It might be because of the invariably ridiculous image the moniker conjures, or simply because it’s also the name of a candy – whatever the reason, the term “Melonheads” fails to evoke the same sense of bone-chilling foreboding as other monstrosities’ names like, say, the “Beast of Bodmin Moor,” or “Skinwalkers.” Regardless, the diminutive, feral, huge-headed humanoids that carry this vaguely humorous title are said to skulk and lurk about the forests of Michigan, Ohio and Connecticut, striking fear into the hearts of bored teenagers and their overly accommodating dates.

More a cry baby bridge-caliber urban legend than a Nain Rouge-style historical folktale, the Melonhead story is interesting not because of its titular deformed grotesqueries, but rather because of the sheer number of extant regional variations on their origins; the tales compose a collection of macabre adolescent imaginings that name check every horror trope from mental hospitals and orphanages to witches and mad scientists. Looking at these stories one at a time provides unique insight into the anatomy of the modern urban legend, revealing that the real monster in all of these stories is history – real or imagined – and the sense that the past lives on as a ragged assortment of misdeeds and sins, all draped over bygone years like sheets over ghosts, haunting the present like some tired, restless phantom.

One of the simpler and more explicable Melonhead origins was conceived in Connecticut, which provided the puritanical umbilicus through which the growing story metabolized New England’s enduring shame over its bygone enthusiasm for ye olde witch trials. The legend tells of a bog-standard colonial family who, after being accused of witchcraft, fled into the woods and adopted a primitive lifestyle that, goaded by time and inevitable inbreeding, led to a race of malformed indigents that still inhabit the dark, ivy-choked corners of rural Connecticut.

The guilt-haunted hemorrhaging American heart, which previously gave us tales of doomed buildings constructed on Indian burial grounds, is behind this story, weaving in the global taboo (though distinctly American fixation) of incestual offspring to create a readymade horror story of humanity gone awry – the sins of the fathers (and, subsequently, the sons and daughters) embodied and alive, waiting for a some hapless double-dog-dare-taker to wander into the woods.

And that’s just one of the unfailingly bizarre tales of the Melonheads – the fat-headed, distinctly American answers to past societal wrongs.

Wednesday: Melonheads and Science

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