Melonheads Part II: Why So Many Big Heads?

This is the second of two posts about the Melonheads. Read part one here!

One of the many interesting things about Melonheads is that in New England the legend is only found in Connecticut. But it is also found in the Midwest, particularly in Michigan and Ohio. Much like their New England cousins, these Melonheads also lurk in the woods and delight in terrifying teenagers.

In Ohio, the legend is found in the rural areas outside of Cleveland, and the creatures' origin is ascribed to a mysterious man named Dr. Crowe. Dr. Crowe allegedly experimented on children that he either kidnapped or acquired from a local insane asylum. He imprisoned them in his secluded house, where he injected them with chemicals and possibly radioactive materials. These painful experiments caused them to mutate. Eventually the children rebelled and killed their tormentor. They escaped into the surrounding woods where they have remained to this day.

There are several versions of the Dr. Crowe legend. In some he has a kindly wife who treats the children well, and the mutant children only rebel against him when they see him abuse her. In another, he actually experiments on children with hydrocephalus. Hydropcephalus is a real medical disorder that causes fluid to build up in the skull, giving its sufferers enlarged heads. Let's be clear, though: hydrocephalus does NOT make anyone into an insane monster.

In Michigan, the Melonheads are said to have either escaped or been released from an insane asylum near the Felt Mansion in Ottawa County. They didn't wander far from their old home, and now lurk in the woods surrounding the mansion.

Melonhead illustration from Joseph Citro's Weird New England.

I don't know why the Melonhead legend is only found in these three parts of the country. Did it spread from New England to the Midwest, or did it happen in the opposite direction? It's a good topic for a folklore master's thesis, I suppose. I do know that the legends in all three areas have one thing in common: they use the language of science to explain where the Melonheads came from. Inbreeding, evolution, mutation, psychology, radiation - these are all terms from the physical and social sciences. They give the Melonheads an aura of plausibility.

Ghosts, witches, vampires, fairies, werewolves - these creatures are all supernatural in origin. We live in a scientific age, so we deserve scientific monsters. The Melonheads are one of them.

Extraterrestrial aliens are another monster of the scientific age, and it's interesting how similar they are in appearance to the Melonheads. Although the Melonheads are feral and bestial, both they and the gray aliens often share a similar physical morphology. They are short, thin, and have really big heads.

Gray aliens.

A monster was seen in Dover, Massachusetts who also had the same physical appearance. This was the infamous Dover Demon, who terrorized several teenagers in 1977. Like the Melonheads and the gray aliens, the Demon had a disproportionately large head and a very small body. Its eyes also glowed orange when lights shone on them. In Connecticut, some people have said the Melonheads' eyes glow orange as well.

The Dover Demon!

The Dover Demon was never quite categorized as either supernatural or scientific, but in earlier eras, little supernatural monsters with large heads were also said to lurk in the woods. The fairies, gnomes and dwarves of European legend often were described this way. In Connecticut, the Mohegan Tribe has the legend of the makiawisug, small magical people who live in the forests. They are often called pukwudgies these days by paranormal investigators, and illustrations show them with small bodies and large oversized heads.

Illustration by Lupi, used without permission.

Fairies, gnomes and pukwudgies are not monsters of science, but they share similar traits with the Melonheads. They dwell outside the fringes of our civilized world, terrorizing those who trespass on their territory. One key difference is that there are ways to placate the supernatural creatures who live in the woods, such as leaving them offerings of food and milk. There is no way to interact socially with the Melonheads. They simply emerge from their hiding places and terrify trespassers. Some accounts from Connecticut say the Melonheads abduct lost hikers and transform them into new Melonheads; fairies and aliens also enjoy abducting humans. 

So what does all this mean? There are some practical, "commonsense" explanations for the Melonheads. Michigan's Felt Mansion was a seminary for boys in the 1940s, and one man who studied there claims that the local townies called the seminarians "melon heads" because they were so educated. (Egghead is a more common derogatory term for the educated, but you get the point.) In the book Weird U.S., writer Ryan Orvis claims to have met an Ohio man who used to scare teenagers out parking in cars at night when he was a kid. A friend who helped him had hydrocephalus, and supposedly this led to the legend of the Melonheads. Similarly, perhaps random encounters with hydrocephalic individuals cruelly gave rise to the legend.

