Across Fairfield County, Connecticut, whispers grow that back in the trees and forests, along lonely country lanes, live the “Melon Heads” — dangerous creatures known to lure and attack wayward outsiders.
Across Fairfield County, Connecticut, whispers grow that back in the trees and forests, along lonely country lanes, live the “Melon Heads” — dangerous creatures known to lure and attack wayward outsiders. Trevor, a new mail carrier, found himself on an unfamiliar country route and wanted to finish before the darkness closed in. He'll always question whether or not that was a good idea...
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There’s a melon on the edge of a picnic table on a hot, late summer day. You notice it because someone bumped the table and the melon is starting to wobble. You see it wobble; see what’s going to happen; and maybe if you move quick-- there’s that drop in your stomach and the tightness in your chest, and you spring forward a step…
Not fast enough. The smooth roundness slips past your reaching fingers and smashes on the concrete. You stand there for a moment, staring at it. And it reminds you of… It reminds you of this week’s story. Because there’s something obscene about a very ripe, very smashed melon. Something about the way the juices ooze and the flesh glistens… how the slimy center clings to the seeds like larval secrets. Somehow, something that a moment ago looked so delicious… now you don’t want to touch it.
But somebody has to clean it up. Put it in the trash, get it out of sight… out of mind. If only you could forget that night as easily. You crouch down… start to gather the warm, wet, broken pieces together… and suddenly you’re back in that horrible place. On that narrow country lane in Connecticut, with the barren trees crowding in around you… that lonely old house up ahead… those sounds in the dark forest… and you realize…
This is the Camp Monsters Podcast.
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This is the very first campfire of our fall season. Welcome back. We’re glad to see you-- especially on a perfect night like this, here in the Connecticut woods just outside the town of Weston. You may have heard of Weston-- it’s a small, quiet town… renowned for the beauty of its name. And known for its nature preserve, the largest in this area-- which is called the Devil’s Den.
We aren’t in the Devil’s Den right now-- the preserve closes at dusk, and fires aren’t allowed. Anyway, our story doesn’t take place inside the Devil’s Den. It happened on one of these narrow country lanes-- you must have driven down one like it to get here. Narrow… gravel… gray tree trunks crowding in like old stone pillars on either side. And leaves like fiery stained glass blown free of its windows… red and orange and gold… shimmering… reflecting the light of the dying sun.
The light reminded Werner of home. Werner hailed from a land of fire and broken glass. Werner knew that he was lucky to be here, in Connecticut, far away from all that, on the day we find him hurrying down one of these narrow country lanes, back in 1945.
Werner has an old black coat over his shoulders and a ragged bundle in his hands. Down the hill, in the thick of the trees, he hears the distant cascade of water. So he leaves the road, plunging through the naked black fingers of autumn undergrowth until he’s squatting beside a small stream. And then he does a series of things that don’t initially make any sense.
He removes his black overcoat and sets it neatly aside. He strips off his dark denim shirt and pants, wraps each of them tightly around a large rock, and wades out into the stream to sink them in the deepest part. Back on the bank he paces up and down, searching intently among the stones, picking up and discarding one after another before settling on one small, dark rock. He sets that special stone on top of a boulder and smashes it repeatedly with a hunk of granite. Among the shattered flakes he finds one that will suit his purpose, and pulling a fresh white shirt from the ragged bundle that he carries, he uses the stone to cut and rip the shirt into long strips.
Then Werner squats on the bank and raises his left arm high into the air. He stares hard at the inside of his upper arm, then clenches his jaw. Slowly… carefully… with steady, practiced hands of a surgeon… he uses the razor-sharp flake of rock to make a few small incisions… and then he brushes a tiny sliver of skin off of his arm. He watches the rivulet of blood trickling swiftly down his side, and takes a moment to enjoy how clean it appears to him. Then he scoops cold water from the stream to wash the blood away, and he binds the small wound up tightly with the strips of shirt he’d cut.
