THE LEGEND OF THE MELON HEADS

Imagine it is a warm summer’s night in the area that is now the Saugatuck State Park in the 1970s. A teenage couple drive their car down what used to be a dirt road and put it into park to get more “acquainted” with each other. The hormones start to fly, and the outside world becomes a blur…until a tiny knock is heard on the passenger’s side window. The couple unlock their lips and look toward the window, expecting to see an officer telling them to move on. Instead, they see a childlike, large-headed creature staring back at them, its nose just touching the bottom of the car window. The whites of its eyes are all they can see, as the irises seem to be at the bottom of the eyelid. The frightened couple scream in unison; the boy starts the car, shifts it into drive and they peel out of the park at high speeds, wondering what sort of monster they have just encountered. To this day, sightings of what have become known as the Melon Heads continue to circulate in the cities of Holland and Saugatuck.

According to the legend, there used to be a hospital in the area that treated children with a condition known as hydrocephalus, which causes the head to swell to large proportions. The doctor treating the children would experiment on the unfortunate souls until they were barely able to function. When the hospital closed down, the children were released and left to fend for themselves. Many say that they banded together in the woods around the Saugatuck State Park area, where they still live to this day.

Not only are the Melon Heads purported to live in west Michigan, but they also have some distant cousins in northern Ohio. The stories that come from Ohio tell of feral, vicious little creatures that will kill your dog, attack and potentially eat you or run alongside your car at cheetah-like speeds. This Ohio variety seems to be a little more dangerous than our Michigan brand of Melon Heads. The Ohio legend has many slight variations of the same story that involve a Dr. Crowe who was a cruel and sadistic man. The Ohio version says that he ran a hospital in the late 1800s to help hydrocephalic children. Instead of treating them, he tortured the helpless victims by injecting more fluid into their brains and conducting other experiments on them, eventually leaving them on their own. The stories are nearly identical, but there is no evidence of a hospital in the Saugatuck area that ever treated this condition or of a doctor who specifically housed and tended to children suffering from hydrocephalus. It’s not known which version came first, but it is obvious that the two are related somehow.

An old tintype of a mother with a hydrocephalic child. Photo courtesy of the Thanatos Archive.

Unlike the uncertainty of the Melon Heads’ existence, hydrocephalus is a very real condition. About one in five hundred children are affected by hydrocephalus, or “water on the brain.” The cerebrospinal fluid in the brain doesn’t drain properly, and the result is an enlarged head, with a normal-sized face and features. It is especially noticeable in infants and children under the age of three because the spinal plates have yet to fuse; the head becomes very large since the skull is still able to expand, unlike in adults and older children, whose plates have already fused. The eyes of the children also have a downward gaze, as the pressure caused from the buildup of fluid in the head makes the irises look down, exposing the whites of the eyes as if they were zombies. Although it is a very sad condition, hydrocephalous can result in a very disturbing image, one that could easily give birth to legend. But how did this story ever get started? Was their a doctor in the area testing children?

Our logical sides tell us that there is no way a band of small children would be living in the wilds of the Saugatuck State Park, completely feral and ready to lash out at any person who happens their way. But our curious sides wonder. What if there were a couple of kids left on the side of the road like abandoned kittens who lived in the woods for a while? The story had to come from somewhere, right? There has to be some grain of truth in it somewhere…

One possible theory is that this story got its roots back in the early 1900s. The Forward Movement Settlement was a charitable organization out of Chicago in the early twentieth century. It owned 130 acres of beautiful Saugatuck lakeshore that it called the Forward Movement Park. One of the services it offered was the Vesta Putnam Summer School for Crippled Children. One can only imagine that in an area of vacationers and people with money, just as today, the kids of the day probably made fun of the children from the school. Stories started, and maybe the school even had a few hydrocephalic students. It’s just a theory, but a very probable one considering that the school was in the same area where the legend started.

Even though the story’s origins aren’t clear, this popular Holland-area legend has been around for well over fifty years, told and retold by teenagers, popular at every Halloween and used by parents as leverage to get their kids to go to sleep on time. Tom Maat of Michigan’s Otherside remembers telling his children in the 1970s to “go to bed or the Melon Heads will come for you!” The kids promptly went to bed, fearing a visit from bulbous-headed children seeking vengeance for their ill-treated lives.

Over the years, the legend has become entangled with other local legends in the area, such as the Felt Mansion and the old minimum-security jail that used to stand behind the mansion when it was the state police post. Some like to say that the Melon Heads lived in the jail and that’s where they were experimented on; others have gone so far as to say that they lived at the Felt Mansion. Both rumors are historically untrue. The Junction Insane Asylum, a mythical place talked about for years, has also been thrown into the mix in recent years thanks to websites and urban legends that spread as fast as a ghost disappears. Some have called the jail behind the Felt Mansion “the Junction,” claiming that the Melon Heads were born there. According to the Allegan County Historical Society, there are no historical records or any documentation of any kind supporting the existence of the Junction Insane Asylum. It is pure legend. With all these urban legends floating about, stories can often start to meld when there are more than a few stories coming out of one location, and that seems to be the case with the Melon Heads.

Tom Maat grew up and spent his youth in the Holland/Saugatuck area and remembers first hearing about the Melon Heads more than thirty-five years ago when he was sixteen years old:

Just before you got to the Felt Mansion, the Melon Heads lived on top of a big hill in the area. The hill had a stairway going up it and a windmill sat on top and supplied water to the nearby Felt Mansion when it was a seminary. The area was a popular make-out spot because it was in the middle of nowhere then. People said the Melon Heads would roam around those woods at night.

Tom remembers that the Melon Heads were said to come from a nearby hospital that never really existed. But what has continued to perpetuate this legend if there is absolutely no basis of truth in it? Could it have something to do with a reel-to-reel? As teenagers, bored and armed with a battery-operated reel-to-reel complete with creepy sounds recorded on it, Tom Maat and his friends would hide out in the dark woods of the Saugatuck State Park, waiting for cars to pull up and turn off their lights. The unsuspecting couple in the car making out weren’t ready for the eerie sounds floating out of the nearby woods. Most likely, the couple would freeze up, question each other about the noises and hesitate to look outside into the inky black surroundings.

“Did you hear something?”

“No…did you hear something?”

The couple would start to turn their heads to look out the window. At the right moment, Tom and his buddies would come tearing out of the woods and bang on the car windows, causing the terrified couple to flee the parking lot in a frenzy of squealing tires and dust. Surprisingly, Tom noted that they never got their butts kicked to Lake Michigan and back. And for all we know, those couples Tom and his band of merry “Melon Heads” terrified are the ones still telling people to this day that the Melon Heads are out there, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting cars.

Is there any truth behind this legend? Maybe not. But do you care to drive your car into the territory of the Melon Heads on a moonless night? Maybe as you cuddle up to your sweetheart, you just might find yourself being stared at by a bulbous-headed creature, or it might just be Tom, thirty-five years later, still hanging out with his now vintage reel-to-reel, playing scary sounds from the woods. So keep your dogs on a leash, steer your children away from the woods of the Melon Heads and keep an eye peeled for a big-headed creature running alongside your car. And if you do see one, please try to stay calm so that you can at least get one good photo for posterity. After the photo is shot, feel free to start screaming.