Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An old mansion sits outside of town, through the forest and past the old cemetery.
A place haunted by its past, and stalked by monsters.
Well, near the lakeside community of Saugatuck, that familiar tale is told.
“There was like an orphanage or an asylum or something like that out here, and there were — experiments done on children?” said question-asker Abi Avery, explaining her understanding of the origins of the story.
I met Abi at the Felt estate north of Saugatuck, about half an hour from her home in Covert and about twenty minutes from the Fennville Library where she works.
There, we discussed the legend of the Melon Heads, a tale that has endured in the region for decades.
“I know my chemistry teacher, when I was in high school, told us stories about how he and his brother used to go Melon Head hunting when they were kids.”
The Melon Heads are alleged to lurk in the woods and caves surrounding the Felt Mansion.
Out front we met Jim Hayden, who will be our Melon Head lore master. He’s the public information officer for Laketown Township.
Hayden, Abi and I had permission to explore the mansion, now maintained by a non-profit.
We toured the 12,000-square-foot Felt residence, which has 25 rooms in total, even sneaking a ballroom onto its third floor.
After the tour, we had our discussion in the guest room, sitting on red velveteen chairs across from a marble fireplace.
The ethereal white drapes and pink floral wallpaper were a stark difference to the grisly topic we were set to discuss.
“The minute I came here, 89ish, I heard the Melon Head stories. It was just like, first day, day one,” Hayden said.
Each time Jim Hayden heard the tale, it was slightly different. Children, abandoned by their parents, kept in an orphanage, asylum or hospital, experimented on by a deranged doctor.
The story plays on stereotypes of mental illness and orphans.
Equally insulting, the Melon Heads are purported to have sharp fangs and large, bulbous heads. With a feral appetite for flesh, especially of the human variety.
But Hayden was quick to firmly place this story in the fiction category.
“First off, there was never an asylum here on this property. There's never an insane asylum. There was never a mental hospital. There was never a hospital.”
The estate’s real history begins with its namesake Dorr Felt, who built it as a summer home in 1928.
Felt gained his fortune through the invention of machines like the Comptometer.
“What made it special, it could do adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, all at once,” Hayden said.
Hayden said the origin of the Melon Heads’ name lies in the building’s time as a Catholic prep school, after the Felt family sold the building in 1949.
According to Hayden, the boys who attended the school were wealthy, and because of that some locals viewed them as uppity and pretentious.
“One way to make fun of them was to call them Melon Heads, because they were reading so much their heads got big with information.”
But how did we get from an insult directed at real teenagers to cannibalistic kids creeping in the woods?
Hayden said there are many factors that could have played a role, from the estate’s secluded location to its ever-changing history. The mansion eventually became a state police outpost, and the dormitory added by the Catholic school was turned into a prison.
“It becoming a prison didn't help much, because a prison is a mysterious entity for people. You can't go in, you can't tour it.”
And Hayden said the view of the mansion didn’t improve when it was abandoned after the state sold it in 1996.
“It was frightening. It was just an old building that you didn't know what was going on. There were dead animals, graffiti.”
Restoration did not begin for another six years, but before that, who wouldn’t believe something scary lurked at the Felt Mansion, awaiting its next unfortunate victim?
“Ya know, throw in a story— a kind of a creepy night with thunder and lightning, and you got a good legend,” Hayden said.
But a legend nonetheless.
I asked question-asker Abi Avery if she was disappointed that the Melon Heads aren’t real. She was not. She said it was no big surprise.
“People talk about these children still being in the woods. Children are don't stay children that long.”
Michael Symonds reports for WMUK through the Report for America national service program.
