by Bob Curran
We have been lulled into a false sense of security by Hollywood and television, as we expect our vampires to be handsome, striking, or beautiful in appearance. Vampires in the cultures and legends of many countries are grotesque and monstrous to look at, and this often adds to their sense of menace. Historically, evil was always associated with the bizarre and unusual, particularly within the human form. Dark people, such as the monstrous mass murderer Gilles de Rais, or the American psycho Ed Gein, have sometimes been portrayed as physically twisted or ugly to look at—a fact that only emphasizes their malignancy. And the same seems to apply to the Undead in European belief. What may be the earliest recorded vampire in the Western tradition—Abhartach, the 5th-century “red drinker” of Celtic lore—is often described as small and deformed (possibly a hunchback). Thus, we tend to characterize out worst nightmares with twisted shapes and grotesque features, which seem to set them firmly in our minds.
From the earliest times, “abnormal” people have been regarded with suspicion. This, coupled with strange behavior, makes them appear threatening. In the ancient and medieval worlds, physical deformities were considered to be either a prognostication of evil times or a mark of the Devil. Newborn babies who carried some kind of disfigurement were often slain in an attempt to ward off evil, which might befall a community.
An 8 year-old boy, for example, was burnt around 1580 near the town of Shrewsbury, England, because he was born deformed. Both his feet were cloven, as was his right hand. This was taken as evidence of a grievous sin between his father and a sheep. In order to ward off possible Divine retribution, the community destroyed the child. A similar event occurred in 1674 in the village of Birdham, England. Here, a child was nailed to a church door and was bludgeoned to death; its body was then burned. The reason given was the same as before: an unnatural liaison between humans and animals. The child had to be killed in order to avoid God’s vengeance on the entire community. The body had been nailed to the church door to remind churchgoers of the awful results of bestiality. In the Brocken area of Germany in 1684, according to Johannes Mayer in his Tuefelbushen (published in 1690), a woman was publicly stoned to death for giving birth to a deformed child. The birth was allegedly the result of having sexual congress with a horse, although no evidence was offered for this allegation. In 1692, in the same region, a woman gave birth to a casket of iron nails, and for this, she was killed.
Deformed births and grotesque people were often seen as signals portending the End of Days. In a rural area of Bavaria in 1702, a number of strange and misshapen infants born in one year panicked the population, inspiring religious revivals in a number of villages (accompanied by several deaths of the deformed children). In Alsace, France, similar births caused widespread alarm around 1708. All of these were considered to be signs of great evil and of approaching menace. Thus, some deformed people living within communities were strongly associated with the forces of darkness.
In fact, such an idea had become so ingrained into the psyche of most societies that traces of it could sometimes still be found in communities during the 20th century. However, as medical science progressed, such abnormalities came to be explained—and yet some of the old uncertainties remained. It was all very well to say that such people were the result of perhaps a congenital problem or that the disfigurement came from a recognized medical condition, but their appearance still sent collective shudders down society’s spine.
One of the most notable of all the conditions, and one that sometimes caused the most fear among ordinary people was that of hydrocephalus. Known as “water on the brain,” the physical characteristics of the deformity were rather striking. The condition is created by an abnormal accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles or cavities of the brain, causing the head to swell to an unusual size. Besides this progressive cranial enlargement, symptoms include convulsions, tunnel vision, and often mental retardation. It can also cause death. It has been known since around 2,500 BC where it appears in ancient Egyptian medical records. The Greek physician Hippocrates also mentioned it in his works around the 4th century BC, although its effects were more accurately described by the Roman Galen around the 2nd century BC. Throughout the Middle Ages, hydrocephalics were regarded both with fear and suspicion, and their condition was said to be an outward sign of inward evil. There was no cure. Even today, the medical response to the condition is both fairly limited and complicated. It involves a series of what are called “cerebral shunts,” using a ventricular catheter in which some of the fluid is drained off into other areas of the body. This can be a difficult process, and is not always successful. Large-headed individuals have existed (and still exist) in many parts of the world.
As late as the 1950s, the idea that deviant sexual practices were somehow connected to the existence of large-headed individuals (Melon Heads or Weeble Heads) was still quite common. In her Folklore of Herefordshire (1955), folklorist Mary Letherbarrow makes reference to an entire family of large-headed people living in the village of Risbury in Herefordshire. They had large and well-rounded heads, which was the result of systematic inbreeding. They took very little to do with their neighbors and many locals shunned them as being “odd and dangerous.” They were still living in Risbury at the time Letherbarrow was writing in the mid-1950s. Writing slightly later, the anthropologist Hannah Williams also makes reference to the Risbury “Melon Heads” (which she calls “Weeble Heads”) and suggests that their family tree was rather complicated. The name of the family concerned is not disclosed, but she suggests that inbreeding and abnormal sexual practices might have been a contributing factor to its general condition. At the time when Williams was writing, the family was still living in Risbury. So what became of the Melon Head family? They seem to have vanished, although in 2009, there was a report of one of them living somewhere close to the Sandpits Estate, west of Leominster in Herefordshire, but sightings of this individual were rare.
