Edward Mordrake: How a Man with a Demon on the Back of His Head Fooled the World

Imagine the silence. A deafening, heavy night silence of an old English mansion. You are lying in bed, closing your eyes and trying to fall asleep. But you can't. Because someone is whispering. Right into the back of your head. A quiet, hissing voice says things that make your blood run cold. And the scariest thing is that this voice belongs to you. More precisely, to the one who shares the same skull with you.

The curse of the perfect aristocrat

The legend of Edward Mordrake is perhaps one of the darkest and most attractive stories of the Victorian era. If you believe the old medical almanacs, Edward was the heir to a noble English family. Young. Diabolically intelligent. Musically gifted - they said that his violin playing made even hardened cynics cry.

But nature has a specific sense of humor. There was mockery behind the perfect facade.

Edward had a second face on the back of his head. A parasitic face. According to some descriptions, it belonged to a beautiful girl, according to others, it was an ugly, distorted likeness of Mordrake himself. It could not eat or speak aloud. But it reacted to emotions. When Edward cried in despair, the face on the back of his head smiled mockingly. When he was calm, the parasite's lips moved silently, emitting, as Edward himself said, "words from hell itself."

Unbearable neighborhood

Living with such a diagnosis today would be the subject of consultations with the best neurosurgeons on the planet. In the nineteenth century, it was a death sentence. Edward begged the doctors to cut the "demonic face" off his skull. He was ready to die on the operating table, if only to stop this endless nightly whisper.

Surgeons refused. The risk was one hundred percent. The anatomy of that time simply did not allow such delicate work with the skull and nerve endings.

"It never sleeps. It talks to me about things that can only be heard in the underworld. No imagination can imagine the horrors it whispers to me," Mordrake himself described his condition, according to records.

Isolating himself from society, refusing even to meet with relatives, Edward slowly went crazy. At the age of 23, he made the only decision available to him. He rented a room on the outskirts, left a note asking to destroy the "demon" before the funeral so that it would not continue to whisper in the grave, and drank poison. A finale worthy of Edgar Allan Poe.

Anatomy of a Grand Deception

Now let's exhale, pour some tea and turn on the light. The story is chilling, isn't it? But it has one small drawback.

Edward Mordrake never existed.

Yes. All this gothic horror, the tragedy of a young lord, tears to the accompaniment of a violin and demonic whispers - absolute fiction. And do you know who its author is? Charles Lotin Hildreth, a poet and science fiction writer. In the fall of 1895, he published an article in the Boston Post newspaper. The article was called "The Wonders of Modern Science" and described a number of "human anomalies" allegedly found in the archives of the Royal Scientific Society.

Among the fish-woman and the spider-man was our sad Lord Mordrake. Hildreth simply invented him from beginning to end to entertain the readers of the Sunday issue.

How science believed in the ghost

A logical question arises: if this is a newspaper hoax, why are people still talking about Mordrake? Why do his photos (in fact - wax figures created in the XX century) wander around the network with the caption "shock content"?

This is where it gets interesting. A year after Hildreth's publication, in 1896, two respected American doctors - George Gould and Walter Pyle - published the monumental work "Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine". It was an encyclopedia of all kinds of deviations. And they... copied Hildreth's article about Mordrake word for word. Without checking the facts. Without references to the original source. They just took a beautiful story and put it in a serious medical reference book.

Thus, fiction acquired the status of a scientific fact. The inertia of human trust in the printed word did its job.

Monsters We Carry Within

In fairness, a medical anomaly remotely resembling the case of Mordrake exists. It is called craniopagus parasiticus (parasitic craniopagi) or diprosopus. This is a very rare malformation in which elements of a second face are formed on the head. Real cases, such as the story of the Mexican Pasqual Piñón or a boy from Bengal, have been documented. But their "second faces" never whispered, cried, and certainly did not have their own demonic intelligence.

Why is the legend of Edward Mordrake so firmly entrenched in our culture? From comics to the American Horror Story series, this image pops up again and again.

It seems to me that it's about metaphor. Mordrake is not a medical phenomenon. It is a psychological mirror. We all carry a "second face" within us. Carl Jung called it the Shadow. The very inner voice that sometimes whispers our worst fears to us, fuels complexes, makes us doubt ourselves at three in the morning.

A voice that laughs when we fail. Imposter syndrome. Anxiety. Destructive thoughts. All this is our inner Mordrake.

Instead of an epilogue

The story of the two-faced lord is a perfect example of how much we need myths. We need physical embodiments of our inner demons in order to somehow comprehend them. Charles Hildreth came up with a horror story for bored newspaper readers, and created an archetype that outlived its creator by a century.

So the next time, when in the silence of the night your own thoughts begin to treacherously whisper nasty things to you, remember Edward. Smile. And just go to sleep. After all, unlike the Victorian lord, you can definitely shut up your inner demon.