The Cleveland Melonheads

You've heard the stories about alien-like beasts roaming around on the outskirts of Cleveland Ohio. Legend has it they used to be orphaned children experimented on by an evil doctor, then turned loose and left to go feral in the woods. 

Well, that's all nonsense. Today we bring you the true story of the Cleveland Melonheads, as told by the man behind the legend. 

Transcript

You’d only had your house for six months before you got your dream job. There was no use keeping it, you were going to be on the other side of the country. But you had lived there, and you’d loved the place, so you wanted to leave your mark somehow. You needed to re-do one of the walls in your kitchen anyway because when your fridge broke down it had soaked the bottom of the drywall. So you get some red paint and ask your friends what you should write to give the next owners who renovated a good chuckle. You tear down the wall, ready to splatter “Get out while you still can” in blood red, but you find that someone else has had the same idea. And as the wall comes down it becomes clear that there’s more than a harmless prank afoot. Painted on the boards, hidden behind the plumbing and electric lines are your first and last name. Below that are the words “Good luck at your new job.” After a mild freakout, you cover up the words and finish installing the new drywall panel. After the move, you convince yourself that that whole thing never happened, that you’d imagined it. But when your bathroom sink floods at your new place you’re nervous. You put off replacing the cabinet for as long as you can, but eventually, you have to worry about mold. And the day you take the cabinet off the wall you find what you’ve been dreading. Waiting for you in dripping blood red letters is; The Podcast Inside Your House. 

You can read all kinds of stories online about the melonheads, but like any urban legend, it’s been twisted by time. There was never an evil doctor or an insane asylum. The Nazis didn’t come here to experiment on hydrocephalic children. No, the truth is much darker and much more tragic.

It all started at a crybaby bridge. You can find one of those anywhere in the Midwest, I’m sure, they all have the same legend. If you go there, shut off your car, and turn off the lights you're supposed to hear a baby crying. Depending on the bridge maybe you’ll even get little handprints appearing on your windshield too. If you get really lucky though, you might even take home your own baby. 

When I first heard the cry, decades ago now, my car was on, my brights turned up, and my windows down. It was almost December, but I've never minded the cold. I find it refreshing. There were no tales of ghosts when I drove across that bridge, so when that first ear-splitting cry rang out, I thought it was the wind. Though it was enough to make me hesitate and ease off the gas enough to listen. I puttered to a stop in the middle of the bridge. Just as I was about to take off, I heard it again; the unmistakable wailing of an infant, but louder than I ever thought a baby could cry.

Shutting off my car I crept over to the side of the bridge, full of dread at what I might see. The cries grew more insistent, and I was certain that they were the last screams of a child on its deathbed. Mercifully I couldn't see anything, but I could tell that the sounds were coming from the bank of the river, just under the bridge. 

The climb was steep and slippery and I fell in the mud twice despite the aid of my lone flashlight. I kept the beam focused on the ground, afraid that if I pointed it toward the cries I would just climb back up and get in my car. I knew I needed to help, but for some reason, my instincts were screaming at me to just get back in the car and drive away. I took the last few steps much slower than I should have, keeping the light on my dirty shoes for as long as possible. Then, taking a deep breath, I pointed it at the sound. The naked crumpled form of a baby lay just a few feet away from me. He was so close to the river's edge that his form was slick with water seeping up from the sand and mud. As I got closer it became clear he had been tossed from the bridge.

Looking at him, at Daniel, for the first time I felt sick to my stomach in a specific way that I’d only felt once before as a child when I’d found a baby bird so mangled by the family dog that I knew instinctively I had to kill it. It was the feeling of seeing something so far beyond suffering that you knew it would be better off dead. His arm was twisted behind his shoulder, the tiny white bone sticking out. Grey and red mottled skin reflected the light back harshly at me, slick with icy river water. But his head, that was the worst part. It was swollen to twice the size that it should be. My mind conjured up terrible images of the child's skull cracking open, blood pooling where the brain should be. 

I found myself standing over him, wondering if it wouldn’t be a mercy to nudge him into the water and end his suffering. But then he looked at me, and our eyes locked for the first time, and I knew I couldn’t do it. I picked him up and held him close to me as I clambered back up the steep embankment, his heartbeat fluttering against my chest.

