American Vampires

by Bob Curran

  As time went on, rather disquieting stories began to circulate in the locality about the Reverend Johann Sprunger. For example, he and his wife Katherina had moved to Ohio from New Berne, Indiana, where they had run a more conventional orphanage. This establishment had been destroyed by a mysterious fire in which three small children had died. Although no official blame had been attached to him, rumor said that the Reverend Sprunger had been somehow responsible for the blaze. But there were even more unwholesome stories. There were hints that Katherina was actually Johann Sprunger’s sister with whom he was having an incestuous relationship. Of course, there may have been nothing to the rumors, but they certainly created an unsavory and suspicious atmosphere about the old place. The whiff of incest now hung about the place like a tangible pall and sparked other stories about the couple there.

  Soon, vague fragments of gossip began to turn into darker tales of neglect, child labor, and abuse. In order to keep the food bills down, the Reverend Sprunger bought sick and dying animals from neighboring farms at knockdown prices and made the children eat the diseased flesh. Porridge was boiled up for breakfast in the same pot that was used to wash soiled underwear. There were tales of beatings and other maltreatments. The reality of these stories became exposed when several children ran away from the community and turned up in Vermillion on the other side of the river, bringing with them alarming tales of a regime bordering on outright torture. In 1909, Ohio conducted a formal investigation into the running of the home. Surprisingly, the Reverend Sprunger and his wife readily admitted all the charges that were laid against them, but because the state had no real laws or framework for dealing with orphanages at the time—and because the inmates were a mix of orphans and children whose parents were still alive—no real action was taken to improve the condition of the children. The Sprungers were, however, cautioned and the matter was laid to rest.

  Previous to that, however, just as the investigation was getting underway in 1908, a tragic and horrific incident occurred 40 miles east in the settlement of Collinwood. More than 176 children at an elementary school were either burned or trampled to death as a fire gutted the building. The blaze had been deliberately started by the school janitor—a German-American named Herter (even though he lost four of his own children in the blaze and was injured in trying to save several others), and he was briefly arrested and detained. The main deaths were of children on the second floor of the building who tried to descend a flight of stairs in order to escape as soon as the fire alarm sounded. However, the fire was already taking hold at the foot of the staircase and some of the children turned to make their way back up to the classrooms that they’d left. Those who were coming down shoved them into the flames below. When they reached the rear exits, the fleeing children found them locked (this was taken as proof that the janitor must have been somehow involved in the blaze) and when rescuers tried to open the doors from the outside, they found that they opened inward and that the crush of bodies on the other side prevented anyone from getting through to safety. The fire spread quickly through the trapped children, setting their dresses and hair alight.

  It was a horrific incident, and one that burned itself into the minds of both survivors and rescuers alike. The disaster actually meant the end of Collinwood as a community, as many of the families, fearful at the lack of fire control there, moved away to places like Vermillion, bringing their memories of the horror with them. This horror somehow transferred itself in the popular imagination to the Light and Hope Orphanage and to Gore Road.

  The Reverend Sprunger died in 1911, two years after the state investigation, and the orphanage finally closed in 1916 in a welter of financial problems and unpaid bills. Pelham Hooker Blossom of Cleveland bought the property and began to lease the land out to local farmers while allowing the great house to fall to rot. Finally, there were a number of fires within the old Swift Mansion—perhaps deliberately started by locals—and the buildings were partly destroyed and then pulled down.

  Stories began to circulate that, before the house had been destroyed, it had been owned by an “old man Gore,” who had also run it as an orphanage. He had given his name to the road and reputedly mistreated the children who were in his care. There was another, more sinister story as well. Apparently, Gore had been a medical doctor and had been employed either by the government or by some private foundation to conduct experiments on the children, all of whom had nobody to fight for their rights. In the end, the children had turned on him and it had been they who started the fire that had burned down Swift’s Mansion. Before starting the blaze, they had killed Gore and had drank his blood. They then escaped into the surrounding woodlands in order to continue with their vampiric activities. The story might originate from a confused memory of the Collinwood fire a number of miles away, and might have nothing to do with Swift’s Hollow.

