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Short Stuff: Edward Mordake · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: and on the back of each of our heads is
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: a little devilish fiend named Jerry.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: I knew that was coming.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Each of us has a Jerry on the back of
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: our heads and we hate it so much.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: Oh, I just punched the back of my head all
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: day long. Yeah, and you know how end up hurting
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: just me.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's true. She can move just in time.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Big thanks to Dave Rus. But this is from the
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: house stuffworks dot com. Side sure, and we're talking about Edward,
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: not more Drake. It's more Dake. I thought it was
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: more Drake until twenty five seconds ago before we recorded.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: I'm glad we sorted that out, by the way.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: I look this over and over and over, and I
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: said more Drake in my brain every time. But there
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: is no ruh and there is no Edward more Dake.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: Oh okay, sure, no, I think that's fair. He does
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: exist in some way, shape or form m hm, at
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: least on paper, specifically a paper called the Boston Sunday Post.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: There is an article in eighteen ninety five that was
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: published in The Sunday Post that was written by an
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: author named Charles Lowton Hildreth, great name, super nineteenth century name. Yeah,
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: And the article was about, essentially, what's the word I'm
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: looking for?
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Chuck a gentleman suffering from a rare defect.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Not just him, a bunch of different ones. So the
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: headline was the Wonders of Modern Science. The subhead was
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: some half human monsters once thought to be of the
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: Devil's brood.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: And so in this article there were a number of
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: different poor people who were half crab half person. One
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: guy who had hands where his feet were and feet
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: were his hands were about.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: How about the melon child of Radnor, whose head looked
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: like a right melon and had a small vertical slit
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: for a mouth.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there was one. There was a vicious creature that
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: was half man, half crab, with monstrous nippers and big
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: claws below the elbow. The Norfolk spider is particularly creepy.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: You want to tell them about him?
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: Uh? The Norfolk spotter. Yes, that was the spider with
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: the human head, of course, and a clergy person confirmed
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: this by saying, I wish s. Migel was around to
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: read this, but I will I saw this monstrous thing myself.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: Otherwise it would not have credited so awful a manifestation
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: of the creator's wrath.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: That was very good, thank you. So there were some
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: illustrations too, including of the Norfolk spider, and he looked
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: more confused than scary. But a giant spider with the
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: human head is just unsettling on all sorts of levels.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but we're focusing on Edward more Dake. I want
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: to say, are in there so bad? But Edward had
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: a condition congenital defect, wherein he had a shrunken second
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: face on the back of his head, which is why
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: you joked about Jerry being on the back of our head.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: And this face would actually speak, and it was sort
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: of like an evil twin. They called it the devil
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: twin that would whisper in his ear, such that Edward
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: Moore Dake would eventually take his own life at twenty
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: three years old. However, and of course none of this
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: is true.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: No, despite the fact that in this article The Wonders
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: of Science, that was published in eighteen ninety five in
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: the Boston Sunday Post, written by Charles Lawton Hildreth sites
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: the Royal Scientific Society that had reported on all of
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: these different people, it was totally made up. In fact,
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Charles Lawton Hildreth was a science writer, Yeah, speculative fiction
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: at the very least.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, poet too, yeah, and measure.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: He had a really great imagination. And the paper he
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: was working for, the Boston Sunday Post is Dave Rush
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: equates it with the National Inquirer today. Yeah, maybe even
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: the World Weekly News almost in this case.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: But I still love the weekly World News.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I always say it backwards, kind of like you
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: want to say more, Drake.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: What'd you say, World Weekly News? Yeah, same thing.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: So Hildreth just basically sat down and let his imagination
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: pour out into an article cited the Royal Scientific Society.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: The Boston Sunday Post published it, and it came out
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: in a newspaper. A year later. Hildreth dies, but the
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: story goes on.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: Hmmm, shall we be right back, yes, all right? After this.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Stop you should know? Still stop you should I should know?
