07:29):
the back of my head, lest it continues its dreadful
whisperings in my grave. So this was the story of
Edward Mordeck that Hildreth originally wrote that these American doctors
published as fact in an actual book. So this has
gone from being in a paper and now being in
a book by doctors who claimed that it's from an
(07:52):
exhaustive research of medical literature, which gives it a real
veneer of reality.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah. Absolutely, And we also fail to mention that the
devil twin was a girl. Oh yeah, a beautiful girl,
lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil, but exhibited
every sign of intelligence of a malignant sort. However, it
sounds like one of our Halloween stories. Yeah, like fully,
but like you said, none of it was true. However,
(08:19):
this is a this is a thing that sort of
can happen and one of the reasons why people believed
it for a long long time is that there are
some very very rare congenital defects where you can have
a face on your head like two faces. One's called
craniofacial duplication or die pro diprosopis, that is Greek for
(08:45):
two faced, and fewer than fifty cases worldwide, I believe
since eighteen sixty four. Most of those were stillborn. It's
very very sad, obviously, but very very rare, and also
happens a lot in the animal kingdom. Well, not a lot,
but happens in the animal kingdom.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
You ever seen like a chicken with two faces? That's
what that is.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
So there was a baby girl born in India in
two thousand and eight, I remember, and she had two
faces and was actually worshiped as a reincarnation of the
Hindu goddess Durga, who was a divine feminine energy who
was very good by the way, because she defeated a
demonic army of evil. But she had three eyes in
(09:30):
multiple arms. And the little girl, I think, reportedly died
at two months. I remember that, don't you. Sort of
it was a big deal. Yeah, there was another girl
who was born I think around the same time, if
not a couple of years before after. Her name was
Manar Maged. She was born in Egypt in two thousand
and five, so a couple of years before. She had
(09:50):
a slightly different version of this called craniopagos parasiticus. And
this is not where you have like an extra face
on your face. You have an entirely conjoined twin attached
to the back of your head. The problem is that
the twin is considered parasitic. It doesn't have any organs
(10:11):
of its own, it doesn't have a brain, It just
has like the body. But the stuff that's inside the
parasitic twin is actually sucking the nutrients and the life
blood and everything out of the surviving twin. So it's
a really deadly situation. And yet at least three people,
including Minarmaged, have had their parasitic twin removed and have
(10:35):
lived to tell the tale.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, a lot of times there are no limbs like
I've seen sort of like a full head attached to
a head with what looks like just sort of an
upper Torso, yes, it can happen in various stages but
or various ways. But it doesn't happen like you talk
about rare or this one is listed as six out
of every ten million births, so super super rare. And
(11:02):
there are different times that Edward more Dake has been
portrayed in pop culture, like there was a Tom Waite
song called Poor Edward. If you followed American horror story
during the Freak Show season, there was a character named
Moore Drake the RTS finally in there that was based
on him, obviously, but if you've ever googled that and
just heard about the story and then seen a mummified
(11:26):
head with the face on the back and as Edward
Moore Dake, it is very compelling and realistic. But that
is a fake. It's what's known as a gaff, which
is joke art. And the artist was edwarked Ewert, you WERET.