Most of the rest of the bundle that Werner had been carrying are also clothes, plucked like ripe fruit from the summer orchards of laundry hung out to dry behind the houses of the town that Werner had escaped from. Werner puts on these clothes, then hurries on through the woods.
It would be several years before a local boy gone fishing would drag ashore the torn remnants of the denims that Werner had sunk, emblazoned in loud white paint with the letters PW-- for “Prisoner of War”. And no one would ever find the little sliver of his own flesh that Werner had washed away, emblazoned in soft black ink with the letter A, in an old gothic font called “Fraktur”. “A” because that was Werner’s blood type, and Fraktur because that was the font preferred by the SS: the Schutzstaffel, the elite Nazi stormtroopers to which Werner belonged. The telltale tattoo was a dead giveaway, widely known as a mark of the SS, so Werner had to get rid of it. But nothing could ever get rid of the loyalty that he still feels in his blood…
Werner sticks to the forest, just out of sight of the road, until he comes upon an old stone farmhouse: broken and dark and abandoned. Silent as a lengthening shadow in the gathering night, Werner slips from the trees and in through the back door of this ruin. Only once inside does he risk unwrapping the rest of his bundle-- a large jar that he has stolen from the hospital where he was allowed to work as a janitor. Werner always assumed that the job assignment, though common among prisoners of war, had been some American’s idea of a cruel joke. You see, back in Germany, Werner had been a doctor. Quite a renowned doctor, to those in his specialized and… controversial area of expertise. Now that he is free again, Werner has plans.
He holds the jar up to the last of the light that peeps in through the back door. The jar contains fluid, and suspended in that fluid are: one… two… three tiny, pale figures. Almost like little humans, but… with enormous, bulbous heads. Werner knows that… under the influence of his treatments, they will return to life… grow larger… multiply. And even as Werner disappears forever into the obscurity of these woods, his creations will become local legends: all across Fairfield and New Haven counties, whispers will grow that-- back in the trees and forests, along lonely country lanes-- live the “Wobbleheads” or “Melonheads”: dangerous creatures known to lure and attack wayward outsiders…
At that point Trevor slapped the magazine shut. It wasn’t that the story was beginning to frighten him-- it wasn’t that at all. A cheap little science-fiction magazine couldn’t scare him. Although it did feel a little funny to be reading it while parked along the side of one of those same, narrow country lanes, as the sun began to set out here in Fairfield County, Connecticut. He felt funny-- a bit strange, but not scared. Trevor started the engine of his little post office van and nosed it down a road that… looked more like a tunnel, the trees were so close around it. But he wasn’t frightened. It was just that his last break of the day was over, and though Trevor had been a mail carrier for six months now he was new to this unfamiliar route, and he wanted to finish it before the darkness closed in.
And he almost made it.
He was looking for the house that was his very last delivery for that day, when he noticed that the light had failed. The trunks of the crowding trees shone shockingly bright in his headlights as he cruised slowly along, way down that old road that had seemed so scary when they were kids that everybody used to call it “Dracula Drive.” The kids probably still did call it that. Because it… well even Trevor had to admit that, at night… it was pretty scary.
Trevor glanced down at the address label as he drove along. Funny coincidence: it turned out that the magazine he’d been leafing through earlier was the only piece of mail left-- the only thing due at this last house. It shouldn’t be far now. Trevor squinted out into the night ahead, looking for signs. And as he did, he caught just the slightest glimpse of movement, way off at the edge of his windshield, almost beyond the palest fringe of his headlight. A sudden movement-- the flashing reflection of eyes, and paleness, and a motion that he couldn’t interpret at first. Like a… like a throwing motion. Trevor would have looked in that direction if the very next instant the whole world hadn’t shattered-- but it did. There was a huge crash, and the night ahead was hidden behind thick milky cobwebs of broken windshield.
