by Bob Curran
So what actually happened to the three keepers on those lonely islands? If we discount the more out-there theories, such as they were carried away by flying saucers or people under the sea, perhaps Harvie’s and Muirhead’s accounts are the most plausible. Great waves and water spouts have been known to batter the islands during the winter months, and there are many tales of loss of life caused by them around Lewis and beyond. Island people sometimes speak of the muir cul, which is said to be a great wave that can rip the turf from the tops of cliffs and can carry away men and livestock. Perhaps that is what hit the Flannans on that fateful day. But muir cul can also refer to something else—a monstrous, supernatural evil that creeps in from the sea and attacks lone settlements or houses. It is as shapeless as a sea mist (though it can sometimes take a vague, gigantic human form), but it is always deadly. Could one of the keepers have gone mad, killing the other two and getting rid of their bodies before disposing of himself? Although this sounds rather implausible, it had been known to happen. Claustrophobic living conditions, coupled with the sheer monotony and loneliness of station life, sometimes preyed on a keeper’s mind and drove him over the edge of reason. This might have happened on the Flannans. Donald John McLeod, the Harbourmaster on Breasclete and an Occasional Keeper in some of the other lighthouses, recalled how he had experienced a situation in which an Assistant Keeper had suffered a mental breakdown after the Principal Keeper had gone down with an exceptionally severe bout of the flu. The man, he said, had become excessively violent, had threatened to kill him, and had to be locked up until the tender Polestar had arrived from Stromness, bringing help. It was a particularly terrifying experience, he remembered. And a number of years before the Flannan incident, two keepers had gone inexplicably mad on the lonely Skellig Light off the coast of Kerry in Ireland. Perhaps something like that had happened on Eilean Mor. Nevertheless, it seemed unlikely that three hardened keepers, well used to the loneliness of the islands, would have simultaneously lost their reason.
Among the islands, however, stranger theories surfaced, and old legends suggesting that the Flannans were part of another realm, largely hidden from human eye, re-emerged. Might the keepers, it was asked, have somehow crossed the boundary between one world and the other and be lost to us forever? Might the fearsome storm have opened up a rift between the existences and they were mysteriously drawn through? Old island folk remembered the near-forgotten tale of John Morisone, a fisherman who had been shipwrecked on Eilean Mor at the end of the 17th century. With nothing with which to make a fire and perishing from the cold, he lay down and prepared to die when suddenly out of the dark night an old man had appeared and had led him up to the ruined chapel where a fire was burning behind the altar. The old man gave him a strange warm soup, and although it was dark, Morisone had the feeling that everything around him was somehow different. He fell asleep, and when he woke, he was alone in the chapel. He managed to stay alive until rescue came, although his mysterious benefactor had disappeared. Could this person have come out of an invisible world of which the Flannans were said to be a part? Or perhaps he was one of the unseen race, which supposedly dwelt on these bleak islands. Many island people seem to think so, and this perception was strengthened during the 1960s when a number of ornithologists camped overnight on Eilean Mor to monitor puffin and nesting seabird colonies there. During the night, three of them distinctly heard a man’s voice crying for help, though there was nobody else on the island, and the sound seemed to be drawing further and further away. This has been variously put down to the wind, the cry of seabirds, or overactive imaginations, but even today people are not all that sure. Maybe it’s one of the keepers, still trapped in another world and trying to find a way back into ours.
Or did the powerful storm, as others suggest, throw up something monstrous from the depths of the ocean that attacked the keepers before returning to its lair? Those who support this theory point to the curious seaweed that Joseph Moore supposedly saw on his way up to the lighthouse, which was reputedly cleared away by Harvie and Muirhead, and was eventually omitted from the formal records in some sort of conspiracy. And why has the Flannan log gone missing? Was there some sort of cover-up? Nobody knows for sure.