  However, there is an intriguing story concerning a mysterious Dr. Crow, who reputedly took over the building after it closed. This shadowy figure spells his name Crow, Crowe, Krohe, Kroh, and even Khune, and he was allegedly a scientist employed in the area by the government on some secret project. This apparently involved the collection of blood; it was said that Dr. Crow was some sort of “blood specialist” who was also involved in genetics. He is believed to have adopted some very unorthodox methods for his research, some of which involved the kidnapping of children from the surrounding countryside. No date is give for these activities, but it was around the late 1800s/early 1900s, although some place them around the time of World War I, claiming that Crow’s activities were part of the war effort. The purpose of the experiments, however, is unknown, but they were said to involve the collection of blood and the injections of certain fluids into children. This turned them into blood-drinking monsters, increased their strength, and caused their heads to swell in a grotesque way. Whatever they were injected with also increased their ferocity, and they became almost savage and animal-like in their ways. Eventually, according to the legend, they turned on Crow and killed him, setting fire to the old Swift Mansion in the process. As in the other stories, they fled out into the woods around Kirtland where they still wait. From time to time, they will attack people with the express purpose of drinking their blood or eating their flesh, for these children are cannibalistic. They will also spirit away other small children for some unknown purpose deep in the woodlands. Perhaps they take them for food! And late at night, some people living in the edge of the woods claim to have seen huge swollen heads with luminous eyes peering in at their windows after dark. The Melon Heads, they say, are on the prowl!

  Researcher Ryan Orvis, citing the West Geauga Sun as his source (Geauga County is near to Kirtland) found evidence of a Dr. Kroh who was allegedly in the area around World War II. Kroh was an unlicensed doctor, but a follower of the Austrian priest and geneticist, Johann Gregor Mendel, who conducted experiments in cross-plant hybridization. Kroh, it was claimed, attempted to alter the genetics of children by injecting them with various substances. One of his experiments allegedly increased the size of their heads in an attempt to increase their intelligence. It also gave them a taste for human blood. However, the experiments failed, and in a fit of pique, Dr. Kroh bundled all the deformed results of his experiments into the back of a car and released them around the area of the Chagrin River in Kirtland. There, they fled into the woods. In some of the newspaper’s accounts, the doctor treated the children with radiation, so the Melon Heads were also radioactive. Subsequent newspaper articles have pointed to the strangely large number of child graves in the nearby King’s Memorial Road, and have suggested that these might be from Kroh’s failed experiments.

  Since the end of World War II, there have allegedly been a number of sightings of the Melon Heads—both as children and as fully-grown adults—along the Gore Orphanage Road and Wisner Roads in the Kirtland suburbs. Many of these sightings come from passing tourists or from local schoolchildren who have been exploring the woods. But there is a strange conformity about the des
criptions even though they come from people who don’t know each other: a humanoid with an abnormally large head, dressed in a kind of “institutional” clothing, which is torn and often bloodstained (white shirt and brown, ragged, button-up trousers). There is a distinctly feral quality about such figures, which disappear into the woods again almost as soon as they are seen. Maybe this has more to do with human imagination rather than the stories of the orphanage at Swift’s Hollow. Worse, it’s also said that animals—dogs, cats, and others—have been found in the same place with their blood drained. This has led to even further tales of vampire activity in the vicinity of Gore Orphanage Road, all of which is attributed to the Melon Heads in the forest. There are also tales of people who have disappeared into the woodlands for one reason or another and, like some of the children, have never been seen since.

  And yet, for all of Ryan Orvis’s research, there is nothing truly concrete to connect the Kirtland area with abnormal genetic experiments. Of course, it has been argued that such genetic manipulation by Dr. Kroh was conducted in secret, but even so, there would have been some trace of such activity. And all the newspaper accounts that have been offered up appear to be very vague when it comes to specific detail. But that’s not to say that such things didn’t happen or that there might be something out there in the Kirtland woods.