Trevor had taken pebbles and even fair-sized rocks on his windshield before-- they made cracks or shiny little divots. This was something different. This was an impact-- large and heavy-- a huge chunk of rock flying through the air-- Trevor had caught a glimpse of it in his headlights just before it struck. There were no hills or cliffs the rock could have fallen from. So someone must have thrown it-- with outrageous strength-- from the side of the road…
Trevor had slammed on the brakes when his world exploded, but in the next heartbeat decided he was in no hurry to meet whoever had thrown that rock, so he put the pedal to the floor. The little van’s wheels spun in the gravel… and something low and dark broke cover from the edge of the forest ahead… running towards the van. Running with unbelievable speed. Trevor only saw it for a moment, before the van’s spinning drift pointed his headlights in the other direction. But whatever it was, Trevor did not want to meet it.
He wrestled the steering wheel and peered through the splintered windshield to try to guess which direction didn’t lead into the ditch. The night was a fractured frenzy of gravel road and bright tree trunks and the black spaces in between. Trevor fluttered the gas pedal, the tires caught, the van jumped forward, and he was off-- just as something from outside slammed against his passenger door.
Trevor couldn’t see what it was-- the thing’s dark body was pressed against the window. The van’s speed was increasing-- moving faster… faster than anything could run. But. Trevor remembered: there was a little running board on that side of the van-- a small steel step outside the door that some delivery-van designer had added for no good reason that Trevor had ever understood. And now… whatever was out there… it was hanging onto the side mirror and standing on the running board, rocketing with Trevor down the narrow road. Trevor glanced over, about to start swerving the van from side-to-side to try to shake the thing off… but before he could… he noticed the handle on that door… begin to turn.
For the second time in fifty yards, Trevor slammed on the brakes. The force of the stop threw Trevor forward against his seat belt-- and it should have launched the thing on the running board clear into the road in front of the van. It would have, too, except… except the thing had just managed to open the passenger door. So the force of the stop threw it violently into the cab of the van beside Trevor, against the dash and then down onto the floorboards where the reflected light from the headlights didn’t reach. For an instant it was just a form-- just a dark shape that Trevor could see moving and groping its way frantically up onto the seat, up toward where Trevor was sitting. He pressed himself away, against the door on his side, fumbling awkwardly behind himself, trying to find the latch.
His hand had just touched it… he’d just felt the hard plastic handle to freedom under his fingers, when the thing on the other seat reared its face up into the light coming through the shattered windshield, and made a sound:
“Drive! Drive! Drive!”
The humanity of the face and the force of the order short-circuited Trevor’s brain. Without thinking he stomped on the gas again, muscled the van through its chattering drift, then as it caught and accelerated he kept its nose pointing down the bright corridor that marked out the gravel road from the forest close around it. He even managed to slow down for the curves-- but no more than he had to.
The man on the passenger seat groaned and writhed, as if moving his body would help him catch the breath he was desperate for. Once or twice, over the roar of the gravel beneath the wheels, Trevor caught snatches of what the man muttered between gasps. Something something “got me” something… Mutter mumble “out of control.”
At last he fell still: eyes closed, mouth a little open, head leaning back against the headrest. Trevor’s heart was calming too, and he slowed the van down to a pace better suited to how little he could actually see through the shattered windshield. Then, in a low voice, the man asked him for something, but Trevor didn’t catch it at first.
“A light,” the man repeated, “I would very much appreciate a light.”
Trevor turned on the overhead-- the dome light he used for sorting mail. By it, the man took a small metal box from the pocket of this coat, flicked it open, and shook a couple of small white pills into his hand. He closed the box and replaced it, tossing the pills into his mouth and swallowing them dry. He looked at Trevor with a grimace. “Medicine,” he said. “For the heart.”
The man was young, blonde, lean to the point of thinness. A little pale, maybe, but having watched him explode in a sprint from the woods, then cling to the side of a speeding van with one hand while forcing his way inside, Trevor had a hard time imagining that the man needed medicine for his heart. That was ignorant, though-- even some elite athletes take medication for heart conditions. And after what they’d just been through, Trevor wasn’t so sure that his own heart might not need a little help. He asked the man who he was-- what had happened to him-- what he was doing out there.
