Edward Mordake

The English Heir With Two Faces—Or None At All

The story sounds made for a Victorian penny dreadful: an English nobleman born with a second, female face on the back of his head—a “devil twin” that sneered when he smiled, whispered to him at night, and finally drove him to suicide at twenty‑three. ^[1][2][3]

For more than a century, the name attached to that nightmare has been the same: Edward Mordake. ^[4][1][5]

His alleged case has been treated as medical curiosity, freak‑show legend, and horror inspiration. It’s been linked—often carelessly—to real, devastating conditions like craniopagus parasiticus and diprosopus. ^{[4][1][2][3][5]} It’s inspired wax figures, online “skull” photos, an opera, a season of American Horror Story, novels, and at least one reported film in development. ^[3][6][7]

But when modern investigators went looking for the man behind the myth, they ran into an emptiness that’s hard to mistake for mere poor record‑keeping.

According to a 2021 USA TODAY fact‑check, “Edward Mordake, an English noble with two faces,” is not a documented historical patient at all, but “a literary creation.” ^[2]

So where did this “case” come from—and why has it been so hard to kill?

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A Sensational Sunday in Boston, 1895

The earliest traceable Edward Mordake doesn’t appear in a hospital ledger, birth registry, or medical journal. He walks onto the public stage in a Sunday newspaper.

On December 8, 1895, the Boston Sunday Post ran a piece by Charles Lotin Hildreth titled “The Wonders of Modern Science.” ^[1][2] Hildreth’s article claimed to present a series of astonishing “human freaks” supposedly culled from reports of a mysterious “Royal Scientific Society.” ^[1][3]

Edward Mordake was one of those wonders. In Hildreth’s telling, Mordake was heir to “a noble English peerage” and cursed with a second face on the back of his head. ^[1][2] The extra face, the article claimed, could laugh and cry and make noises independent of Edward’s will. ^[2] It whispered to him, tormented him, and—after doctors refused his pleas to remove it—drove him to die by suicide at twenty‑three. ^[2]

It was lurid stuff, and it appeared alongside other supposed marvels like “The Fish Woman of Lincoln” and a man with four eyes—figures that no one has been able to locate in any earlier records. ^[2][3]

Hildreth, crucially, was not a physician or scientist. USA TODAY notes he was a speculative fiction writer and poet, and his short stories frequently appeared in newspapers, many now recognized as early science fiction. ^[2][3] The piece ran during the high tide of U.S. “yellow journalism,” when sensational copy was a business model, not a problem. ^[2]

That context matters, because the “Royal Scientific Society” Hildreth invoked as his source appears to have been pure invention. Later researchers, including USA TODAY, have found that the only real Royal Scientific Society they can document was founded in Jordan in 1970—decades after Mordake’s supposed lifetime. ^[1][2] No relevant reports matching Mordake’s description show up in the archives of Britain’s Royal Society of London either. ^[1][2]

Hildreth’s article was reprinted in at least two other U.S. papers within days, already spreading the tale beyond Boston. ^[3] Within a year, it would be laundered into something more enduring: a “medical” case.

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From Newspaper Curiosity to Medical “Case”

In October 1896, ophthalmologist George M. Gould and physician Walter L. Pyle published Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, a hefty compendium of rare medical oddities. ^[8][3]

Nestled in its pages is a now‑famous passage on Edward Mordake. Gould and Pyle describe an Englishman with “remarkable grace” and a face like Antinous—except for the presence of another visage, “that of a beautiful girl,” on the back of his head. ^[1][6]

This second face, they write, showed “every sign of intelligence, of a malignant sort,” and would “gibber without ceasing” when Mordake tried to sleep. ^[6] Mordake is said to have told his physicians that the “devil twin” whispered to him constantly and robbed him of rest. ^[6] According to the passage, he lived in seclusion, refused visits from family, ultimately obtained poison, and died—leaving behind a letter begging that the “demon face” be destroyed before burial and that he be interred without stone or legend. ^[6][5]

