This is disturbingly like the plot to Stephen King's the Dark Half (which i only vaguely recall because I read it somewhere in 6th grade a long ass time ago). But I recall that he even mentioned the bit about finding hair and bone in the dead foetus

yeah, it seems like an urban myth....the hair, nails and bones part I've heard before.

When we washed him -- what?

PS - the Dark Half had the other fetus in his head, causing terrible headaches and of course then horrific multiple personality icky stuff...

How did Dark Half phrase it? in utero cannabalism?
Of course, the book also had some utterly strange fascination with a particular type of pencil, so I'm not sure how much cred we should put into it's factual reporting ability.

(Oh, wait...)

This is not an urban myth. What was removed was most likely a teratoma. When you take Anatomy & Human Physiology you learn about all sorts of neat things like this.

Do you have a strong stomache? See a teratoma here.

FROM:

http://zygote.swarthmore.edu/cleave4a.html

CONJOINED TWINS

    * are identical twins who develop with a single placenta from a single fertilized ovum.
    * are always the same sex and race.
    * are more often female than male, at a ratio of 3:1.
    * occur as often as once in every 40,000 births but only once in every 200,000 live births.
    * are more likely to occur in India or Africa than in China or the United States.
    * may be caused by any number of factors, being influenced by genetic and environmental conditions. It is presently thought that these factors are responsible for the failure of twins to separate after the 13th day after fertilization. Conjoined twins can be artificially generated in amphibians by constricting the embryo so that two embryos form, one on each side of the constriction.
* There are no documented cases of conjoined triplets or quadruplets.

Here's a site that discusses teratoma
http://www.ucsfhealth.org/childrens/medica...teratoma/signs.html

It might also have been a dermoid cyst.

http://www.drhull.com/EncyMaster/D/dermoid.html

in an unusual location.

Kuato lives!

That's a 50-percent savings on hats.

Margaret Atwood wrote a short story called "Hairball" that bares similarities to this event. In Hairball, a young woman has a hairy object of unknown origin removed from her stomach. She places the "hairball" on her mantle in a glass jar - a comment on our unknowability of the self, our dark side, I dunno. Haven't read it since grade school.

I've actually known two people who had very smallish versions of the degenerate twin thing. Both had them on their heads. One was my girlfriend of over 2 years, who had surgery for a tooth related sinus problem, that actually turned out to be one of these things that was lodged in part of her skull, and down into the sinus cavity, hence causing trouble when her adult teeth started to come in when she was 10. She has a small patch of plastic replacing a bit of her skull.

The other was my friend Seth, who had what was at first thought to be a mole going cancerous, and turned out to be a smallish one of these.

Weird in any event.

re: atwood's story.

those hairballs are not the twin thing. i can't remember what they're called... but i vaguely remember reading that they were once thought to have mystical properties back in the medieval period. i think the name starts with a P ... this is going to bug me until i remember it!

bezoar. A small stony concretion that forms in the stomach of many animals especially ruminants. It was in ancient times thought to have medicinal or magical powers.

The midwife that delivered my daughter tells the story of when
the midwife was pregnant with her last daughter, some twenty
years ago, the ultrasounds showed a boy and a lump. The lump
was an ovarian cyst, said the doctor.

After the boy was born the midwife, who worked as a nurse at
the time, realized something was wrong. The boy's body was too
small for the head size, and there was still something moving
in her.

Later the older sister would joke, "the cyst turned out to be
a sister."

thanks Liz Ditz. a friend reminded me that i heard of the bezoar from neil gaiman's sandman series.

Edited by author 05-03-2003 11:57 AM
I'm surprised the article didn't mention what this situation is called: it's a teratoma:

     A tumor, sometimes found in newborn children, which is made
     up of a heterigenous mixture of tissues, as of bone,
     cartilage and muscle.

I learned about this in the Fortean Times (http://www.forteantimes.com/), which mentioned that in a few instances of teratomas, they've had faces! If I recall correctly, a google search will turn up disturbing pictures, too.

Somewhere in the last few years I've heard that apparently some doctors are increasingly believing that nearly all human pregnancies start off as twins, and at some point, one usually absorbs the other, although clearly, not always successfully!

I find this concept creepy on sooo many levels....

--Kimota!

This reminds me of the Stephen King story "The Dark Half", where the main character has chronic headaches and as a child has brain surgery which revealed a fully developed human eye growing in the area of his head which was causing the headaches!!