When I got to the hospital, doctor Hughes told me Daniel had a condition called hydrocephalus. But his nervous glances and shaky voice told me what he wouldn’t say out loud; that he wasn’t sure. Daniel stayed in the hospital for two weeks, and when I came to visit him I would catch the doctors and nurses giving him looks and whispering to each other. They said hurtful things about how he was “creepy” or “not right” or “something they’d never seen before.” I was disgusted that medical professionals could be so callous to a baby. One nurse even told me in passing that “that boy had the devil in him.” Bastards, all of them. 

While I was watching over Daniel, police were on the hunt for his mother. They visited the girls known around town to be promiscuous, ready to lay down the law if any of them were hiding anything. Sheriff Wilson kept me up to date, and I kept track of everyone as they checked them out, ready to go and extract my own justice if they found the person responsible for throwing Daniel off a bridge like he was a piece of trash. But by the time Daniel was ready to leave the hospital, we still had no idea where he’d come from, and the sheriff decided his mother had probably been someone just passing through. 

With no one else ready to care for him, they asked me if I’d be willing to take on the responsibility, and of course, I said yes. 

The day I brought Daniel home was the happiest day of my life. There was a lot I had to figure out of course: diapers and formula and doctor's appointments, but I took to it like a fish to water. I’d always wanted to have kids, but I’d just never met the right woman, and I guess I thought that meant I wasn’t meant to be a father. 

Daycare was the biggest hurdle. I dealt with the complaints from other parents in as civil a manner as I could muster, but there was only so much of their bitching that I could put up with. They said awful things about my baby, all lies of course. On his first day there, little Judy Mason complained about Daniel biting her arm, and her mother tried to say my boy was a danger to the other children. One of the workers even quit because she said that she didn’t like the way that Daniel looked at her. There were more stories of biting or fighting after that, but those were all things to be expected of a young boy, so I wasn’t even sure why the daycare staff felt the need to tell me about all of them. I didn’t think it was a big deal. 

Daniel grew remarkably fast. The doctors who examined him when we found him seemed fairly certain that he’d been a newborn, but after that first year, he was nearly three feet tall. But his impressive height meant it was harder for him to play with the other babies. 

It all came to a head when my boy was playing with Judy Mason again. She was a bubbly little baby and the only one in the daycare who seemed to seek out my boy, despite their rocky start. Perhaps babies didn’t hold grudges. Anyway, the two were playing like they always did, when they started roughhousing. It’s just what toddlers do, but apparently, my little boy didn’t know his own strength. He ended up breaking her arm. 

We had to leave after that. We picked another spot on the map, close enough to the city to be near a hospital, and have days out on the town, those occasional conveniences that keep one from being too isolated. But also a spot rural enough that it was uninfluenced by the racy sensibilities of the city. 

As we got settled into our new home Daniel continued to grow at an alarming rate. By the time that summer rolled around, I’d only had my boy for a year and a half and he was already practically a teenager. He could walk, and though he couldn’t talk, something had never set right with his jaw, he could write in perfect English. 

I’d often thanked the Lord for letting me finally become a father, and I started to realize that he’d given me an even more beautiful gift. Daniel wasn’t just my miracle baby, he was something miraculous, something heavenly. The way he grew up was not natural, not possible without divine intervention. I started to wonder if perhaps God had sent me an angel to raise. In addition to his height, Daniel never quite grew into his large head. His eyes had stayed a bit strange too, the pupils massive, and the irises such a rich brown that they looked red in the sunlight. 

I realized that school would not be a possibility at all, and even staying in a town, somewhere in sight of other people was dangerous. It was obvious to anyone who lived near us for more than a month that Daniel was different. And what was different, people automatically assumed was something bad and scary. We picked another spot on the map, this time a little further out, and bought a plot of land far from prying eyes. 

This was a long time ago. Not as far in the past as the legends would have you believe, but long enough ago that men were still men and we knew how to survive when we had to. We opted to build our own cabin. Daniel was big enough to help by then, and the fall that we spent building our new home was probably the most joyful and lovely time of my entire life. 

It killed me to chop down all the cedar trees nearby, but they made the best building blocks for our new home. We made sure to spread the pinecones from the ones we took though, ensuring that their descendants would come back. While we built we lived in a tent, camping off the land, and although I knew we needed to be inside before winter, I often found myself wishing I could sleep under the stars every night, I’d never felt so connected to the world.  The woods weren’t the only thing I found myself feeling connected to though.