  The strange stories of the cursed family of Joseph Swift, the Spiritualism of Nicholas Wilber, and the utter weirdness of the Light and Hope Orphanage of the Reverend Sprunger and his curious sister have all combined to create an aura of creepiness around the area. The region can certainly be a spooky one, and several other eerie legends have grown up around it; for example, there’s a Cry Baby Bridge on Wisner Road, just north of Kirtland’s Chardon Road. The ghostly child who weeps there is said to have been an inmate of the old Gore Orphanage. It might be easy to dismiss the Melon Heads as a fantasy or urban myth that has been dreamed up by gullible teenagers and tourists, but what if there is something more to it? Many of the accounts show a curious uniformity and nearly all the descriptions of the beings coincide in an eerie and alarming way. And there are similar accounts from some other nearby states.

  In Michigan, the story of the Melon Heads is connected with the old Felt Mansion near Laketown. Local legends say that they are the descendants of hydrocephalic inmates of the nearby Junction Hospital for the Insane, and that they have been living in the woodlands around Laketown for many years. As the result of abuse (and perhaps experimentation) by a number of doctors at the hospital, these inmates broke out and fled into the nearby woods. There they found the decaying Felt Mansion, which they used as a base, prowling out into the surrounding countryside to attack humans and perhaps even drink their blood. The flaw in the story is that such an asylum never existed in the area. There certainly was a Junction Hospital, but the Allegan County records simply list it as a regular hospital with no mental facility attached to it. Nevertheless, a local newspaper, The Holland Sentinel, carried stories of beings seen in the woods and some people’s recollections of the Weeble Heads. According to some of the printed stories, several of the doctors who conducted the experiments were killed by the Melon Heads, and their bloodless, chewed remains lie buried in unmarked graves not far from where the old Felt Mansion once stood. A spectral sight of one of the doctors being killed is frequently seen through the old mansion’s doorway. And it is said that anyone who sees this phantom vision will be pursued by the Melon Heads, who will attempt to drink their blood.

  In Connecticut, the legend appears to take on an even darker tone, with origins that supposedly date back to Colonial times. In Fairfield County, it’s said that a certain family settled in the Trumbull area after having been driven out of Massachusetts for witchcraft and cannibalism. This family was supposedly comprised of vampires. Faced with local hostility, they retreated into the neighboring woods where their descendants continue to live, some of them as Melon Heads, until today. The legend has been amended to include the now-obligatory insane asylum and the customary riot by some of its malformed inmates. There seems to have been a hospital at Grant Wood in Fairfield, which did indeed experience a serious fire in the 1960s. A number of the patients were evacuated, and according to local folklore, some disappeared and were never found (there is absolutely no evidence for this assertion)—these are said to be the ancestors of the present-day Melon Heads, which are to be found in the area. In Trumbull, they supposedly haunt the area around Velvet Street (which is also known locally as “Dracula Dive” on account of their alleged blood-drinking), and in Shelton it is Saw Mill City Road. Velvet Street is still an unpaved dirt road running through deep woodlands, and several people have reputedly disappeared along its length. Such disappearances have, of course, been attributed to the Melon Heads, and this seems to have been borne out by the finding of a number of dead domestic animals in the area, which allegedly appear to have been drained of their blood.

  Back at Swift’s Hollow in Ohio, nothing remains of Rosedale except for a few old graffiti-covered sandstone blocks and a similarly decorated entrance column. Those who visit the Hollow claim, like the workmen in Connecticut, that they have the sensation of someone watching them from somewhere close by. And they too hear unexplained calls and noises in the surrounding woodlands.