“My name is Eli Rhileth, and I’m doing exactly the same thing that you are.” Eli looked at Trevor, and Trevor blinked at Eli a couple of times. Great. What a promising companion Trevor had picked up. In a slow, gentle voice-- in a way he hoped was kindly-- Trevor explained what his uniform should have made obvious: that he, Trevor, was out here delivering the mail.
Eli cracked a crooked grin and shook his head. “No, no. You’re looking for this house.” As he said it he rapped a pointed finger down on the address label of the magazine-- Trevor’s last item for delivery-- that had somehow remained on the rubber-lined tray of the center console. “You’re looking for this house, and so am I. And I think…” he said, squinting ahead, “that that is it.”
The dark, old house seemed to bounce toward them as the van’s headlights jumped through the deepening potholes. They were running out of road, it seemed-- the woods were getting closer-- there was a sudden squeal that made them both jump as branches on either side began to claw along the sides of the van. The house was the end of the line. The only way out was the way they’d come.
Trevor was about to ask Eli why he was looking for this house-- what this address could possibly mean to him. But the van was still rolling to a stop when Eli jumped out. “Quick!” he said, already moving toward the house-front that glowed in gray dilapidation in the headlight beams. Trevor opened his door and called out in surrender and protest. He tried to give the magazine to Eli. After all: Trevor was just here to deliver the mail.
Eli stood for a moment on the low, ramshackle porch, squinting back into the light toward Trevor but not really looking at him-- with a face like he was listening to something other than the cough of the engine and the whine of Trevor’s voice. When Trevor finished his plea, Eli asked quickly: “You intend to drive away from here?” Trevor said he was, and Eli looked impatient. “I don’t think they will let you,” Eli said.
What? Who? Let him? Trevor hardly knew where to begin-- and in fact, he didn’t have time to start. Something heavy struck the body of the van just behind him-- Trevor whirled in time to see a rock rolling to a stop on the ground, followed by a laugh… a high, thin, unnatural cackle from the woods nearby. He left the headlights on, but ripped the keys from the ignition and followed Eli onto the porch.
Eli had knocked already, or… anyway he had the heavy oak door to the house open, and he closed it as soon as Trevor entered. Dim light came from somewhere in the entryway-- Trevor saw paneling and discolored wallpaper, a wide old staircase. Everything old fashioned, with the appearance of having been just barely maintained. Eli was struggling out of his dark overcoat… he seemed to be having some trouble freeing himself from it. He looked visibly older under this light-- Trevor had him marked for thirty in the van, but now he looked nearer fifty. When Eli got the coat off, Trevor saw that the long-sleeved white shirt he wore underneath had a seam of blood running down one arm. He pointed it out, but Eli hardly gave it a glance.
“Yes, that,” Eli said. “That happens, when… That must have happened in the woods.” He threw the bundled coat onto a little table in the entry and moved toward a long, unlit hallway-- but then turned back and fumbled in the coat until he’d found that little metal pillbox. Its lid was enameled, Trevor noticed, with a logo on it: black and white and red. Before Trevor could look more closely Eli had flicked the lid back and was shaking a pill into his hand– when there was the crash of glass somewhere off in the darkened house. Not nearby-- but not that far either. Eli dropped several of the pills and gave an exclamation that Trevor didn’t catch. Then: “Time!” Eli said. “We’re running out.” He stumped swiftly off down the dark hallway, with Trevor close behind.
As they walked there were sounds… more sounds in the house. It was impossible to tell if it was merely the echo of their own footsteps, or… or if there were other things… other sounds around them. Stealthy movement in other rooms, on other floors? Rather than listen and try to interpret these sounds-- what made them? how close?-- Trevor asked Eli what was happening. What… who was out in the woods? Who had attacked him? Were they… were they in the house now? Should they call the police?