I suppose any of these origins are plausible, but they don't explain the particular form the legend took or why it persists. It's a long road from someone being called a "melon head" to stories about cannibalistic mutants that live in the woods. Maybe there is something primitive deep inside us that fears the darkness outside our little circle of light and knows that monsters are out there waiting for us. It might not be rational, but I think the feeling is persistent and powerful.

That still doesn't explain why so many of these monsters have a particular shape though, does it? All these creatures are childlike and sometimes almost embryonic in appearance. That doesn't really seem like a shape that people would inherently find frightening.

If you like supernatural or paranormal explanations, maybe you're inclined to believe there is some force (or some entity) out there that takes this shape repeatedly over the centuries, materializing as small big-headed monsters to scare the pants off us before disappearing into the darkness. Right now sitting here at my computer, I don't find that explanation too compelling, but if you bring me out into the woods at night I might just change my mind.

Melonheads Part I: A Trip Down Dracula Drive

If you ever travel the back roads of Connecticut's Fairfield County late at night, you might see an old blue Ford Granada barreling down the road. In 2015 Granadas are officially antique cars, but that's not what makes this car so unique. It's remarkable for the the people - or creatures? - that ride in it.

Back in the 1980s, a group of girls from Notre Dame High School in Fairfield decided to go out joyriding after a Friday night football game. Their names: Megan, Sue, Kim, Deb, Jen and Karen. Just a group of all-American girls looking for harmless fun, they got into Deb's blue Granada and set off into the dark night.

After driving around for a while they decided to go someplace spooky: Velvet Street in neighboring Trumbull. The locals had given Velvet Street the nickname Dracula Drive because of the strange things that supposedly happened there. Megan told her friends that strangest of all, little monstrous humanoids with huge heads were said to live in the woods surrounding Dracula Drive. Why not try to find them?

The girls drove down Dracula Drive and parked the car. They left the headlights and climbed out into the cool autumn air. The woods were very still and very, very dark. Other than the headlights there was no illumination - no streelights, no houses nestled among the trees. The girls were alone in the night-time woods.

Laughing with nervous energy they started to walk down the road, hoping yet fearful of seeing the monsters who supposedly lived in the woods. After walking a couple hundred feet they heard the car door open and slam behind them. The engine started and the car barreled down the road towards them. Someone had stolen Deb's car!

The girls jumped into the woods to avoid the car as it charged towards them. The Granda's thieves were illuminated by the interior light. They were the size of children with disproportionately large heads and were clad in dirty rags. Their eyes glowed with orange light, and they cackled wildly as they drove past the girls. The tail lights disappeared into the distance.

Megan, Deb and their friends had found what they were looking for. They had found the Melonheads.

I first read about the Melonheads in Joseph Citro's Weird New England, which is where the story about the stolen car comes from. After doing some research, I learned two things. First, Melonhead legends are very localized in New England. Stories about Bigfoot, ghosts, witches and UFOs can be found everywhere in this region, but you'll need to go to the Nutmeg State to encounter Melonheads. (Melonhead legends are also found in Ohio and Michigan, but more on that later.)

Second, the legend is not that old, at least in New England terms. Some of our legends go back to the first English settlers or even to the Algonquin Indians. Melonhead stories can only be traced back to the 1960s, and don't appear in older collections of New England legends like Botkin's Treasury of New England Folklore or Dorson's Jonathan Draws the Longbow.

Melonheads are small, spindly little humanoids with heads the size of melons. But what exactly do they do? Mostly they terrorize teenagers, as so many American monsters do. The Melonheads lurk in the rural areas of Connecticut where they live a feral lifestyle, sustaining themselves by eating small animals, stray cats, and human flesh (when given the opportunity). A hiker gone missing in the woods? A runaway teen who never comes home? Blame the Melonheads. Some people say they eat anyone they catch, while others say they do something even worse: turn them into Melonheads. While that seems far-fetched, some people also claim the Melonheads communicate by telepathy, so if they are psychic they may have powers unknown to the average human.

Several towns in Connecticut have roads that pass through Melonhead territory. Velvet Street (aka Dracula Drive) in Trumbull and Monroe is the most famous, but other towns have their own special streets. Shelton's Saw Mill City Road, Milford's Zion Hill Road, and Marginal Road in New Haven are just a few of the streets where Melonheads lurk.

