The tale of a man known as ‘Charlie No-Face’ who glowed green isn’t just a story used to scare people, he was actually a real person with a very upsetting backstory.
Residents of Koppel, a small borough in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, would often go on late night excursions to find the man for themselves.
The urban legend dates back 100 years and is passed through generations but only a few people know his real story.
Also known as the ‘Green Man’, the story states he was either a ghost who walked highways with a glowing green head or suffered his features melting away after growing up in squalor.
But perhaps in a perfect example of why you shouldn’t judge a book by its over, the ‘bogeyman’ feared by countless people was said to be a ‘beautiful, kind man’.
His name was Raymond Theodore Robinson and he was left disfigured due to a freak accident during his childhood.
Robinson was born in 1910 and 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 affected.
He also lost a land which was completely blown off during the awful accident.
Robinson wasn’t expected to survive but he lived albeit with life changing injuries. The urban legend arose after he’d go out for walks at night time along the quiet stretch of highway between Koppel and New Galilee.
He retreated from normal life and was rarely seen during the day out of fear of people’s reactions to his face.
The cruel ‘Charlie No-Face’ moniker was given to him because of the loss of his facial features, while the ‘Green Man’ nickname arose because his face appeared to glow following the near-fatal electric shock.
Some locals assumed the glow came from working at a power plant.
However a documentarian who spent three years researching Robinson’s tragic story for a film shared a different theory.
Speaking to Thrillist, Trisha York claimed: “His nose was basically an open wound his entire life. It would get infected quite often and that would make it turn green.”
Robinson stopped taking night time walks during the later years of his life. He retired to the Beaver County Geriatric Center where he died in 1985 aged 74.