On its face, this looks like a classic 19th‑century teratology case. But Gould and Pyle quietly admit they did not examine Mordake themselves or draw from hospital files: they took the story from unspecified “lay sources.” ^[1][2][5]

Later, Alex Boese of the Museum of Hoaxes determined that those “lay sources” were not obscure medical men but Hildreth’s sensational Boston Sunday Post article. ^[2] Gould and Pyle had essentially copied the newspaper account, with a few flourishes, and placed it between hard covers. ^[2][6]

They also added veneer in the form of two doctors—“Manvers” and “Treadwell”—presented as Mordake’s physicians. ^[3] To generations of readers, the inclusion in a medical reference book, and the presence of named doctors, made Mordake feel real.

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Early Doubts: Phantom Doctors and a Missing Society

Skepticism, however, surfaced surprisingly early.

A 1905 (and later 1906) critique in The Theosophical Review went looking for Gould and Pyle’s supposed experts and reported that the names Manvers and Treadwell did not appear in the authoritative Dictionary of National Biography. ^[3][6][5]

Half a century later, in 1958, folklorist Paul Brewster appealed to readers of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences for any solid documentation that Mordake was a genuine teratological case. He received no replies. ^[3][6]

Modern fact‑checking has hammered the point home. USA TODAY’s 2021 investigation found no records to prove the doctors quoted in the original Boston Sunday Post piece ever existed. ^[2] It likewise confirmed that there are no matching reports in the archives of the Royal Society of London and that the only verifiable “Royal Scientific Society” dates from 1970 in Jordan, long after the events Hildreth described. ^[2]

Boese’s Museum of Hoaxes article, published in 2015, argues bluntly that Hildreth invented Edward Mordake and that Mordake never existed. ^[3] The piece notes that attempts to find any reference to Mordake predating Gould and Pyle’s book came up empty, until the trail finally led back to Hildreth’s 1895 newspaper fantasy—and no further. ^[3]

The same pattern holds for Hildreth’s other supposed “half‑human monsters,” such as the Fish Woman of Lincoln and the Norfolk Spider: no one has located earlier mentions outside his own article. ^[3][5]

By the early 21st century, the highest‑tier sources weighing in—a PubMed‑indexed editorial in Child’s Nervous System, professional hoax researchers, and mainstream fact‑checkers—were converging on the same conclusion: there is no solid primary evidence that Edward Mordake, heir to an English peerage with a parasitic female face, ever lived. ^[2][3][6][2]

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Strange‑But‑True Afterlife

If Mordake began as fiction, he proved tenacious.

Writers in the “strange but true” genre folded him into their repertoires as if he were historical fact. Frank Edwards’s Strange People (1961) and the 1977 edition of The People’s Almanac Presents the Book of Lists both repeated the core legend, including the suicide at age twenty‑three and the dying wish that the “devil twin” be removed. ^[3][6]

Medchrome, a 2021 online medical article, likewise presents “Two Faced Edward Mordrake” as a purported 19th‑century Englishman, though it tags the story under “Supernatural” and admits the absence of real photographs, proper historical recording, and the proliferation of conflicting versions make it hard to tell myth from truth. ^[4] The article notes that scientific literature mentions Mordake “more like a tale,” even as it entertains the possibility that earlier similar cases might point to a factual core. ^[4]

TheHumanMarvels.com, a site devoted to historical “human marvels,” describes Mordake as said to be heir to one of the noblest families in England, a bright and charming scholar and musician who lived isolated from others—including his own family—because of the “twisted and evil” second face on his skull. ^[7] It recounts versions where the extra face is a beautiful woman, where it speaks with its own malign intelligence, and where Mordake begs doctors to remove the “demon head” before taking his own life at twenty‑three. ^[7] That same site, however, concedes that many parts of the legend do not make medical sense and that the tale has often been considered false. ^[7] It notes that “the true tale of Edward Mordrake has been lost to history” with no solid birth or death dates evident to modern researchers. ^[7]

