By Dustin Waters
C.A. Bell of the Boston Museum departed just after supper on the evening of Sunday, April 22, 1888. Bell was headed west to Cleveland in hopes of getting his hands on a new attraction to feature in the museum. Not even a month had passed since talk of this much sought-after specimen began to spread across Ohio. Bell intended to capitalize on all the fervor. But first he’d have to see if the rumors were true — who, or what, was the “Devil Child” of Cleveland?
The first reports of a demonic newborn appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on March 30, 1888. The story went that a poor Polish couple in Newberg, a manufacturing suburb southeast of Cleveland, had experienced a sort of infernal delivery. The mother had not exhibited the normal signs of motherhood until late in the pregnancy and suffered great pains during delivery. She spoke in mostly garbled nonsense in between contractions. In a seeming moment of clarity, the mother asked her attending nurse for a glass of water. Upon returning to the birthing bed, the nurse was grabbed by the mother, who pleaded, “I’m afraid. Don’t leave me. Hold me.”
“Then the child — or whatever you may call it — was born. It was awful,” the nurse later told a reporter. “I supposed the child was dead. It seemed to be only a ball of flesh. But when the umbilical cord was severed, there was a flash of blue flame, a strong smell of brimstone, and when the thing touched the bed, it uncoiled.”
The child soon rushed to the breast of its mother. The doctor who handled the delivery demanded that the parents kill the child at once. When they failed to act, the child is said to have crawled to the edge of the bed, dangled its cloven hooves over the edge, and quipped, “Well, I guess not.”
Once word of the devil child spread beyond the suburbs, the Plain Dealer sent along a reporter and an artist to capture the story. Huddled in the darkness of the small family home with notebook in hand, the artist studied the child closely.
Its sparkling eyes fixed on the artist. Their color shifted hues from green to red, but always maintained the same look of hate.
According to this original account, “Never before was the like gleam in infant’s eye; one could almost swear this being was as old as the earth itself and that all the hate, bigotry, and cruelty of the ages were heaped together and imprisoned in those two aweful eyes. The thought at once struck the artist that if the eyes were the windows of the soul, the spiritual part of the child must be too debased for human conception.”
Beyond the callous eyes were ridges of flesh that overlapped on its brow. A small set of tusks slipped through its moist, clammy lips. Some eyewitnesses claimed the creature had a set of bat-like wings. Others say a pointed tail that extended from its spine. But everyone agreed on one particular feature: a pair of fully-formed horns jutting from the child’s skull.
“I never would have believed it had I not actually seen it,” the reporter said as he and the artist raced away from the home.
“It is indeed wonderful,” the artist replied.
“If you could go again and sketch the thing in colors,” the reporter began to suggest before his comments were cut short by the artist.
“All the wealth in Cleveland could not tempt me to undertake the task,” he answered.
As with all close communities and demonic births, rumors began to swirl as to why such an unexceptional couple might be host to a devil child. The nurse who attended to the mother during childbirth told reporters that she believed the mother was possessed of a devil that had entered the child.
“If the evil spirit could be cast out of the mother before she gave birth to the child, I think all would have been as it should be,” the nurse said before dropping any illusions of humility or humbleness on the matter of devils. “You laugh, but you don’t understand as much about evil spirits as I do.”
One persistent rumor related to the grim birth detailed an afternoon stroll that the devil kid’s mother took during her pregnancy. Happening upon a salesman whose wares included illustrations of all the greater saints and holy persons of Christendom, the mother is said to have responded, “No, I want no saints.”
She allegedly followed this up by declaring, “I would rather have the devil in my house than St. Joseph.”
One commonality among all the explanations for why such a couple would sire a demon child is that fault lies solely with the mother. According to some, the father was a very religious man who had the misfortune of marrying “an infidel.” During the pregnancy, the couple is said to have engaged in a heated argument over religion. In her anger, the mother tore the holy pictures from the walls of their home. Many in the community saw the child’s deformities as punishment from God.
Regardless of whichever explanation for the devil child’s origin a person latched onto, the story was incredibly popular. The edition of the Plain Dealer containing the description of the devil child was met with unprecedented sales. Those enterprising enough to purchase multiple copies were selling them for nearly ten times the paper’s original price. People from all over Ohio began to plan their trips to Newberg to see this evil newborn. In Elyria, Ohio, the story of the devil child was treated seriously by one local church leader, who cited the infernal birth as an example of “divine visitation upon a blasphemous mother.”
As is usually the case with stories such as these, the mother typically gets the blame. In response to the wild success of the tale of the devil child, a Cleveland physician is said to have contacted a reporter to share the story of his most prized specimen — a perfectly preserved body of a male child with a rat’s head and tail.
After the doctor delivered the child, he haggled with the parents over possession of the infant’s body in the event of his death. Within two weeks, the child’s body became the property of the physician, who recounted a specific incident as the cause for the child’s deformity.
