Edward Mordrake: Man with two faces!
Fidhat Fayaz Drangay
Have you ever seen a human being with some physical deformity? Some defects appear because of genetic factors and by a variety of environmental injuries such as infection, radiation and drug exposure during pregnancy. The majority of birth defects, however, are without known detectable cause.
“One of the weirdest as well as most melancholy stories of human deformity is that of Edward Mordake. On Dec. 8, 1895, the Boston Sunday Post published an article titled “The Wonders of Modern Science” that presented astonished readers with reports from the so-called “Royal Scientific Society” As the Post reported, Edward Mordrake was a young, intelligent, and good-looking English nobleman, as well as a “musician of rare ability.”
But with all of his great blessings came a terrible curse. In addition to his handsome, normal face, Mordrake possessed a terrifying disfigurement: another face on the back of his head. This horrifying second face was that of a “beautiful girl” — “lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil.” The strange visage possessed an intelligence “of a malignant sort.” Whenever Mordrake cried, the second face would “smile and sneer.”
The eyes would follow the movements of the spectator, and the lips would ‘gibber without ceasing.’ No voice was audible, but Mordake avers that he was kept from his rest at night by the hateful whispers of his ‘devil twin,’ as he called it, ‘which never sleeps, but talks to me forever of such things as they only speak of in hell.
No imagination can conceive the dreadful temptations it sets before me. I beg and beseech you to crush it out of human semblance, even if I die for it.’ were words he often used to say to his physicians… In spite of careful watching he managed to procure poison, whereof he died, leaving a letter requesting that the ‘demon face’ might be destroyed before his burial, ‘lest it continues its dreadful whisperings in my grave.’ At his own request he was interred in a waste place, without stone or legend to mark his grave.”
Investigating the truth behind the “Man with two faces”
As Alex Boese’s blog Museum of Hoaxes diligently deduced in 2015, the author of the original Post article, Charles Lotin Hildreth, was a poet and science-fiction writer. His stories tended toward the fantastical and other-worldly. For one, Hildreth’s article cites the “Royal Scientific Society” as its source for its numerous bizarre medical cases, but an organization by that name didn’t exist in the 19th century. Hildreth’s article appears to be the first time any of the medical cases he describes have ever appeared in any literature, scientific or otherwise. Boese wrote, “that’s when it becomes apparent that Hildreth’s article was fiction. All of it sprang from his imagination, including Edward Mordake.”
Of course, even the most fantastic stories do contain at least a small grain of truth. The story has staying power, in part because of how disturbing it is, and in part, because it is in some ways plausible. Occasionally, an animal will be born with an extra face, although those rarely live long.
Sometimes that’s a result of “craniofacial duplication,” and sometimes it’s a form of conjoined twinning. There was even a man, Chang Tzu Ping, who lived at least to adulthood with an extra mouth and other facial features. In India Lali Singh was born with the condition back in 2008, residents of her tiny village believed her to be an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga, who is traditionally portrayed with multiple limbs. After the poor baby Lali died when she was only a few months old, the villagers constructed a temple in her honor.
The enduring tale in modern times
Modrake was subject of many songs, plays, and movies….Edward Mordrake’s story experienced a recent resurgence in popularity, thanks in part to the TV series American Horror Story. The modrake was played by Wes Bently. The show rehashes the basics of the urban legend, although the television incarnation of Mordrake is driven to murder rather than suicide by his evil second face.in 2018 a photo supposedly depicting the remains of Mordrake’s head went viral, however like other photos it was far from being authentic. In picture the gruesome Janus-like skull is, in fact, just a papier-maché artist’s imagining of what Edward Mordrake might have looked like.
(The writer is a student and is presently pursuing MBBS at Community Based Medical College, Bangladesh)
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