In popular culture, the legend has proved irresistible. Composer Erling Wold wrote an opera titled Mordake; the Child’s Nervous System editorial notes Mordake as its subject. ^[3][6] The FX series American Horror Story: Freak Show, set among carnival performers with congenital anomalies in 1952 Florida, features Edward Mordrake as a spectral character in several episodes, explicitly drawing on the Gould and Pyle version. ^[3][6]

There are also derivative works: a 2001 Spanish novel Mordake o la condición infame by Irene Gracia; a Russian‑language book The Two‑faced Outcast published in 2017; a 2016 short film called Edward the Damned; and a U.S. feature film titled Edward Mordrake reported to be in development. ^[7]

The fictional patient, in other words, has enjoyed the kind of cultural afterlife many real patients never do.

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What Medicine Actually Knows About Two Faces

Part of what keeps Mordake on the page is that, stripped of the demon‑whispering and aristocratic pathos, his deformity doesn’t sound wholly impossible.

Modern medicine recognizes a handful of extremely rare conditions that could, in a very broad sense, resemble “two faces on one head.”

Craniopagus parasiticus involves conjoined twins joined at the skull, where a rudimentary or parasitic head is attached to the head of the more developed twin. ^[4][6] Cases are vanishingly rare and survival chances are slim. ^[4] Historically, a famed example is the “two‑headed boy of Bengal,” born in 1783, who had a reasonably well‑developed second head attached atop his own. ^[4][6]

Diprosopus, or craniofacial duplication, is a different defect in which facial features are duplicated to varying degrees on a single head and neck—ranging from partial duplication of the nose or eyes to, in rare cases, two nearly full faces. ^[1][4][5] Since the mid‑19th century, just under 50 instances have been documented, and the condition has a poor survival rate; many infants are stillborn. ^[5]

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia estimates that conjoined twins occur in roughly one in 50,000–60,000 births, most of them stillborn or unable to survive outside the womb, with only about 2% joined at the head. ^[2]

There are modern, well‑documented people whose conditions echo bits of the Mordake legend. TheHumanMarvels and Medchrome both point to Chang Tzu Ping, a man in China whose second partial face—containing a mouth with several teeth, a malformed tongue, and other vestigial features—moved in tandem with his primary mouth and was surgically removed in an operation documented on the 1980s TV program That’s Incredible. ^[4][7]

Medchrome also cites an episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not about a man with two mouths whose scans showed an underdeveloped parasitic twin with partial brain tissue, successfully operated on, and the case of Egyptian infant Manar Maged, born with craniopagus parasiticus, who survived a separation procedure but died two years later from a central nervous system infection. ^[4]

When medical writers discuss Mordake today, they usually do so to contrast his legend with these real conditions. The 2015 Child’s Nervous System editorial, titled “An apocryphal case of craniopagus parasiticus: the legend of Edward Mordake,” explicitly labels the Mordake description apocryphal even as it uses it to introduce genuine craniopagus parasiticus cases. ^[6][9]

From a strictly anatomical standpoint, several details in the legend don’t track. Medchrome and TheHumanMarvels point out that in craniopagus parasiticus, the attached parasitic twin is always the same sex as the developed twin; the oft‑repeated claim that Mordake’s extra face was that of a beautiful woman is therefore medically implausible for that diagnosis. ^[4][7][3]

Snopes, in its own analysis, notes that diprosopus tends to produce mirrored facial movements, whereas the Boston Sunday Post description hinges on the second face doing the opposite—smiling when Mordake wept, sneering when he was happy. ^[1][2]

It’s not impossible that a 19th‑century patient with some form of craniofacial duplication suffered deeply, or even died by suicide. What the record does suggest is that—and this is key—no such patient named Edward Mordake, heir to an English peerage, with a whispering female face and a documented family line, has ever been found. ^[2][3]

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Wax, Papier‑Mâché, and a Skull That Never Existed

In an era where a photograph can feel more authoritative than an archival letter, images have been central to Mordake’s staying power—and to modern confusion.