I’d always chalked it up to parental intuition, but when Daniel filled up one of his notepads sooner than I remembered to replace it, I realized there was something more going on. When he wanted or needed something, I could sense it, even if he didn’t write it down. It was almost like I could read his thoughts. Or I guess more like he could send them over to me when he wanted to.  One look into his maroon eyes, and I knew instantly what needed to be done. 

When our home was finished, we settled into a comfortable routine. I tried to homeschool Daniel, but his remarkable mind was leagues ahead of me. Half the time I just went to the local universities and bought cheap textbooks to let him learn for himself. By the time he was just three years old, he was becoming a proper man. 

With Daniel’s knowledge of the outside world growing exponentially more in-depth, so too grew his desire to experience it for himself. Without me even needing to broach the topic of a disguise he asked me to bring him sunglasses and an oversized knit cap. There was nothing to be done about his great height or his mottled skin, but people in the city were used to stranger sights I’m sure. 

I took Daniel on as many trips as I could stomach, but being in the city too much, and seeing the direction the world was heading in made me sick. But Daniel got up to his own excursions in the nearby town too. I didn’t need to remind him of his disguise, he wouldn't go anywhere without it. Even still, anyone who got too close to him could see that he was no ordinary man.

Before long Daniel had cultivated a reputation around town, and even all the way into the city. At the store, I’d hear whispers of a monster in the woods, something grotesque and alien. I never tried to correct the townsfolk, I figured it was best they leave us be for as long as we could keep them away. 

When the town finally came for us it was in the form of three rebellious teenagers. They snuck around our cabin as stealthily as a blind bear in a berry patch. I wanted to greet them with the shotgun, but Daniel had other plans. He took some freshly baked molasses cookies, his notepad and went out to try and make the first true friends he’d ever had. And after a round of gasps and squeals and stares, it worked. 

Their names were Jillian, Robbie, and Steve, and just like Daniel, I was fooled by their friendly facade. They started coming over all the time on weekends, and when that next summer hit, they were over at all hours and all times of day. I wasn’t sure if I liked them, but my boy was aging so fast that I didn’t want to deny him whatever small bits of normalcy he could find.  

The whispers around town soon stopped altogether, and I even had Steve’s parents try to befriend me any time I went grocery shopping. They owned the store, so there was no avoiding them. Eventually, my annoyance turned to fake friendliness, which snuck its way into what I thought was a genuine friendship. 

Daniel and I started going about town together during the day, and though the stares were unavoidable, people began to get used to him enough to try and at least be less obvious about it. It was a good thing too because my savings were rapidly drying up, and it was high time I got a job. I went back to handyman work and started making my own friends around town. It started to feel like we belonged there. 

The next year was one that I wished I could remember fondly because at the time I thought we’d found a place that would accept us, a place that would make Daniel's short life span a pleasant one. Though his bald head had never produced any hair to go gray, he was getting bags under his eyes, and his fearsome strength was beginning to wane. We told the townspeople the same thing we’d told his friends about his sickness, that whatever was wrong with him had doctors baffled. Though we also told the townspeople that he was nineteen, as explaining that he was only four years old would certainly cause panic. 

Sometimes I try to isolate the memories of my time there and enjoy them in a vacuum; going out for ice cream in the summer, spending hours at the library, visiting the homes of Daniel’s friends, and genuinely liking most of their families. Though I could never quite stomach Jillian’s parents, I’d never understood what kind of father would let his daughter run wild with a bunch of teenage boys. I tried not to let Daniel know of my disapproval of that girl though, I figured if he was ever going to experience any semblance of romance it would be with a loose girl like that, and I wasn’t going to discourage him. 

Sometimes I’ll catch myself thinking of Daniel’s friends fondly too. They’d come over all the time to play cards and listen to music, and all those other things kids used to get up to before they started spending all day on their computers. When they joined us for meals I’d catch myself even being charmed by them. Jillian was a bold and talkative girl, but she’d get you talking too. Before you knew it she’d have you telling her your whole life story. Steve was the leader of the group, an extroverted boy who was always talking about the future, and always planning ahead. He was going to get out of that town and make something of himself. Robbie was the joker, sometimes verging on inappropriate at dinner, but I could never quite bring myself to scold him. 

Sometimes I smiled and remembered those times, but then those sunny memories would inevitably cloud over with the darkness that had followed them. 

