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.
I knew that was coming.
Each of us has a Jerry on the back of our heads and we hate it so much.
Oh, I just punched the back of my head all day long. Yeah, and you know how end up hurting just me.
Yeah, it's true. She can move just in time.
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.
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 ruh and there is no Edward more Dake.
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.
Yeah.
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 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 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 where his feet were and feet were his hands were about.
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. 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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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, Charles Lawton Hildreth was a science writer, Yeah, speculative fiction at the very least.
Yeah, poet too, yeah, and measure.
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.
But 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 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.
Hmmm, shall we be right back, yes, all right? After this.
Stop you should know? Still stop you should I should know?
All right, like you said, uh, the author of that original Sunday what was it, Sunday.
Post, Boston Sunday Post.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 exhaustive research of medical literature, which gives it a real veneer of reality.
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, 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 reevaluate things for a minute and see what you come up with.
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