You weret Schindler.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
So the real reason that people believe it was a
thing is in part because of the photos, but more
to the point, because those photos were shared along with
the story as if it were real on Facebook. That's
why people believed it shared at least two hundred and
sixty thousand times, so it went kind of viral. I
guess you could say yeah, and people were like this
(12:06):
poor guy, this is awful, and nobody stopped to think, like,
is this real? Did this guy really have a face
that would torment him and say evil things that only
he could hear, Like this doesn't make any sense, and
that's an actual big problem today.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
This is a good.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Example of that. Yeah, yeah, So I guess if you
believe in clones and shape shifters and people making clouds
on TikTok, I think you should stop and reevaluate things
for a minute and see what you come up with.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Short Stuff is out. You Know. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck,
and on the back of each of our heads is
a little devilish fiend named Jerry.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I knew that was coming.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Each of us has a Jerry on the back of
our heads and we hate it so much.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Oh, I just punched the back of my head all
day long. Yeah, and you know how end up hurting
just me.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Yeah, it's true. She can move just in time.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Big thanks to Dave Rus. But this is from the
house stuffworks dot com. Side sure, and we're talking about Edward,
not more Drake. It's more Dake. I thought it was
more Drake until twenty five seconds ago before we recorded.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I'm glad we sorted that out, by the way.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I look this over and over and over, and I
said more Drake in my brain every time. But there
is no ruh and there is no Edward more Dake.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Oh okay, sure, no, I think that's fair. He does
exist in some way, shape or form m hm, at
least on paper, specifically a paper called the Boston Sunday Post.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
There is an article in eighteen ninety five that was
published in The Sunday Post that was written by an
author named Charles Lowton Hildreth, great name, super nineteenth century name. Yeah,
And the article was about, essentially, what's the word I'm
(01:32):
looking for?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Chuck a gentleman suffering from a rare defect.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Not just him, a bunch of different ones. So the
headline was the Wonders of Modern Science. The subhead was
some half human monsters once thought to be of the
Devil's brood.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
And so in this article there were a number of
different poor people who were half crab half person. One
guy who had hands where his feet were and feet
were his hands were about.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
How about the melon child of Radnor, whose head looked
like a right melon and had a small vertical slit
for a mouth.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, there was one. There was a vicious creature that
was half man, half crab, with monstrous nippers and big
claws below the elbow. The Norfolk spider is particularly creepy.
You want to tell them about him?
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Uh? The Norfolk spotter. Yes, that was the spider with
the human head, of course, and a clergy person confirmed
this by saying, I wish s. Migel was around to
read this, but I will I saw this monstrous thing myself.
Otherwise it would not have credited so awful a manifestation
of the creator's wrath.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
That was very good, thank you. So there were some
illustrations too, including of the Norfolk spider, and he looked
more confused than scary. But a giant spider with the
human head is just unsettling on all sorts of levels.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, but we're focusing on Edward more Dake. I want
to say, are in there so bad? But Edward had
a condition congenital defect, wherein he had a shrunken second
face on the back of his head, which is why
you joked about Jerry being on the back of our head.
And this face would actually speak, and it was sort
(03:22):
of like an evil twin. They called it the devil
twin that would whisper in his ear, such that Edward
Moore Dake would eventually take his own life at twenty
three years old. However, and of course none of this
is true.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
No, despite the fact that in this article The Wonders
of Science, that was published in eighteen ninety five in
the Boston Sunday Post, written by Charles Lawton Hildreth sites
the Royal Scientific Society that had reported on all of
these different people, it was totally made up. In fact,
(03:56):
Charles Lawton Hildreth was a science writer, Yeah, speculative fiction
at the very least.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, poet too, yeah, and measure.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
He had a really great imagination. And the paper he
was working for, the Boston Sunday Post is Dave Rush
equates it with the National Inquirer today. Yeah, maybe even
the World Weekly News almost in this case.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
But I still love the weekly World News.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah. I always say it backwards, kind of like you
want to say more, Drake.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
What'd you say, World Weekly News? Yeah, same thing.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
So Hildreth just basically sat down and let his imagination
pour out into an article cited the Royal Scientific Society.
