The richest tale of the Melonheads originated in suburban Ohio, but has since spread upward into Michigan, appending itself to the state’s already rampant accounts of little mutants with big noggins. Unlike Connecticut’s legend of wrongly accused witchcraft and familial perversities, these Midwestern Melonheads were drawn from the generous well of horror stories re: empiricism gone awry, with all the mad scientists, deviant experimentation and ultimate comeuppance that one would expect. Underneath these trappings, though, the tale provides more than just an invective against misplaced scientific authority – it provides the virulent seeds of socially imposed American middle-class guilt.

The story goes like this: In the wake of WWII, Dr. Crow, a scientist and medical practitioner, was contracted by the government to do research on hydrocephalus (water on the brain) in children. The government conveniently proceeded to send a mess of l’il hydrocephalites to Crow’s palatial Ohio estate. Crow, however, an insane sadist, proceeded to inject the children’s heads with even more fluid, including radioactive substances, testing the limits of their fragile bodies while subjecting them to squalid living conditions and perpetual emotional abuse. Eventually, the children, desperate and angry, banded together and attacked Crow, tearing him apart and devouring the remains. During the attack, the lab caught fire and the mansion burned down, but not before the deformed and viciously bitter kids had escaped into the surrounding woods, where their eventual offspring, raised on raw meat and resentment of “normal” humans, still live today.

Unsurprisingly, the legend propagates most readily among adolescents – teenagers blindly railing against an establishment that has, heretofore, only wronged them in principle. The Melonheads provide their angst substance via a local threat created by an insidious authority figure. More than that, the story underlines the privileged innocuousness of typical middle-class life by vividly portraying the disenfranchised and showing how they are exploited and abused. Essentially, the tale constructs enraged, broken bodies for the guilt of the privileged to inhabit. While the lower class is left to fear illness, homelessness and total familial dissolution, the middle classes, bored and imbued with an elevated sense of superficial social justice, invent vindictive bobbleheads encompassing all of those real but distant threats, a stark, angry negative of life in the cul de sac. The rich fear the poor; the kids of the rich fear the Melonheads.

Friday: Orphanages, Asylums and Melonheads

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