Where did they come from? One origin story ties the Melonheads to New England's Puritan past. Way, way back in the 1600s a family from the Trumbull area was accused of witchcraft by their town's elders. The family was banished into the surrounding wilderness, where it was assumed they would starve to death. They didn't. They survived by hunting and gathering, and when their young children reached maturity the brothers and sisters interbred. The family remained isolated in the woods, mutating from generations of inbreeding and a diet of wild animal flesh, but increasing their numbers to become the Melonhead tribe people encounter today.

An alternative story claims the Melonheads are really escapees from a mental asylum. According to this version of the legend, an asylum operated in the area from the 1860s to the 1960s, but mysteriously burned to the ground one day. Every staff member and most of the inmates perished, but a few were never accounted for. Locals claim they escaped into the woods, where they interbred and became the feral Melonheads.

I am not a debunker. I don't think it is an interesting or fruitful activity, and I don't want to discount what people experience. However, even if people are encountering something strange in the Connecticut woods, I don't think these two stories are historically true. There's no record of a disastrous insane asylum fire in the area, and there aren't any records of people being banished for witchcraft. People found guilty of witchcraft were flogged, jailed, or even executed, but they weren't usually banished.

The forests in southern New England are not old growth forests. They haven't been here for 350+ years. Most of the original forests in Connecticut were cut down to carve out farms, and only started to take over again in the 19th century when people abandoned the farms for the mill towns or moved out west to more fertile lands in New York and Ohio. In other words, I don't think there have been enough woods for a family of inbred monsters to hide in for three consecutive centuries.

But, having said that, I still think something interesting is happening with the Melonhead legends, and I'll write about that next week. Stay tuned!

*** UPDATE: Part two now online! ***

Strange Gravestones of Whitefield, New Hampshire

Tony and I were recently up in the White Mountains, and I paid visit to Pine Street Cemetery in Whitefield, New Hampshire.

Pine Street is just outside downtown Whitefield and has some nice old gravestones dating back to the 18th century. It's very peaceful. On the day I went I was the only person there.

Some of the 19th century stones have a finger pointing up, indicating the deceased is bound for heaven. Take for example this stone which memorializes the fantastically-named Varnom Blood:

The text above the finger reads "Gone Home." It's a nice sentiment.

The same upward-pointing finger appears on the memorials for Varnom's wife Lydia and for George Parker, who died when he was only thirteen.

 

But apparently the people of Whitefield did not think all their neighbors were going home to Jesus. Here is the gravestone for poor Henry Lane, deceased at age twenty-two. 

 

Clearly whoever made this stone didn't think Henry was going to heaven. I'm surprised that Henry's family would pay for such a judgmental gravestone but maybe Henry really was that bad. The stone indicates he was bad enough to make Jesus cry, which is pretty bad. 

According to Joseph Citro's Weird New England there is another stone like this in Whitefield. That one is for Ira Bowles (dead at age 63) and is located in the Methodist Cemetery nearby. Apparently stones with the downward-pointing fingers are quite rare, and only two have been found outside of  Whitefield.

No one knows what Henry Lane and Ira Bowles did to deserve such damning gravestones. Were they murderers? Thieves? Drunkards? 

Or maybe none of the above. Charles Jordan suggests in his book Tales Told In the Shadows of the White Mountains that the downward fingers may have actually reflected Seventh Day Adventist beliefs that were popular at the time. Rather than believing that the dead went immediately to heaven, the Adventists felt they waited in the grave until Judgment Day. The finger points just to the soil, not to Hell. It's not as dramatic as the other explanation, but it does make me feel better about Henry and Ira's families.

Cavemen Living on the Connecticut River?

I do love a strange story, and here is one of the stranger ones I've read in a while. Any concern about the truth of the story pales in comparison to how good it is.

According to Betty Hill, the famous UFO abductee, at one point in the 20th century an island in the Connecticut River was inhabited by a tribe of small primitive people.

For the space of about three years, people who lived near the river reported seeing prehistoric-looking people on an island that was supposed to be uninhabited. Whenever anyone (including the police) ventured out to the island to investigate the cavemen disappeared.

Betty wrote,

"It was as though somebody had picked up a group of early cavemen and had set them down on the island in a New England countryside. Planes and helicopters had flown over the area, hoping to get pictures, but these little people - they're not really tiny people, but maybe four feet tall or so - would just take off running at such speeds that no one could even get pictures of them. These prehistoric people would be there one instant, they would start running, and in the next instant, they would just disappear."

