In the Salt Lake Daily Tribune, December 16, 1888, there was an eerie note about the birth of a child somewhere in the Pennsylvania mountains with a frightening appearance and horns like the Devil. The article was written by a seminary student from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
“To the northwest of our city, on the border of Cumberland and Franklin, lies a mountain range. In its valleys lives a population almost untouched by civilization with incredible denseness and ignorance.
In one of the local small villages, a child was born two weeks ago and he was so ugly that he instilled fear in the hearts of all residents. Rumors of his incredible ugliness quickly spread throughout the area.
Those few who managed to find the courage and visit the child's parents and look at him, despite all superstitions, were able to describe his appearance. They say that the child is the fruit of a white father and a black mother, and that it is covered from head to toe with dark short hair. And on his head, natural short horns grow on the sides.
The baby has a long tail at the back, and its legs end in what look like forked goat hooves. Everyone who saw this child called him the natural incarnation of the Devil.
There are several stories about the incidents accompanying the birth of this monster. According to one of them, the child's father entered into an angry religious dispute with his wife. He tried to convince the woman of something, but she still did not agree with him. In the end, the woman stated in emotion that she would never do what he wanted and would instead agree to always see the Devil next to her.
Soon after this statement, the woman began to have contractions and the very Devil was born in the flesh. At the sight of the child, his father in horror wanted to kill his own child and enlisted the support of several neighbors. He wanted to cut open the child's veins so that he would bleed out.
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But as soon as the father approached the child with a knife in his hand, the child rose into the air above the bed, flew around the room and, returning to his father, addressed him in a terrible angry language. It stated that the man would face punishment if he tried to kill him, and then said that he would live for seven days and then die on his own.
And so it happened. The child died a week after this incident."
There is another story about the same Devil from Pennsylvania. Perhaps there were other tales about this incident, but after more than a hundred years they have long been forgotten.
“It was after the end of the Civil War. The young Quaker left his native Philadelphia and decided to seek his fortune in Pennsylvania. After several years of searching, he bought a piece of land in Cook Township, and then took a job at a metallurgical plant.
He had a good job and the land was abundant in fish and fruit. But then he met a woman who was not a believer, but he fell in love with her and despite many disagreements, he married her. Soon the woman became pregnant, but when there was nothing left before the birth, strange outbursts of anger and severe abdominal pains began to torment the woman.
The doctor visited the pregnant woman, but could not find the cause of her ailments, and then the Quaker himself had a nightmare. In this dream, the Devil came straight to his house while he was at work. After this dream, the Quaker became convinced that his wife was possessed by a demon and that he must cleanse her of this evil.
For ten days in a row, the Quaker knelt by his wife's bed and prayed fervently to God … much to the chagrin of his wife herself. Soon the woman was disgusted with his actions and she grabbed a small wooden cross that was lying on the bed and threw it out the window. And then she declared that God does not exist, and the Devil is only a product of stupidity.
On the same night, the Quaker's wife began contractions and the woman screamed in agony all night and all morning until the baby was born. A called midwife helped his wife, and when the child began to leave the birth canal, she immediately realized that his appearance was different from that of normal babies.
The male newborn looked more like an animal than a person. He was alive and breathing, but he did not scream or make any sounds at all. He was gray in color and his skin looked more like scales than human skin.
It had a long tail and small thick horns, as well as pointed ears. On the hands were claws instead of nails, and on the legs were hooves. It also gave off a hideous stench. It was the real incarnation of Mephistopheles."
The second story is silent about what happened next with the child-Devil.