The Boston Sunday Post published it, and it came out
in a newspaper. A year later. Hildreth dies, but the
story goes on.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Hmmm, shall we be right back, yes, all right? After this.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Stop you should know? Still stop you should I should know?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
All right, like you said, uh, the author of that
original Sunday what was it, Sunday.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Post, Boston Sunday Post.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
It on Fridays, the paper of Record is how they
called it. He died in eighteen ninety six, and this
was a year after he wrote that story. But in
that same year there were a couple of doctors who
published a legitimate book called The Anomalies and Curiosities of
(06:01):
Medicine and said it was quote derived from an exhausted
research of medical literature, and they included an entry on
Edward Moore Dake. And what they did was basically the
modern Internet, because they copied word for word what Hildreth
had written and pasted it into their own work as fact.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Yeah, so what they copied and pasted that was in
the original article was essentially this that Edward Moredake was
a very handsome young man. He had it all. He
was a scholar, he was amusing and then yeah, yeah, right,
he was very handsome, very graceful. He just had a
big problem, and that was he had an evil twin
(06:46):
face on the back of his head that said all
sorts of terrible stuff to him. No one else could
hear what it was saying except Edward. But you could
watch its lips gibber without seizing, and the eyes of
the face would follow you around the room if you
were in its in its field of vision. And Edward
(07:06):
just couldn't stand this thing. He asked the doctors to
crush the second face, even if it meant he was
he was going to die as a result. He didn't
care at that point so much. So, like you said,
he took his life by drinking poison at age twenty three,
and he left the Royal Scientific Society said a note
that said, when you bury me, destroy the face on
(07:29):
the back of my head, lest it continues its dreadful
whisperings in my grave. So this was the story of
Edward Mordeck that Hildreth originally wrote that these American doctors
published as fact in an actual book. So this has
gone from being in a paper and now being in
a book by doctors who claimed that it's from an
(07:52):
exhaustive research of medical literature, which gives it a real
veneer of reality.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah. Absolutely, And we also fail to mention that the
devil twin was a girl. Oh yeah, a beautiful girl,
lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil, but exhibited
every sign of intelligence of a malignant sort. However, it
sounds like one of our Halloween stories. Yeah, like fully,
but like you said, none of it was true. However,
(08:19):
this is a this is a thing that sort of
can happen and one of the reasons why people believed
it for a long long time is that there are
some very very rare congenital defects where you can have
a face on your head like two faces. One's called
craniofacial duplication or die pro diprosopis, that is Greek for
(08:45):
two faced, and fewer than fifty cases worldwide, I believe
since eighteen sixty four. Most of those were stillborn. It's
very very sad, obviously, but very very rare, and also
happens a lot in the animal kingdom. Well, not a lot,
but happens in the animal kingdom.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
You ever seen like a chicken with two faces? That's
what that is.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
So there was a baby girl born in India in
two thousand and eight, I remember, and she had two
faces and was actually worshiped as a reincarnation of the
Hindu goddess Durga, who was a divine feminine energy who
was very good by the way, because she defeated a
demonic army of evil. But she had three eyes in
(09:30):
multiple arms. And the little girl, I think, reportedly died
at two months. I remember that, don't you. Sort of
it was a big deal. Yeah, there was another girl
who was born I think around the same time, if
not a couple of years before after. Her name was
Manar Maged. She was born in Egypt in two thousand
and five, so a couple of years before. She had
(09:50):
a slightly different version of this called craniopagos parasiticus. And
this is not where you have like an extra face
on your face. You have an entirely conjoined twin attached
to the back of your head. The problem is that
the twin is considered parasitic. It doesn't have any organs
(10:11):
of its own, it doesn't have a brain, It just
has like the body. But the stuff that's inside the
parasitic twin is actually sucking the nutrients and the life
blood and everything out of the surviving twin. So it's
a really deadly situation. And yet at least three people,
including Minarmaged, have had their parasitic twin removed and have
(10:35):
lived to tell the tale.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, a lot of times there are no limbs like
I've seen sort of like a full head attached to
a head with what looks like just sort of an
upper Torso, yes, it can happen in various stages but
or various ways. But it doesn't happen like you talk
about rare or this one is listed as six out
of every ten million births, so super super rare. And
(11:02):
there are different times that Edward more Dake has been
portrayed in pop culture, like there was a Tom Waite
song called Poor Edward. If you followed American horror story
during the Freak Show season, there was a character named
Moore Drake the RTS finally in there that was based
on him, obviously, but if you've ever googled that and
just heard about the story and then seen a mummified
(11:26):
head with the face on the back and as Edward
Moore Dake, it is very compelling and realistic. But that
is a fake. It's what's known as a gaff, which
is joke art. And the artist was edwarked Ewert, you WERET.
You weret Schindler.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
So the real reason that people believe it was a
thing is in part because of the photos, but more
to the point, because those photos were shared along with
the story as if it were real on Facebook. That's
why people believed it shared at least two hundred and
sixty thousand times, so it went kind of viral. I
guess you could say yeah, and people were like this
(12:06):
poor guy, this is awful, and nobody stopped to think, like,
is this real? Did this guy really have a face
that would torment him and say evil things that only
he could hear, Like this doesn't make any sense, and
that's an actual big problem today.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
This is a good.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Example of that. Yeah, yeah, So I guess if you
believe in clones and shape shifters and people making clouds
on TikTok, I think you should stop and reevaluate things
for a minute and see what you come up with.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Short Stuff is out. You Know. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
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