And there the matter rests, shrouded even today in mystery and speculation. Throughout the years, the eerie disappearance of the Flannan keepers has been overshadowed by investigations into other sea mysteries such as that of the Marie Celeste (a brigantine whose entire crew disappeared in the mid-Atlantic) more than 30 years earlier, but that doesn’t take away from the sense of menace that the story generates. It has, however, captured the human imagination with a number of articles, plays, an opera and even a Dr. Who adventure written around it, keeping the incident on the very edge of our memories. In 1912, Wilfred Gibson wrote his famous poem Flannan Isle, which introduced the mystery to many young scholars, although now that it has been dropped, the memory of the strange disappearance is starting to fade.
Today as the sea continually beats against the rocky shores of those distant and remote islands beneath the automated lighthouse, we may well ponder the curious fate of Ducat, Marshall, and McArthur. Are they indeed dead or do they still wait somewhere beyond our knowing, hoping someday to return to the world they left in 1900? Whatever the answer, the lonely Flannans have kept their secret well for more than a hundred years.
“And as we listened in the gloom,
Of that forsaken living room,
O chill clutch on our breath,
We thought how ill chance came to all,
Who kept the Flannan Light.”
Gore Orphanage Road (Cleveland, Ohio)
“The road ahead forked, one path descending into a muddy hollow before
rising steeply on the other side to vanish into the brambly
thicket; the other leading off under a large hanging archway of
branches and creeper into the darkness. Around me little sunlight
penetrated the dark trees to light me where I stood and no bird sang.”
—L.L. Galbraith, Cousin Silas’s House
What lurks in the dark woodlands? Is there something moving among the shadows under the trees, just where the sunlight is trying to struggle through? Something that doesn’t look quite human, but with a large, misshapen head that’s far too big for its body? Something that has disappeared back into the undergrowth? If that’s the case, we must be on the Gore Orphanage Road on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio.
The legend of the Melon Heads is a common one across several American States, most notably Michigan, Connecticut, and Ohio, but there are older references to them from England and Germany as well. In her Folklore of Herefordshire (1955), the English folklorist Mary Letherbarrow mentions an extended family of Melon Heads living on the edge of the village of Risbury. She claims that they had “large, rounded heads,” which were thought to be the result of inbreeding. Known locally as “Weeble Heads” they were avoided by the general populace and kept mostly to themselves. Although generally reclusive, they were not exceptionally hostile toward their neighbors. Another Melon Head family allegedly living near Konzenburg in Bavaria, Germany, in the mid-1800s, were not so friendly, and several murders were laid at their door, although nothing was ever proven. They were just as reclusive as those in Risbury, but tended to adopt a more aggressive attitude to those who came near them. And from time to time, in local folklore, stories of Melon Heads—whether just bizarre or highly dangerous—have featured. They have been blamed for doing damage to property or for carrying away small children and vulnerable adults for some unspecified purpose and are therefore feared. They are also said to have a deep and abiding hatred for those whom they consider to be “normal” and are intent on doing them harm.
Where did these Melon Heads come from? In folklore, as is seen in the Risbury and Konzenburg accounts, their origins derive from sustained inbreeding (which was—and perhaps still is—probably more common in isolated communities than we suspect) or illicit sex (for
example with the mentally deficient or with animals). In America, stories of mutated and disfigured people were to be found in the remote and inaccessible areas of places like the isolated communities in, say, the Rutherford Mountain area in Tennessee during the 1920s and 1930s, or in mountainous areas of West Virginia. Latterly, however, they are said to be the results of genetic experimentation and manipulation. In recent times, several urban myths have risen around certain groups of individuals, such as vanished children who are believed to have been abducted either by individual scientists or by Government agencies for such purposes. And perhaps nowhere in America is such a variation of the legend so common than in heavily wooded parts of Connecticut, Michigan, and Ohio.
The Kirtland suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, in particular has achieved a notoriety all of its own concerning the Melon Heads. The area borders on local woodland in which groups of strangely headed humanoids—the results of terrible experiments—are still said to dwell. Even before the alleged advent of the Melon Heads, one particular area of the suburb had a rather strange and macabre history. This was a site known as Swift’s Hollow.
