The Melon Heads & the Ohio woods

Modern back-road folklore of the northern Ohio woods

Wisner Road winds sharply through a densely wooded stretch of Kirtland, in Lake County east of Cleveland, and on into neighbouring Chardon Township in Geauga County. By day it is farmland and forest for hikers and riders. After dark, local lore says, it is Melon Head country.

The melon heads are small humanoid figures with huge, bulbous, hairless heads and malformed bodies, said to come out of the woods at night. Most tellings involve a Dr. Crow, also spelled Crowe, Krohe or Kroh. In the darkest version he ran an orphanage and experimented on children who suffered from hydrocephalus, injecting more fluid into their heads until they swelled to three times normal size; the children killed him, burned the place down and fled into the forest. Some say a secret government programme was behind it. In a gentler version Dr. Crow took the children in out of kindness, and when his wife died he could no longer care for them, so after his death they were left to wander the woods, wary of anyone who intrudes.

For generations of East Side teenagers, driving Wisner Road at night has been a rite of passage. Bonnie Snyder of the Lake County Genealogical Society remembers rolling the car windows down to listen for them; getting out of the car, she said, made you pretty brave. She later went looking for the doctor, combing census records and newspaper clippings from the 1930s and 1940s and the obituary indexes, name indexes and cemetery books at Morley Library, and found no Dr. Crowe, Crow, Krowe, Kroh or Krow anywhere. She is 90 percent sure he never existed.

Kirtland is not alone. Michigan has melon heads around Felt Mansion in Ottawa County, blamed on an asylum the Allegan County Historical Society says never existed, and southwest Connecticut has its own around Shelton, Trumbull and Milford. The Ohio legend spread through websites where readers posted their own versions, and it has been filmed more than once, from Legend of the Melonheads in 2010 to The Melon Heads: House of Crow, a micro-budget horror film by the Solon native Eddie Lengyl, who hunted for melon heads near Wisner Road as a boy. Tonya Busic, education manager at the Lake County Historical Society, collects such stories too, the far-fetched along with the true, because they are retold often enough to have become part of the county's history.