Featured Image Credit: All That's Interesting
Topics: Social Media, Viral, Twitter
Gerrard Kaonga
The tragic story of a man with a facial disfigurement has resurfaced online, leaving many devastated after learning what happened to him.
Urban myths and legends aren’t quite as prevalent as they used to be.
The main reason being, well, the internet. Fact checkers, online sleuths and Wikipedia fanatics normally lie in wait to debunk most of the stories you were told as a kid.
But a viral post shared on social media has many realizing that the legend of the man with no face was very much a real person.
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The legend of ‘Charlie No-Face' or ‘The Green Man’ may have been a story you had heard growing up in Pennsylvania and at this point, there are likely a multitude of different versions that are still floating around the interwebs.
But the actual story of the man named Raymond Theodore Robinson is quite upsetting.
Some of the myths would allege that he was a ghost or ghoul that walked alongside highways and had a glowing green head and a face with no features due to the fact they had melted away in some accident during his childhood.
In a great example of you shouldn’t believe everything you hear, the facts differ from the story.
Robinson was born in 1910 and was a resident of Koppel, a small borough in Beaver Country, Pennsylvania.
At the age of eight, during a walk with his sister and some friends, they approached a bird’s nest in a tree next to Morado Bridge, an abandoned bridge outside Beaver Falls.
Curious to get a closer look, Robinson climbed up the tree but during his ascent, he touched a live wire that was used to provide power to the trolley on the bridge.
The electric shock he suffered severely disfigured his facial features, with his nose, lips and eyes being affected.
In a surprising turn of events, Robinson survived the incident but understandably grew up concerned about his appearance.
Sadly, the cruel nickname of 'Charlie-No-Face' was given to him due to his facial disfigurements, while the ‘Green Man’ nickname arose because his face appeared to glow following the electric shock.
Out of fear of people’s reactions, he retreated from normal life but would get outside at night and walk between the quiet stretch of highway between Koppel and New Galilee.
While he looked considerably different to everyone else around him, Robinson was said to have been a ‘beautiful and kind man’.
As he aged, Robinson stopped taking nighttime strolls and he retired to the Beaver County Geriatric Center where he died in 1985 at the age of 74.