“The police can do nothing,” Eli replied, as Trevor struggled to follow him down a stone staircase in total darkness. They emerged into… into a cellar, filled with laboratory equipment. A dim green light without a clear source suffused everything. Trevor moved slowly from the doorway to the center of the room, taking it all in, as Eli shuffled around a workbench along the far wall. Trevor noticed that Eli left a little trail of dots on the ground behind him-- dots that looked black in the strange light, but that were dripping from the cuff of Eli’s wounded arm. The entire inside of Eli’s left sleeve was soaked, from just about the same place where… Trevor snorted, and reminded himself that the story he’d read earlier about a man cutting out his own tattoo had appeared in a science fiction magazine.
About the only hint Eli gave that he noticed the bleeding was by a growing slowness… an increasing weakness and hesitancy in his movements. Maybe it was the light, but when he turned toward Trevor from across the room Eli’s face looked thinner… thinner and terribly, terribly old.
“As for who attacked me in the forest...” Eli pointed at the magazine that Trevor still held limply in his hand. “You’ve read the article, yes? I wrote it. I intended it to frighten, to keep people away, so that my work… So I could… regain control… my experiments…” Eli seemed to be losing the thread, about to collapse. But he rallied himself: “The people call them ‘Melonheads,’ but that isn’t their name. They don’t have a name. They can’t give themselves a name, because they are not human. They are less than animals. They are things. Objects!”
Eli staggered as he spat his way to the end of this rant, knocking over a stand of beakers on the workbench in front of him. As they shattered a flame spread across the table: low at first, and green... then rising blue... then turning a deep red as the blaze grew higher. Eli cowered away from the table, away from the smokeless flames which lit the whole room livid as blood. Trevor was frozen in a nightmare of horror and amazement, and Eli hurried toward him in a stooped, broken gait, clutching at him when he reached him. He angled his face up at Trevor, on a neck that could no longer support his head upright… he looked at least a hundred years old.
“They don’t have a name,” he said, “but I do. I am Werner, from that article. Doktor und SS-Standartenfuhrer. This is my house. And they… they are my creations… but… they have passed… out of my control…”
As he said it, there was a tremendous sound behind him. From a separate staircase, in the shadows… the sound of timbers tearing and splintering-- heavy doors being ripped off their hinges. Then something moving… coming down those stairs…
“You won’t leave me?!” the old man wailed as Trevor shook away the feeble hands that clutched at him. “Du wirst mich nicht verlassen?!” Trevor turned and dashed for the stairs they’d come in by. He reached and started up them-- then stopped... stepped back… and fell, backwards, onto the floor of the fiery basement. Staring… staring up the stairs in front of him.
And a small figure descended. Softly… almost shyly. Its body was deathly pale and sinewy, with the long, wrong proportions of a starved child. But its head… its head was massive and impossibly wide, grotesque and lumpy, with tiny shining eyes and teeth large and yellow-- crooked inside its grinding mouth. The legs and body moved with perfect deliberation, but the head rolled and twitched and wobbled on top, while the face contorted into expressions that defied interpretation. And Trevor did try. He tried to discern what the creature was thinking as it came closer and its tiny eyes devoured him. It seemed likely that Trevor’s life depended on what was happening inside that outsized head.
Whatever it was, it changed completely when the creature caught sight of the old man. Eli, or Werner… the doctor, or whoever he was. The thing gave a cry-- high-pitched, like a bird of prey-- and raced past Trevor’s prone figure. There was another cry, then. A cry from the old man that started out as human, but… rapidly became something much less, and much worse.