It was around the time Daniel turned five that his health took a nosedive, and he was sick more often than he was well. His friends came over less and less, both because of his illness but also because of his intense bouts of melancholy. I tried to ask him what was wrong and he never wanted to talk about it. But I always thought it was obvious; that he was dying, that his time was so much shorter than the rest of us get, that it was all so terribly unfair. 

Sometimes I thought about trying to take him to the doctor and get another opinion about what really might be wrong with him, but I had no way to explain away his lack of records. I also figured that the Lord had sent him to me, so if the Lord wanted him fixed he would do it. 

One night Daniel finally opened up to me. I’d often told him that he was my miracle baby and that I thought God had chosen him to do great things. And he finally admitted that he believed that to be true as well. He said he’d figured out what his mission on this earth was, but that he didn’t want to do it. I tried to reassure him that God works in mysterious ways, and that even if we don’t understand why, we need to do what he asks of us. Daniel didn’t get out of bed for a whole week after that. 

We had another talk and he wrote, “I wish I could just be normal.” That one really hurt me because I was sure that he must have had that thought countless times before, but he’d never written it out before. 

We talked more and more about his mission, about God’s will, but he never told me what God was asking of him, only that the Lord’s many voices were becoming harder and harder to ignore. I tried to read Daniel stories from the bible, the ones of people being asked to do terrible or confusing things. I told him that whatever it was, it was okay, that he was fulfilling a purpose bigger than us. 

Eventually, he got out of bed, and though I could still tell when he was feeling sick he always tried to hide it. Daniel spent that last summer hanging out with his friends as much as he could, and as it drew to a close, and fall crept in, I knew his end was coming. 

He told me one chilly perfect day that he needed my help. It was a day that reminded me of that first fall we’d spent in the woods, living in a tent and building our home. It made me so incredibly sad that my time as a father was so incredibly short. Daniel wrote out that he knew what he needed to do, and that he would need the house to himself over the weekend. I didn’t ask why, I just told him I’d do anything he needed. 

I ended up staying with Steve’s parents, as we’d all grown close by then. Steve was notably absent that weekend, saying he was staying with Robbie. I had a feeling that if we'd called Robbie's parents, they would have said that he was staying with Steve. But neither I nor Steve’s parents questioned the alibi. They knew that my son was dying, and though we suspected he was going to throw some wild teenage house party, we weren’t going to rob him of that experience. 

Later I would read in the papers that a dozen other kids had lied to their parents about what they were doing that weekend. The liquor store clerk gave an interview where he admitted to looking the other way when a local drifter had paid in cash for copious amounts of booze, while half a dozen teenagers waited suspiciously in the parking lot. I think the whole dang town was quietly proud of Daniel for getting up to some normal teenage mischief for once. 

Later too I would see on the news about that same drifter buying unsavory items from the farm and feed store. Though he’d gotten enough corn feed and heartworm pills to make the ketamine as unsuspicious as it could be. See, back in the day more often than not people operated as their own vets for their farm animals, and you could buy whatever you needed to get the job done. That included rough surgical equipment too, all designed for livestock of course, but a blade cuts the same regardless of what animal you use it on. For that purchase, the drifter paid in cash as well, but this time witnesses would later only report one teenager waiting outside the store, the most conspicuous teenager in town. 

It was Sunday morning, the Lord’s time, when things went wrong. I was at church with Steve’s parents, when I felt it; a distress call. I could sense in that divine way that my boy was in great danger, that he needed me. I sprinted out mid-service and drove home as fast as I could. There were several cars parked in the clearing around our house, and I was terrified of what I might find inside. 

What I walked into was strange, and it did scare me at first, but like I’ve said so many times before, just because something is different doesn’t mean it’s bad. 

Our house was small, so Daniel’s project, his mission, took up the whole living room and sprawled into both of our bedrooms as well. Every cup in the house, and some of the bowls were scattered along the carpet, some still glistening with liquid in the morning sun. Others were shattered and broken, clearly dropped mid-drink. Along with their drinks, the teenagers who’d held them were all collapsed on the floor. They all looked as if they’d been left where they’d passed out, though their hands had been tied together. Some were slowly stirring, but none in the living room were awake yet. Screaming told me that at least one person in Daniel’s bedroom was awake though. 

