Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Edward Mordake

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to IEC's Daily Game every weekday on the I Heart Radio app on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and start your morning with me. 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-feigned named Jerry. I knew that was coming. Each of us has a Jerry on the back of our heads and we need it so much. I just punched the back of my head all day long. And you know how it ended up hurting just me. Yeah, that's true. She can move just in time. Big thanks to Dave Ruse, but this is from the house stuffworks.com side. Sure.

And we're talking about Edward, not more Drake. It's more Drake. I thought it was more Drake until 25 seconds ago before we recorded. I'm glad we sorted that out by the way. I look this over and over and over and I said more Drake in my brain every time, but there is no R and there is no Edward Mordake. Oh, that's quite good.

Sure. No, I think that's fair. He does exist in some way, shape, or form, at least on paper, specifically a paper called the Boston Sunday Post. There is an article in 1895 that was published in the Sunday Post that was written by an author named Charles Loughton Hildreth, great name, super 19th century name. Yeah. And the article was about essentially, what's the word I'm looking for Chuck? A gentleman suffering from a rare defect? 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 the headline was the wonders of modern science. The subhead was some half human monsters once thought to be of the devil's brood. That's right. And so in this article, there were a number of different poor people who were half crab, half person, one guy who had hands, whereas feet were and feet were his hands were. How about the melon child of Radnor, whose head looked like a right melon and had a small vertical slit for a mouth? Yeah, there was one, it 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 them. The Norfolk spider yes that was the spider with the human head of course and a clergy person confirmed this by saying I wish Miko 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. That was very good. Thank you.

So there were some illustrations too, including of the Norfolk spider and he looks more confused and scary. But a giant spider with a human head is just unsettling on all sorts of levels. Yeah, but we're focusing on Edward Mordake, I want to say R, and they're so bad. But Edward had a condition, a 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 of like an evil twin, the devil twin, that would whisper in his ear, such that Edward Mordek would eventually take his own life

at 23 years old, however, and of course none of this is true. Now, despite the fact that in this article, the wonders of science that was published in 1895 and the Boston Sunday post written by Charles Loughton Hilldrich, um, sites, the Royal Scientific Society that had reported on all of these different, um, people. Uh, it was totally made up. In fact, Charles Loughton Hilldrich was a science fiction writer. Yeah. Speculative fiction at the very least. Yeah, poet too. Yeah, and he had a really great imagination. And the paper he was working for the Boston Sunday post is Dave Rousse equates it with the national inquire today. Yeah. Maybe even the world

weekly news almost in this case. I still love the weekly world news. Yeah, I always say it backwards kind of like you want to say more Drake. What'd you say? World weekly news? Yeah. Same thing. So, um, Hildrith just basically sat down and let his imagination pour out. In new and article, cited the Royal Scientific Society, the Boston Sunday Post published it. Yeah. and it came out in the newspaper. A year later, Hildrith dies, but the story goes on. Hmm, shall we be right back? Yes.

Right after this. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. All right, like you said, the author of that original Sunday, what was it? Sunday post? Boston Sunday post. It came out on Friday. The paper of record is how they call it. He died in 1896,

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 medicine, and said it was, quote, derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature, and they included an entry on Edward Mordek, and what they did was basically the modern internet, because they copied word for word what Hildrith had written and pasted it into their own work as fact. Yeah. So what they copied and pasted that was in the original article was essentially this, that Edward Mordek was a very handsome young man. He had it all. He was a scholar. He was a musician.

And then he was very handsome, very graceful. He just had a big problem, and that was he had an evil twin 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 jibber without seizing. And the eyes of the face would follow you around the room if you were in its field of vision. And Edward just couldn't stand this thing. He asked the doctors to crush the second face, even if it meant 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 23. And he left the Royal Scientific Society, said, a note that said, when you bury me, destroy the face on the back of my head, lest it continues its dreadful whisperings in my grave. So this was the story of Edward Mordek that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that Hildruth originally wrote, that these American doctors published as, as fact in an actual book. So this is gone from being in a paper to now being in a book by doctors who claim that

it's from an exhaustive research of medical literature, which gives it a real veneer of reality. Yeah, absolutely. And we also failed 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, 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 diprosopus that is Greek for two-faced and fewer than 50 cases worldwide, I believe since 1864. Most of those were stillborn. It's very, very sad obviously, but very, very, rare. And also happens a lot in the animal kingdom, oh not a lot, but happens in the animal kingdom.

Yeah. You ever seen like a chicken with two faces, that's what that is. So, there was a baby girl born in India in 2008, 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 and 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 years before after her name was Minar Maged. She was born, I think, around the same time, if not a couple of years before, after her name was Minar Muggede. She was born in Egypt in 2005, so a couple of years before. She had a slightly different version of this called Cranio Pagus 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 the twin is considered parasitic. It doesn't have any organs 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 in the lifeblood and everything out of the surviving twin. So it's a really deadly situation. And yet, at least three people, including Minar Maged, have had their parasitic twin removed and had lived to tell the tale. 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 to sort of an upper torso. Yes. It can happen in various stages but various ways but it doesn't happen. Like you talk about rare, this one is listed as six out of every 10 million births. So super, super rare. And there are different times that Edward Mordek has been portrayed in pop

culture. Like there was a Tom Waitson called Poor Edward. If you follow the American Horror Story during the freak show season, there was a character named Mord Drake, the artist 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 head with the face on the back and as Edward Mordek, it is very compelling and realistic. But that is a fake, what's known as a gaff, which is joke art. And the artist was Edward Ebert. Ebert. Ebert. Ebert. Schindler. So the real reason that people believe it was at worked, e-worked, you worked, you worked, you worked, shinlar. 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. It was shared at least 260,000 times. So it went kind of viral, I guess you could say. And people were like, God, this 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. This is a good 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 re-evaluate things for a minute and see what you come up with. Short stuff is out? Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio.

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