The Hollow takes its name from Joseph Swift, a property developer and landowner, who moved there from Massachusetts in the mid 1820s, with his wife Eliza, who built a rather large estate house along the Vermillion River, which became known as “Swift’s Mansion.” According to many authorities, this was the most elaborate and ostentatious dwelling for miles around, and it soon became the talk of the countryside. It was allegedly built in a classic Greek style with wonderful colonnades, the like of which had never been seen before in that region of Ohio. Was it any wonder then that this magnificent building gave the name of its builder to the hollow where it stood? The house was actually called “Rosedale,” but its location was always known (and still is) as Swift’s Hollow.
Soon after they arrived in the Hollow, bad luck hit the Swift family. In 1831, Swift’s 5-year-old daughter Tymphenia died from a mysterious illness, and in 1841, his 24 year-old son Herman also died from a “peculiar wasting.” Swift made several bad investments, including several on land initially earmarked for a railroad, that fell through, leaving him almost bankrupt. Swift was forced to sell the grand house in 1865 and move away.
The man he sold it to was Nicholas Wilber, who had a curious reputation. This was an era when spiritualism was taking hold in parts of America and Wilber was greatly interested in the movement. He began to organize “spiritual experiments” and séances in the house, much to the alarm of local folk who counted him little more than a black magician. There were various attempts, it was said, to raise both ghosts and demons, all of which haunted the mansion and the surrounding Hollow long after the Wilburs were gone.
Similar to the Swift’s, bad luck struck the Wilber family shortly after they arrived. They lost four of their grandchildren to diphtheria—Jesse (aged 11), May (aged 9), and twins Roy and Ruby (aged 2). All of them died within six days of each other as the disease tore through the mansion between January 13th and January 19th, 1893. Wilber began to suffer from “a strange, wheezy and wasting disease,” which may have been related to the diphtheria. His wife died there in 1899 and Nicholas Wilbur died there in February 1901.
After this, the house became abandoned and the notion of a great falling house out in the woods was sufficient to spark ghost stories, especially as attention appeared to be drawn to some “abandoned and overgrown” children’s graves out in the undergrowth. Stories of ghosts and walking dead began to circulate through the local community.
The story of the Melon Heads is a much later addition, but it also concerns Swift’s Hollow. At the end of 1903, the mansion was bought by the Reverend Johann Sprunger, a Lutheran minister with the idea of starting a self-sustaining Christian community there. His intention was to provide work in the local area and also provide a refuge for local neglected and abused children. He hoped to teach both boys and girls the benefits of a virtuous life, as well as farming and husbandry techniques. It was not really an orphanage in the conventional sense. Although there were centralized dormitories in the old house, these were mainly used by Christian workers while the neglected boys were billeted in specially built accommodations at the nearby Hughes farm and the girls at the Howard property. He called his new community “Light and Hope Orphanage.”
Gore Orphanage Road was originally simply called Gore Road—taking its name not from the sinister custodian of a ghastly orphanage, but probably from a type of skirt, the outline of which resembled the shape of the road. A “gored skirt” is made from a triangular piece of material that is narrow at the waist but wider and more comfortable at the bottom. These skirts were once quite popular in Ohio and may well have given the road its name. The word Orphanage was later added to facilitate the institution that the Reverend Spunger had started there.
Even so, disquieting stories were starting to circulate 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 that had been destroyed by a mysterious fire in which three small children had died. Rumor said that the Reverend Sprunger was somehow responsible for the blaze. But there were even more unwholesome stories. There were hints that Katherina was actually the Reverend Sprunger’s sister, with whom he was having an incestuous relationship, and when they had run the New Berne facility, they had run it as “Brother and Sister Sprunger” Katherina was the daughter of a Lutheran minister—the Reverend Christian P. Sprunger (the same surname as her husband and no explanation was given for this)—and Johann always kept quiet about his own father. Of course there might have been nothing in the rumors, but it created an atmosphere of suspicion about the old place.