  It is not surprising then that such a remote and unfrequented area gave rise to legends of the Melon Heads. Many of the families in this region were interrelated, and of course this gave rise to stories about incest and of queer-resulting births. Much of this must be regarded as prejudice and storytelling by people who regarded themselves as “more civilized” and who wished to portray the barbaric hillbilly as something short of an animal, committing incest and sexual deviation at will. In a sense, the Rutherford hillbilly followed on from the medieval sinner in former European times in terms of deviance and promiscuity. It was to be expected that some of these allegedly inbred children would exhibit signs of deformity, such as being Melon Heads. And there were tales of such individuals living in the very remote regions of Rutherford. For example, in the far reaches of Hat Hollow, Kentucky, there were tales of such things as “man-bats,” creatures with huge heads and vampire features (sometimes even covered in a kind of fur), which prowled the rocky courses of tiny creeks and the thick woods, killing anyone or anything that they came across and drinking their blood. It is said that the wooded gullies and ravines around Hat Hollow echoed with their eerie cries as they called to one another. Similarly, loggers working on a sawmill up in Buffalo Lick Hollow, Tennessee, claim to have glimpsed figures in a remote wallow with large and malformed heads crossing a small creek. These beings are generally taken to be offspring of local families who have been thrown out into the wilds and left to fend for themselves.

  Are the stories of Melon Heads in both Ohio and elsewhere true, or are they mainly urban (or even rural) myths? If they are true, are such beings the results of failed clandestine genetic experiments carried out by the government, or by covert organizations and individuals? As night closes in on the forests of America, strange shadows move in the half-light and strange sounds are heard. Are there really things lurking out in the woodland night—waiting, perhaps, to drink your blood?

  MISSOURI

  In May 1673, a Jesuit priest named Father Jacques Marquet and a French trader named Louis Jolliet traveled down the Mississippi River in a couple of canoes, mapping and exploring the river banks. On the rough maps that Marquet made, he marked a region known as Missouri, taking the name from an Illinois Indian word ouempssourita (pronounced wimhsoorita) meaning “those who have dug-out canoes.” In doing so, he not only named an indigenous tribe and a tributary river, but also an area of land that would one day become a state. Father Marquet claimed the area for France, although the French never really referred to the area as Missouri, preferring to call it Illinois Country. In 1682, Rene-Robert Chevelier, the Sieur de la Salle, made a successful journey to the mouth of the Mississippi and passed through the area once again, reinforcing
the French claim. The French authorities took little interest in “Missouri,” however, and simply established a line of trading posts there to facilitate commerce with local native tribes. Perhaps Chevelier had plans for a wider commercial enterprise in the area but, if he had, he died before they could be completed.

  There is an old tale that says when Father Marquet arrived in Missouri, and was standing on the banks of the Mississippi, local tribes showed him some low hills and told him that strange lights were seen there—lights that would draw the energies from anyone who ventured too close to them. The Father told the Native Americans that there were evil spirits that had been sent by the Devil to torment them, and that they were to pray for deliverance from them. Only God could drive such things away. The Devil, they were warned, was everywhere, and was seeking to subvert all of God’s creatures. For the priests who followed the French traders, the area known as Missouri was an earthly place in which the Evil One and his agents would make themselves manifest.

  Father Gabriel Marest, who established a mission station on the west bank of the Mississippi in 1700, was particularly exercised about the presence of evil in the surrounding countryside. His station comprised French settlers and groups of Kaskaskia peoples who had fled into the Illinois Country to avoid raids on their villages by marauding bands of Iroquois. This angered the Sioux, who held lands around the Des Peres River where the Kaskaskia were settling. In 1703, they forced Marest to move his mission south and strengthen his links with the Kaskaskia. In learning the language of these people, the good Father also learned some of their lore and beliefs. He learned of moving lights that danced and bobbed, and sometimes drew the energies of travelers into themselves, leaving those whom they encountered weak and tired. He believed, as did the Kaskaskia, that these were witches and evil spirits who had been sent by the Enemy of Mankind to do harm to God’s people. He recorded his thoughts in a journal, stressing the sense of growing evil, which the Kaskaskia conveyed to him. Some of the natives thought that they might be the spirits of the dead, seeking a way back into the world or trying to do the living harm, and some of the French priests in Marest’s mission tended to agree with them. Unexplained lights, and the strange noises and sensations that accompanied them, were undeniably the work of devils. Through the years, other tribes began to drift into the area, brought there by hunting or driven there by enemies—the Missouri and the Osage were prominent groups who settled the region. The Missouri were reasonably well settled along the Mississippi, and became allies of the French. They too had their folktales about strange and moving lights, which sapped the energies of those who saw them or who got too close to them.