Aside from the Risbury instances, there is anecdotal evidence from other parts of England and indeed from other areas of the world. In 1969, folklorist Jane Davis claimed that there were “Wobble Heads”—individual members of a hill family—living in a remote area of Snowdonia in Wales. The family dwelt on a remote farm and were generally avoided because there were a number of unhealthy and frightening stories about them—one of these being that they would drink the blood of sheep, which had been left out to graze on the mountain slopes. It was even thought that they might attack humans who ventured too near to where they lived. A similar story from the 1920s comes from the Forest of Dean, where a family of dangerous Wobble Heads dwelt. Little is known about them, except that they had both cannibalistic and vampiric tendencies, and were said to attack travelers through the Forest at various times. As before, stories concerning them may have been inspired by their strange appearance.
England and Wales were not the only places for these disfigured people. A family of Melon Heads lived near the village of Konzenburg in Bavaria in the mid-1800s. Several local murders were laid at their door, but nothing could be proved. Like the Risbury Melon Heads, they were extremely aggressive if approached. In the context of local folklore, some even drank blood. Again, in the Black Forest area of Baden-Württemberg in Germany, there were other dangerous Melon Heads who still attacked travelers.
The idea that Melon Heads were both cannibalistic and vampiric was a common one in many areas and was firmly rooted in their curious appearance. They were also linked in the popular mind with both sin and evil. Such a concept was so deeply imbedded in the human psyche that it traveled with many European peoples wherever they went—most notably to the New World. And so the legend of the Melon Heads entered the world of American folklore and urban myth. Many were said to exist in remote rural areas where some of the early European settlers had put down roots. Such people were often hardy and rather reclusive—preferring to stick to their own societies—and gave rise to whispers and gossip in the more settled areas. Stories began to circulate in a
reas of Kentucky and Tennessee of Melon Heads living in almost inaccessible areas such as the Rutherford Mountain region on the border of the two states during the 1940s and 50s. In Arkansas, there were also tales of such people dwelling in isolated areas of the Boston Mountains in the north of the state. And in Louisiana, rather frightening stories of cannibalistic Melon Heads living deep within the bayou country were common in the 1920s and 1930s. The remoteness and inaccessibility of such areas often added to the actual horror of the accounts.
Around the time of World War II, another element began to creep into such tales. Previously, the existence of the Melon Heads was attributed to inbreeding or to sexual perversion (as in the Risbury and German cases), but now some of this was also attributed to surreptitious scientific or medical experimentation. This widened the scope of the legend from “hillbilly inbreeding” into a broader context. These might be personal or even government research, using humans as guinea pigs. Such a notion was just as horrible as imagining that the Melon Heads were the results of sin or of sexual deviance. It further widened the geographical scope of the myth—no longer were such tales confined to the remote hill country, but now they might be in areas of more urban population. Although clandestine, such experimentation might be conducted on the very outskirts of towns or cities. And they were not the sole province of unlettered mountaineers, but rather of educated, though suspect, medical minds. Indeed, during World War II, it was believed that the military conducted experiments in the creation of a “super soldier” who could fight in any theater of war and who had enhanced intelligence with which to fight the enemy. Even after the war, the idea of the “mad scientist” still persisted—a crazed figure totally obsessed by a scientific ideal, the execution of which superseded all moral and ethical constraints.
Throughout time, the myth of the crazed scientist expanded and developed. He was working for the military or the government on some ultra-secret project about which the general public could not be told. Or he was some sort of insane individual who was crazily planning some sort of national domination. He preyed on the most vulnerable of society—the old and, more particularly, children—as the subjects of his horrific experiments. And because they had been in some way altered, this myth merged with stories of feral children roaming the remote woods and created a tableau of horror and fear. Discarded results of fiendish experimentation were now roaming freely in certain areas and, like Frankenstein’s monster, might put “normal people” at risk. Such creatures might even eat human flesh or drink human blood. The idea of a failed experiment seemed, perhaps, even more terrifying than the offspring of carnal sin. Indeed, it was assumed that some of these awful creations did drink blood, making them vampires in the literal sense. And they prowled around urban areas, often just beyond the glow of the streetlights. The scientific idea of urban menace actually gave these alleged horrors a greater imminence. They were out there in the shadows just beyond the light’s comforting glow—or so the myth said.