Leading up to the child’s birth, the mother was working in the kitchen when a large wharf rat ran across the floor. As the woman attempted to flee the room in fear, she stepped on the rat, crushing it. This was enough to cause her to faint right away.
When the woman finally came to, she opened her eyes and was met with the crushed body of the rat, blood pouring from its eyes, nose, and ears. The mother attributed her accidental murder of this innocent creature as the cause for the deformities of her child.
In the months following the first report of the devil child, an enterprising business man by the name of J.J. De Vaux began touring Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania with what he claimed to be the body of the once-living demonic offspring. Admission was 10 cents.
As the exhibit made the rounds, newspapers familiar with the origin of the devil child story began to claim that the entire tale was a work of fiction and the exhibit was a swindle.
On Aug. 18, 1888, the Marion Star of Marion, Ohio, wrote, “The Star has no wish to interfere with anybody’s mode of making an honest living, but gulling the innocents as the proprietors of the devil kid exhibition are doing is not honest and we feel like saying so.”
The Star’s editor went on to liken the devil kid exhibit to a “county-fair-fraud mermaid… and the job of manufacturing doesn’t reflect any credit upon the skill of the workman who did it.”
After the devil child exhibit finished a weeklong stint in Kansas City in December 1888, the Kansas City Star called the show a complete fraud. According to the report, the “embalmed child” was actually made out of paper mache, the handiwork of a Detriot man who crafts orders for “dead Aztecs, Egyptian mummies, cave dwellers, and devil children.”
By this point, the devil child exhibit had moved out west of the Mississippi, but its effects were still being felt in Ohio. Even though almost a year had passed since claims of an evil infant were first reported, residents of Newberg were still plagued by fanatics calling for blood. As the initial story was translated into other languages, portions of local immigrant communities were thrown into a panic. A mob crowded around the home of Fred Gillman, who was suspected of housing a demonic infant. They wanted a child sacrifice. For the next several days, three police officers were stationed around the Gillman home in order to protect the family from any new witch hunts.
Even near the turn of the century, stories such as these were nothing new. The legend of “changelings” dates back centuries. Originally, the claim was that fairies would snatch a newborn human child and replace it with one of their own. Under the lens of Christianity, fairy cradle-robbers were replaced by demonic possession. The common thread is that these legends all served a single purpose: providing an explanation for parents as to why their child was not like the others.
“We all want explanations for happenings that fall outside of our control, especially those that have a direct bearing on our welfare. It is only natural that our forebears wanted to know why some children fail to develop normally, and what our responsibilities are toward these handicapped individuals,” writes folklorist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh D.L. Ashliman. “These accounts — which, unlike most fantasy tales, were actually widely believed — suggest that a physically or mentally abnormal child is very likely not the human parents’ offspring at all, but rather a changeling — a creature begotten by some supernatural being and then secretly exchanged for the rightful child.”
One positive aspect of the changeling myth is that it guaranteed new mothers with respite from their usual chores as they recovered from childbirth. Some versions of the legend insisted that mothers keep constant watch over their newborns for the first six weeks after they are born, as this is the period when fairies or some other supernatural entities are most likely to take the child. Unfortunately, this is one of the few upsides of adhering to such superstitions.
In many cases, the changeling myth was used as justification to abuse and neglect children with undiagnosed or misunderstood conditions. In some cases, even murder was the prescribed solution. According to Ashliman, Protestant reformer Martin Luther believed that “Satan was responsible for the malformed children known as changelings, and that such satanic child exchanges occurred frequently. In Luther’s theological view, a changeling was a child of the devil without a human soul, ‘only a piece of flesh.’ This view made it easy to justify almost any abuse of an unfortunate child thought to be a changeling, including the ultimate mistreatment: infanticide. Luther himself had no reservations about putting such children to death.”
Almost a decade after the story of the devil child of Cleveland first hit newsstands, locals continued to keep the tale alive. In 1896, the Salem Daily News of Salem, Ohio, reported, “The people of Cleveland are again stirred up over a devil kid. When the newspaper of that town can’t quarrel any longer, someone of them publishes a story about the birth of a devil kid. Cleveland furnishes a fine field for rural journalism.”
But around the same time that the people of Cleveland were reviving the well-worn story of a malformed child of Satan, a couple in a small milltown in the most northwest corner of Georgia was experiencing a very real nightmare of their own. There was no fanfare. No artists’ renderings. No traveling exhibits. Their story didn’t even make the front page. Just a small blurb buried inside the June 8, 1896, edition of the Atlanta Constitution under the headline “A Human Freak.”
“Near Echols’ mill in Chattooga County, the wife of Dr. Jim Ballenger gave birth to a child that had four legs, four arms, four eyes, and three ears. It lived a couple of hours.”
For the Ballengers, the honest fear of growing something unspeakable and unfortunate inside you was realized. And for a couple of hours, they experienced the closest thing to hell that any new parents can imagine. Because hell isn’t always an eternity. Sometimes it’s just a few moments that stick with you forever. Sometimes horror is what you’ve lived through, what you’ve created. Sometimes horror is your legacy.