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: All right, like you said, uh, the author of that
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: original Sunday what was it, Sunday.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Post, Boston Sunday Post.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: It on Fridays, the paper of Record is how they
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: called it. He died in eighteen ninety six, and this
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: was a year after he wrote that story. But in
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: that same year there were a couple of doctors who
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: published a legitimate book called The Anomalies and Curiosities of
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: Medicine and said it was quote derived from an exhausted
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: research of medical literature, and they included an entry on
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: Edward Moore Dake. And what they did was basically the
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: modern Internet, because they copied word for word what Hildreth
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: had written and pasted it into their own work as fact.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so what they copied and pasted that was in
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: the original article was essentially this that Edward Moredake was
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: a very handsome young man. He had it all. He
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: was a scholar, he was amusing and then yeah, yeah, right,
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: he was very handsome, very graceful. He just had a
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: big problem, and that was he had an evil twin
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: face on the back of his head that said all
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: sorts of terrible stuff to him. No one else could
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: hear what it was saying except Edward. But you could
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: watch its lips gibber without seizing, and the eyes of
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: the face would follow you around the room if you
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: were in its in its field of vision. And Edward
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: just couldn't stand this thing. He asked the doctors to
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: crush the second face, even if it meant he was
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: he was going to die as a result. He didn't
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: care at that point so much. So, like you said,
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: he took his life by drinking poison at age twenty three,
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: and he left the Royal Scientific Society said a note
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: that said, when you bury me, destroy the face on
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: the back of my head, lest it continues its dreadful
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: whisperings in my grave. So this was the story of
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Edward Mordeck that Hildreth originally wrote that these American doctors
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: published as fact in an actual book. So this has
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: gone from being in a paper and now being in
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: a book by doctors who claimed that it's from an
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: exhaustive research of medical literature, which gives it a real
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: veneer of reality.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, And we also fail to mention that the
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: devil twin was a girl. Oh yeah, a beautiful girl,
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil, but exhibited
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: every sign of intelligence of a malignant sort. However, it
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: sounds like one of our Halloween stories. Yeah, like fully,
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: but like you said, none of it was true. However,
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: this is a this is a thing that sort of
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: can happen and one of the reasons why people believed
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: it for a long long time is that there are
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: some very very rare congenital defects where you can have
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: a face on your head like two faces. One's called
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: craniofacial duplication or die pro diprosopis, that is Greek for
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: two faced, and fewer than fifty cases worldwide, I believe
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: since eighteen sixty four. Most of those were stillborn. It's
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: very very sad, obviously, but very very rare, and also
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: happens a lot in the animal kingdom. Well, not a lot,
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: but happens in the animal kingdom.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: You ever seen like a chicken with two faces? That's
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: what that is.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: So there was a baby girl born in India in
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, I remember, and she had two
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: faces and was actually worshiped as a reincarnation of the
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: Hindu goddess Durga, who was a divine feminine energy who
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: was very good by the way, because she defeated a
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: demonic army of evil. But she had three eyes in
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: multiple arms. And the little girl, I think, reportedly died
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: at two months. I remember that, don't you. Sort of
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: it was a big deal. Yeah, there was another girl
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: who was born I think around the same time, if
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: not a couple of years before after. Her name was
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Manar Maged. She was born in Egypt in two thousand
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: and five, so a couple of years before. She had
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: a slightly different version of this called craniopagos parasiticus. And
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: this is not where you have like an extra face
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: on your face. You have an entirely conjoined twin attached
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: to the back of your head. The problem is that
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: the twin is considered parasitic. It doesn't have any organs
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: of its own, it doesn't have a brain, It just
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: has like the body. But the stuff that's inside the
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: parasitic twin is actually sucking the nutrients and the life
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: blood and everything out of the surviving twin. So it's
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: a really deadly situation. And yet at least three people,
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: including Minarmaged, have had their parasitic twin removed and have
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: lived to tell the tale.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of times there are no limbs like
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: I've seen sort of like a full head attached to
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: a head with what looks like just sort of an
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: upper Torso, yes, it can happen in various stages but
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: or various ways. But it doesn't happen like you talk
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: about rare or this one is listed as six out
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: of every ten million births, so super super rare. And
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: there are different times that Edward more Dake has been
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: portrayed in pop culture, like there was a Tom Waite
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: song called Poor Edward. If you followed American horror story
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: during the Freak Show season, there was a character named
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: Moore Drake the RTS finally in there that was based
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: on him, obviously, but if you've ever googled that and
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: just heard about the story and then seen a mummified
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: head with the face on the back and as Edward
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: Moore Dake, it is very compelling and realistic. But that
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: is a fake. It's what's known as a gaff, which
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: is joke art. And the artist was edwarked Ewert, you WERET.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: You weret Schindler.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: So the real reason that people believe it was a
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: thing is in part because of the photos, but more
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: to the point, because those photos were shared along with
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: the story as if it were real on Facebook. That's
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: why people believed it shared at least two hundred and
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: sixty thousand times, so it went kind of viral. I
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: guess you could say yeah, and people were like this
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: poor guy, this is awful, and nobody stopped to think, like,
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: is this real? Did this guy really have a face
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: that would torment him and say evil things that only
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: he could hear, Like this doesn't make any sense, and
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: that's an actual big problem today.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: This is a good.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Example of that. Yeah, yeah, So I guess if you
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: believe in clones and shape shifters and people making clouds
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: on TikTok, I think you should stop and reevaluate things
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: for a minute and see what you come up with.
• 12:37
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• 12:42
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• 12:49
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