Like a lot of classic folklore the particulars of the story are vague. Where did it happen, and when? It's not clear. Betty claims she was told about the cave people by someone else, and didn't remember exactly where the island was, but thought maybe it was someplace near Springfield, Massachusetts. 

I'm grateful to Joseph Citro for including this story in his fantastic book Weird New England. Apparently Betty Hill first wrote about the cave people in an article called "Bigfoot in New England." Bigfoot researcher Jack Kewaunee Lapseritis also interviews Betty on this topic in his book The Psychic Sasquatch and Their UFO Connection. That's an amazing title for a book, but it looks like it is out of print. Some copies on Amazon are selling for hundreds of dollars! I guess everyone wants it as much as I do.

To me little cavemen sound suspiciously like faeries or trolls, and those creatures are notoriously hard to pin down. Maybe they were just paying a brief visit from the mythic world to remind us they're still lurking around, even if we can't prove they're really there.

Bigfoot: He's Wicked Strong!

I was a big comic book fan when I was a kid, and one activity most young comic geeks engage in is determining which superhero is stronger. Can the Incredible Hulk beat up the Mighty Thor? Who can lift the heavier weight, Superman or Captain Marvel? A quick search of the Internet will show you that adult comic book fans still play this same game.

The Hulk, who gets his strength from gamma radiation, usually tops the list of the strongest superheros. A lot of other superheroes and villains in Marvel Comics get their power from gamma radiation, like She-Hulk, the Abomination, and Doc Samson.

One under-appreciated gamma powered hero, though, is Sasquatch. Sasquatch was originally a Canadian physicist named Walter Langowski. While playing around with gamma radiation (as physicists so often do in the comics), Walter gained the ability to transform into a giant, orange-furred musclebound monster who looks just like the cryptid Bigfoot. Assuming the name Sasquatch, Walter uses his super strength to fight crime with a band of other Canadian heroes called Alpha Flight.

Unfortunately, not even gamma radiation could make Sasquatch an A-list superhero like the Hulk, and I don't think he's appearing in any comic books currently. Much like the real-life Sasquatch, the comic-book version is now quite elusive.

But that's not the only trait they share. Like Walter Langowski, the real-life Sasquatch or Bigfoot is also fantastically strong, as this example from Joseph Citro's Weird New England shows.

Bigfoot has been seen quite a few times in a Longmeadow, Massachusetts area called the Meadows. The Meadows abuts the Connecticut River, and many locals have seen large hairy humanoids swimming in its waters. Others have seen hairy faces peering into their windows at night, and found footprints leading from their houses down to the river the following day. Some residents speculate that the creatures inhabit a series of tunnels that run under the riverbanks.

The Meadows. Photo from this site.

A man named Joe operated a car crushing business in the Meadows for many years. One summer night he and some friends were sitting outside the office trailer enjoying some beer when they heard something moving through the bushes by the river bank. Abruptly, a large man burst into the car crushing yard. But was it a man? Although his bearded face looked human, he was eight-feet tall, naked, and covered with hair. It was a Bigfoot.

The Bigfoot wandered around yard for a while before picking up a crushed car chassis. Joe and his friends gasped! The crushed car weighed more than 2,000 pounds. The Bigfoot eventually put it back down and walked back to the river, where he swam away into the night. The next day Joe shut down his business and found a new location in town.

The Bigfoot seen in the Meadows was not a gamma-radiated anomaly - many people who see Bigfoots claim they are very strong. For example, in his book Passing Strange Joseph Citro mentions a 1951 Bigfoot encounter in Sudbury, Vermont where a Bigfoot moved a 450 pound oil drum.

To sum up, don't mess with Bigfoot because he's wicked strong - and he's not confined to the comic books.

The Pigman of Northfield, Vermont

The time? 1971.

The place? A high school dance in picturesque Northfield, Vermont.

I'm sure you can imagine the scene. Crepe paper streamers, teens dancing to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven", bell bottom jeans, mediocre orange punch. A scene of small town serenity.

However, small towns often have weird secrets, and Northfield's most shocking secret came to light that night when a group of students ran into the dance. They looked scared, and some of them were in tears.

They had been drinking beer in a sandpit behind the school, they said, when something strange came out of the woods. It was tall, naked, and covered in white hair. And although it walked on two legs, it had the face of a pig.

Whatever it was, it scared the hell out of the teens - they even abandoned the beer in their panic! Some of the braver students ventured out of the dance to investigate the sandpit. They didn't see the monster, but did find the grass and underbrush had been trampled down. Something had been there. And thus the Pigman appeared in Northfield.