I ran in and found Jillian hunched over Steve and Robbie, both untied and both groggy but Steve was close to waking. Sprawled out on the floor next to them, was my baby boy. But he wasn’t unconscious, no, he was lying in a pool of his own blood, with his head bashed in one one side. The blood covering Jillian’s hands and splashed up her torso told me all that I needed to know. 

I dashed into the living room and grabbed the shotgun from the rafters. I aimed for her leg when I fired though, I needed to know what the fuck was going on and she was the only one awake. When she was done sniveling about the hole in her knee she tried to besmirch the memory of my boy. She said that he’d gone crazy and spiked all of their drinks. She said he had tried to hurt Robbie, and looking closer I saw that Robbie was also bleeding, his dark hair matted with gore. 

Steve woke up then, and I shot him in the gut. He started wailing too, but once he quieted down he said “Your kid is a fucking monster. You’re both fucking monsters.”

A shot to the head shut him up, and I was finally able to focus on the voice that mattered. Miraculously, even though his brain had been bashed in, even though surely he had to be dead, Daniel was sending me his thoughts. He projected to me a vision of his mission, the one he’d kept so secret, and I understood that it was mine to take on now. He showed me what he wanted me to do, and though it was hard for me, I got to work. 

I dug through the hole in my boy’s skull and found not brains, but rather a wonderful secret he’d been hiding from us all. Inside his skull was a clutch of maroon eggs, the same color as his eyes. I scooped them out carefully, lovingly. They were so warm and fragile. There was an egg inside his mouth as well, one that had been intended for Robbie. 

Daniel’s thoughts told me to grab the surgical saw that had been kicked under the bed and get to work on finishing what he’d started. It was simple; one egg in each brain, starting with his closest friends. Once I placed the egg in Robbie’s head, the wound around it closed over with a pink membrane, healing itself. Jillian was blessed enough to be awake at the start of her surgery and I told her that she was witnessing a miracle. As I went through the house more and more kids had woken up, and though they screamed, none of them escaped. 

Once everyone had been blessed, I untied them. They were quiet now and seemed to communicate with one another in a way that even I couldn’t hear. Slowly, they all started wandering into the woods. When I was done there was still one egg left, the one that had been meant for Steve, but his brains were all over the bedroom wall so that wouldn’t work. Daniel told me to bury that egg with him. 

I gathered just the bare essentials and fled with Daniel’s body. About an hour into the drive, his voice faded, then disappeared altogether inside my head. 

I drove back to the place where it had all started and carried his corpse down beneath the crybaby bridge, just like I’d carried him up the bank only a few short years prior. I buried my boy as best as I could under river rocks, and I was careful with the egg, placing it on top. It was still warm and I wondered if soon someone else might be blessed with a beautiful baby boy. 

I left Cleveland then and made a new life for myself in my golden years. Aside from the worry that I would be blamed for the mass disappearance of Daniel’s disciples, it was too painful to go back to the place where my boy had been taken from me. 

But last month I had the doctor's visit that we all get eventually, the one where you find out that the end is near. It’s sooner than I would have liked, but I’ve had a good run. It could be any day now. That’s why I’ve written all this down, to tell the world about my precious baby, and the short but wonderful life he had. 

Even facing my own mortality I couldn’t go back to Cleveland. But that yearning to know what kind of legacy I’d managed to leave prompted me to go somewhere else. I drove up to Michigan where, according to the internet, people were seeing what they’d rudely been calling “the melonheads.” I camped out in the woods, at all the different places people claim to have seen them, and eventually, I found what I was looking for.

In the first rays of sunlight, I saw a group of them standing at the edge of the woods. Their heads were swollen, their eyes red, and they looked so happy. There were three boys and a girl, and they watched me carefully. I waved but they didn’t seem to know what that meant. The girl was holding something in her arms that I couldn’t quite make out in the morning mist. They walked up to my tent, cautiously smelling the air as they approached. Then, for just a brief moment before they turned back, the girl held up a prize in her arms. It was a baby boy, mottled gray, and the spitting image of my Daniel. 

My grandbabies had come to visit me, and they’d shown me that they were alive and well. And even more exciting than that, they’d shown me that they were multiplying, spreading all across the country, and populating it with my precious great-grandbabies. 

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the podcast inside your house! To hear every tale of terror as they are released, subscribe to our show on your podcast app or on Youtube or follow us on Facebook and Bluesky. Until Next Time: Have a good Easter and remember, you’re never too old to go on an egg hunt, who knows what wonderful different types you might be able to find?