For years, a haunting “photograph” of a man with a second face on the back of his head has circulated online with captions identifying him as Edward Mordake. ^[3] A widely shared skull image, complete with a second fused cranium, has been passed around as a medical specimen from Mordake’s grave. ^[2]

Investigators have traced most of these back not to morgues or museums, but to artists.

USA TODAY’s 2021 fact‑check determined that the skull circulating on Facebook and elsewhere was a sculpture created by artist Tom Kuebler, who posted similar two‑faced skulls to Instagram with the hashtag #edwardmordrake. ^[2] Before Kuebler’s work, some users claimed a papier‑mâché skull by artist Ewart Schindler—posted on DeviantArt in 2015—was Mordake’s; it too is modern art, not human remains. ^[2]

Wax museums have also contributed to the illusion of physical evidence. TheHumanMarvels and Medchrome both note that the most commonly shared “image” of Edward is likely a wax interpretation created long after his supposed death, rather than a contemporary likeness. ^[4][7] The Museum of Hoaxes article identifies one such wax figure as coming from the Panoptikum museum in Hamburg, Germany. ^[3]

These works aren’t frauds in themselves; many are openly labeled as artistic interpretations. The problem is what happens once an image is stripped of its caption and fed into the social media churn.

By the time a sculpture or waxwork reaches a “creepy facts” feed, it’s often presented as a documentary photograph. The existence of a picture then loops back into new retellings of the case as if it were evidence that Edward Mordake lived and died under an impossible curse.

USA TODAY’s verdict on the skull images is blunt: photos claiming to show Mordake’s skull are works of art, not real human remains. ^[2]

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So—Did Edward Mordake Ever Exist?

Across 130 years, the story of Edward Mordake has accreted like a pearl around a grain of fiction. Early newspaper sensationalism was dignified by a medical textbook, adopted uncritically by mid‑century “freak” anthologies, and then amplified by the internet’s appetite for the grotesque and supposedly true. ^[1][3][5]

Some sources still hedge. Medchrome talks about “myth or truth” and points out that similar real cases make it theoretically possible that a man like Mordake once lived, even if the legend’s specifics are embellished. ^[4] TheHumanMarvels suggests the “true tale” has simply been lost to history. ^[7]

But the higher‑tier evidence is stark:

• The origin of the Mordake narrative is a single 1895 Boston Sunday Post article by a known speculative fiction writer, published amid other unverifiable “wonders” and attributed to a “Royal Scientific Society” that, in the form described, did not exist. ^[1][2][3]
• Gould and Pyle’s 1896 “medical” account is effectively a reprint of that newspaper story, fronted with unnamed “lay sources” and fictional‑seeming doctors whose names cannot be corroborated in professional biographical records. ^{[1][2][3][6][5]}
• A century of searching has turned up no hospital case notes, burial records, peerage documents, or contemporary medical discussions that would be expected if the tormented heir of an English noble family with such a profound anomaly had actually existed. ^[2][3][6][3]

Boese’s Museum of Hoaxes piece concludes that Edward Mordake was the literary creation of Charles Lotin Hildreth. ^[3] USA TODAY’s 2021 fact‑check reaches the same bottom line, calling Mordake “a literary creation” and rating claims about his skull as false. ^[2]

The Child’s Nervous System editorial treats him explicitly as “apocryphal.” ^[2][6][9] Snopes frames his story as an urban legend. ^[1][5]

In that light, the most ethically sound way to treat Mordake today is as what he almost certainly is: a 19th‑century horror vignette that mutated into faux medical history, built on and around the real suffering of people with rare congenital conditions—but not, as far as the evidence shows, on a real Edward.

The tragedy, then, isn’t the fate of a particular English heir with two faces. It’s how swiftly a few hundred words of Victorian fabrication slipped into the medical imagination, blurred the line between fact and spectacle, and still shape the way we think about the bodies of real people more than a century later.