Soon, such bits of gossip began to turn into darker tales of neglect, child labor, and abuse. In order to keep food bills down, the Reverend Sprunger bought sick and dying animals from the farms around and made the children eat the diseased flesh. Porridge was boiled in the same pot that was used to wash soiled underwear. There were tales of beatings and other maltreatment. These stores became exposed when several of the children ran away from the community and turned up in Vermillion on the other side of the river bringing with them alarming stories of neglect and a regime bordering on torture. In 1909, Ohio conducted a formal enquiry into the running of the orphanage. Surprisingly, the Reverend Sprunger and his wife admitted most of the charges that were laid against them, however, because the state had no real laws or framework for dealing with orphanages at the time, no real action was taken to improve the plight of the children. The Sprungers were, however, cautioned and the matter was laid to rest.
In 1908, just as the enquiry was getting underway, a tragic and horrific incident occurred 40 miles to the east in the settlement of Collinwood (now a suburb of East Cleveland). More than 176 children at an elementary school were burned or trampled to death in a fire that completely gutted the building. The blaze, it was believed, had been deliberately started by the school janitor—a German-American named Herter (even though he lost four of his own children and was injured trying to save others)—and he was briefly arrested and detained. The main deaths affected 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 and, according to witnesses, tried to make their way to the classroom. Those who were coming down shoved them into the flames below. When they reached the rear exits, the fleeing children found it locked (this was taken as proof that the janitor had been involved in the fire), but when rescuers managed to open the door, they found that it opened inward and 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 truly horrifying incident and one that burned itself into the minds and psyches of both survivors and rescuers alike. The
disaster meant the end of Collinwood as a settlement, and many of the families, fearful at the lack of fire control there, moved into places like Vermillion, bringing the memory of that horror with them. The horror of the account somehow transferred itself to the Light and Hope Orphanage, and the Gore Road and ghost stories concerning burning babies floating through the air along the orphanage road soon proliferated.
The Reverend Sprunger died in 1911, two years after the state investigation, and the orphanage finally closed in 1916 among a welter of financial problems and unpaid bills. A Pelham Hooker Blossom of Cleveland bought the property, leasing the land to local farmers and the old Swift Mansion was left to rot. Finally, there were a series of fires—perhaps deliberately started by locals—and the buildings were partly destroyed and then pulled down. But the horrifying legends continued.
Stories began to circulate around the area that before its destruction the orphanage had been run by an “Old Man Gore” (who had given his name to the Road—this is not true) and who had mistreated those in his charge. The children eventually turned against him, killing him and burning the buildings down. This is probably some sort of confused memory of the events in Collinwood, a number of miles away, and has little to do with Swift’s Hollow.
A more intriguing story concerns a reputed Dr. Crow who allegedly took over the building after it closed. This mysterious figure spells his name Crow, Crowe, Trobaino, Krohe, Kroh, or even Khune and was said to be a scientist conducting experiments on his own behalf or at the behest of the American government. He is invariably portrayed as a sinister figure who used unorthodox methods for obtaining his specimens, all of whom were children. No date was given for the doctor’s activities, but it is said to have been around the late 1800s/early 1900s or just after the First World War. The purpose of the experiments is unknown, but it may have involved injecting kidnapped children with fluid, which caused their heads to swell in a grotesque way. The experiments were also supposed to increase their strength and their ferocity, and they eventually turned on Crow and killed him, setting fire to his house (the Gore Orphanage). They then escaped into the surrounding woods where they presumably still live, a group of beings with bulbous heads and wide-staring eyes. They still appear to be aggressive and according to local legend are known to steal away “normal” children for unknown purposes—perhaps for food. A number of people in the Kirtland area claim to have seen the Melon Heads, as they are known, either in gloomy places in the woodlands, or peering through the windows of houses late at night, often terrifying those inside. Of course, there is a recognized medical condition associated with the appearance—hydrocephalus, or “water on the brain,” which is an abnormal accumulation of cerebro-spinal fluid in the ventricles or cavities of the brain. This often gives rise to diminished cognitive faculties and a “melon head” appearance in the individual. Some claim that the legends might have been started by some unfortunate hydrocephalic in the area who may have been wandering about. However, there may be some truth in the idea.