Among these unquestioned scientific creatures were the Melon Heads. These were no longer the product of folkloric evil, but were the results of questionable experimental practices. Perhaps they were the offspring of some genetic manipulation (either by a crazed individual or scientific facility—maybe even a government agency) to enhance human intelligence or strength. What had been created were monsters. The idea that the Melon Heads were the products of a failed government experiment gained much ground in a number of states and they had been seen all across America from Michigan to Massachusetts to Texas. Such sightings were often incorporated into the local folklore of the area.
The state in which the Melon Heads feature strongly in urban myth and legend, however, is Ohio, particularly in Cleveland. The Kirtland suburb of the city has achieved a notoriety all of its own concerning the Melon Heads centering on a specific section known as the Gore Orphanage Road. The area borders on some dense woodland in which groups of strangely headed humanoids—the results of terrible genetic experiments—are still said to dwell. The name Gore allegedly derives from a Dr. Gore who ran an orphanage and conducted terrible (and illegal) experiments on the children who were inmates there. In a bid to raise their intelligence, he created a number of Melon Heads, who eventually turned on him and killed him before escaping into the surrounding woodlands. Their presence there has supposedly been recorded since around World War II, but even before that, the place already had a sinister reputation. This stemmed from the macabre history of a place known locally as Swift’s Hollow.
The Hollow takes its name from Joseph Swift, a property developer and landowner who moved there from Massachusetts around the mid-1820s with his wife Eliza. A reasonably wealthy man, Swift built a grand house on the banks of the Vermillion River, which soon became known as “Swift’s Mansion.” According to contemporary accounts, it was a grand and ostentatious dwelling, the likes of which had never been seen anywhere around and probably in all Ohio. Was it any wonder that such an elaborate building took on the name of its builder? Although the house was officially known as “Rose-dale,” it was always called “Swift’s Mansion” and the area as Swift’s Hollow.
Soon after they settled in the Hollow, bad luck hit Joseph Swift and his family. In 1831, Swift’s 5-year-old daughter Tymphenia died from a mysterious illness; in 1841, his 24-year-old son Herman also died from a peculiar illness. Around the time of his son’s death, Swift made a series of particularly bad investments, including one on a proposed railroad that had been scheduled for development. The whole scheme suddenly and unexpectedly fell through, leaving him almost bankrupt. The Civil War completed his financial decline, and he was forced to sell his grand house in 1865 and move away.
The man to whom he sold the house, Nicholas Wilber, had a curious reputation. This was an era when Spiritualism was taking hold in some parts of America and Wilber was both interested in and associated with the movement. He began to organize spiritual experiments and séances in the house. There were various attempts to communicate with and to raise both ghosts and demons, all of which haunted the mansion and the surrounding Hollow long after Wilber had gone.
Although he was obsessed with supernatural entities and powers, Wilber’s sojourn in Swift’s Hollow did neither him nor his family any good. Like Joseph Swift before him, his family was hit by a series of unfortunate and tragic illnesses. He and his wife lost four children to diphtheria—Jesse (age 11), May (age 9), and the twins Roy and Ruby (age 2). All of them died within six days of each other as the terrible illness swept through the mansion between January 13th and January 19th, 1893. Wilber then began to suffer from a strange wheezy and wasting disease, which might have been related to diphtheria. His wife died there in 1899 and Wilber followed her in February 1901.
The grand house now lay abandoned and the notion of such a mansion lying derelict out in the woods, especially one that had been the focus of Spiritualist activity, prompted many local stories of ghosts and the walking dead throughout the surrounding community. Special attention was drawn to the abandoned and overgrown children’s graves in the woody undergrowth, and the crumbling mansion was generally regarded as being haunted by a number of ghosts, some of whom Wilber had summoned during his experiments.
The story of the Melon Heads is a much later addition, but it is also strongly connected with Swift’s Hollow. At the end of 1903, the mansion was bought by the Reverend Johann Sprunger, a Lutheran minister who had the idea of starting a self-sustaining Christian community there. His intention was to provide work in the local area, but also to provide a refuge for neglected or abused children from the surrounding district. He hoped to teach boys and girls the benefits of a virtuous life, as well as husbandry and farming techniques, thus contributing toward the local economy. The institution was not really an orphanage in the conventional sense; although Sprunger constructed dormitories in the house, these were mainly used by the Christian workers while the neglected boys were billeted in specially constructed accommodations at the nearby Hughes farm and
the girls at the neighboring Heywood property. Sprunger viewed this entire complex as a community, which he named “The Light and Hope Orphanage.”
At this time, Gore Orphanage Road was simply called Gore Road. According to many people, the roadway took its name from a sinister custodian of the orphanage who had mistreated those in his charge. However, the name probably comes from the shape of the road itself, which resembled the outline of the hem of a skirt. A gored skirt is made from a triangular piece of material that is narrow at the waist, but wider and more comfortable at the bottom. This type of skirt was quite popular in Ohio, and the edge of it may have given the road its name. The word orphanage may have been added later to facilitate the institution that the Reverend Sprunger had established there.