Trevor didn’t look back. He scrambled to his feet, started up the stairs… but there were more of them up there. More of them racing down, following the screams, oblivious to Trevor’s struggles. He felt innumerable, incredibly strong bodies push past him; force him back. Shoved backward he misplaced a stair-- twisted in air and tried to keep his balance-- went down. He felt feet-- strange, thin, bare feet tripping and sliding over his legs and body, over his face. The screaming from the room below rose to an awful crescendo and then suddenly ceased… replaced by a strange high gabbling murmur. Then Trevor began to scream… began to scream and thrash. And the feet ceased stepping but there were hands-- so many hands, so strong, grabbing and restraining him-- pulling him-- taking him… where were they taking him? WHERE WERE THEY-- WHERE WERE THEY TAKING HIM?!
And then the red light in the room began to flash… began to flash and rotate… and the voices… the high mumbling voices became lower... and lower… and the gabble began to form into words. Into… into Trevor’s name. And in the middle of another and another and another desperate scream he saw a face… a human face… and he saw the ambulance in the road… and the paramedics and police, and… and…
Trevor had been found, late that night, sitting in his darkened van by the side of the narrow road at the very same pull-out where he had read the article in the science-fiction magazine that afternoon. The windshield on his van was completely shattered, but there was no other visible damage. When his supervisor had opened the driver’s side door Trevor was sitting there, staring straight ahead, seemingly unaware of his rescuers’ presence. Nothing they said or did could elicit a response. Finally, with the help of the medics called to the scene, they began to lift Trevor carefully out of the driver’s seat. Only then did he react, panic in his eyes, tearing himself from their grasp and screaming, screaming…
Of course you’ve already guessed that Trevor was never able to find that house again. In fact, once he’d described it to them, his friends and doctors made an effort to try to find the article in the magazine that he’d been reading, that seemed to have started the whole thing… but apparently there never was any such article written, and no magazine has ever been published under the title that Trevor recalled.
He’s recovered now-- as recovered as someone who had gone through such an experience can be. And he’s still proud to deliver the mail. He’ll even take that route down old “Dracula Drive.” But… Trevor has become kind of an early riser these days. Everyone on his route gets their mail late in the morning or early in the afternoon… long, long before the sun goes down… long before headlights cast such stark shadows between the trees…
Speaking of which-- this property allows bonfires, but not camping. So we’d all better make our way back to Weston… the town, that is. Or wherever you’re staying. There are plenty of good motels and inns, none of them are too far away. All just a short drive down… these narrow roads… through the forest… Say, who wants to carpool?
Don’t worry, my YETI Rambler 20 ounce tumbler is designed to fit most cupholders, so if we decide to carpool I’ll always have my toasty-warm drink close to hand. It’s dishwasher safe, and the magnets in the MagSlider lid help keep coffee or cocoa safely in the tumbler, even over the bumpiest Connecticut back roads. Check it out at REI dot com, or in-store at your local REI. Thanks, YETI!
Camp Monsters is part of the REI Podcast Network. Next time you see our Executive Producers Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby, be sure to ask them about that time they got lost while driving a truckload of watermelons across Connecticut. They stopped to ask for directions at a dilapidated old house where the heavy door creaked open to reveal our Senior Producer Chelsea Davis, who spoke without even the trace of a German accent. But then they stumbled on the basement laboratory, where our Engineer Nick Patri was at work bringing his fiendish sound-creations to life using spare parts from yours truly, writer and host Weston Davis. And when Joe and Paolo finally managed to escape, the sheriff in the nearest town was our Associate Producer Jenny Barber, who didn’t believe their story and told them git outta town and stop causing trouble. But we believe you, Joe and Paolo. We believe.
Next week we’ll leave the bright lights and noise of a high school football stadium. We’ll walk down that hill in the shadows behind the bleachers, taking the short cut home across the bottomlands like we always do. A roar goes up from the game behind us… but from somewhere much closer… somewhere in the darkness nearby, we hear another sound… and we know we have to run… See you next week.
And as always, the stories we tell here on Camp Monsters podcast are just stories. Sure, some are based on things people claim to have experienced, but it’s up to you to decide what you believe… and how to explain away what you don’t. Please subscribe, like, share, and tell your friends about Camp Monsters. Its your efforts that keep us on the air. Thank you.