Artist's rendering of the Pigman from Joseph Citro's Weird New England.

After the dance was disrupted, the locals made some strange connections. A farmer said he had seen a hideous naked figure rummaging through his trash a few nights earlier. More eerily, people remembered how a teenage boy disappeared from his family's farm six months ago. At the time authorities thought he had run away, but now people wondered if something more sinister had happened. Could he have been transformed into this strange monster? Or perhaps been eaten by it for dinner? A monster had to eat, and an awful lot of animals had gone missing recently...

The Pigman was seen in Northfield off and on for years, often around an area called the Devil's Washbowl. Motorists saw him run across the road, and teens who went to make out in the Washbowl sometimes had a surprise guest disrupt their romantic interlude.

Although the creature himself was somewhat elusive, physical evidence suggested he was real. A local man named Jeff Hatch and his friends found some caves near the Washbowl filled with animal bones, and found a similar stash of gnawed bones in the town's only pig farm. Strange cloven footprints were also found in the soft ground.

I don't know if we'll ever know who (or what) the Pigman is. The top two theories are that the missing teenage boy somehow devolved and became feral, or that some lonely farmer and a particularly friendly pig ... well, you know what I mean. I don't think genetics work that way, but try telling that to the teens in Northfield, who still get spooked at night when they go drinking out in the woods.

You can read more about the Pigman in books by Vermont author Joseph Citro, particularly Weird New England and Green Mountains, Dark Tales.

October Monster Mania: the Bennington Monster

In the early 19th century, a stagecoach full of passengers was traveling by Glastenbury Mountain near Bennington, Vermont. The night was rainy, and the horses were skittish - perhaps more skittish than they normally would be in bad weather. Eventually, the driver brought the carriage to a halt and dismounted because the road had been washed out.

And that's when he noticed the enormous footprints in the muddy road. Were they human? Were they animal? He couldn't tell. The other passengers left the coach to look at the prints, but no one could ascertain what type of creature made such unusual tracks.

And that's when some thing, unseen in the dark, attacked the coach and knocked it over with several blows. The passengers saw a pair of eyes staring at them from the dark, and then heard something roar and rush off into the darkness.

They had an encounter with the Bennington Monster.

The Bennington Monster has been seen many times since then. For example, in September 2003, Ray Dufresne of Winooski Vermont was driving by Glastenbury Mountain when he saw a large "black thing" by the road. It was well over six feet tall, and was "hairy from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet."

On September 16 that same year, a writer named Doug Dorst was driving near Bennington College when he saw something he at first thought was a man in a snowsuit. As he got closer, he realized the enormous, stocky creature he saw wasn't quite human. Several other sightings occurred around the same time in 2003.

I remember reading about this in 2003. At the time, local law enforcement officials thought it was Michael Greene, a known prankster who lived in the area. But Mr. Greene denied it, saying he wouldn't be dumb enough to run around the woods in a furry costume in hunting season.

So what is the Bennington Monster? A Yankee relative of Bigfoot? The folks over at the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization certainly have collected reports from Vermont, so maybe it is.

Or maybe, like the other creatures I've posted about this month, it's just another reason to keep your doors and windows locked when you're driving through the dark woods.

(I got most of this information from Joseph Citro's book Weird New England.)

Jeff Berlanger's Weird Massachusetts

Author Jeff Berlanger has an article on Boston.com about weird attractions in Massachusetts. He covers a mix of places historic (Dungeon Rock), paranormal (the Bridgewater Triangle), and kitschy (the birthplace of tupperware in Leominster).



Berlanger is the author of the book Weird Massachusetts , which is brought to us by the same people who produced Weird New England. I own Weird New England - it's an entertaining and heavily illustrated coffee table book. Weird Massachusetts is the same type of book. It would make a good gift for a kid who's interested in these things, or someone who wants a quick overview of the bizarre things in the Bay State. Joseph Citro and Dianne Fould's Curious New England covers similar content, but is aimed at an older audience, is a small paperback, and includes explicit driving directions to the various locations.

It's interesting that all these books use words like "weird" or "curious" to describe things that in the past would have been part of everyday life. "Of course there are little monsters in the woods, sea monsters on the beach, and ghosts almost everywhere else", our ancestors would say. "What else would there be?" It would be weird for them if the world were otherwise. John Josselyn wouldn't be surprised by any of it!