The Melon Heads of Saugatuck

Ask anyone who grew up around Holland or Saugatuck in the last sixty years, and there’s a good chance they were warned, as a teenager, about the Melon Heads. The legend goes like this: somewhere in the woods near the old Felt Mansion stood an institution called the Junction Insane Asylum. Inside lived a group of children with hydrocephalus — a real medical condition that causes the head to swell. A cruel doctor, the story says, performed experiments on them. When the place finally shut down (or burned down, depending on who’s telling it), the children, now feral and deformed, escaped into the forest. And they’re still out there — in the dunes, in the tree line, in a system of underground tunnels — occasionally darting across a lonely back road in your headlights.

It’s a story teenagers have scared each other with for decades, daring one another to drive out to the abandoned mansion at night and look for glowing eyes in the woods.

Now, the honest part — and this is a good one. There was never any Junction Insane Asylum. The Allegan County Historical Society has flatly stated that no such institution ever existed. The Felt Mansion is real: it was built in 1928 by businessman Dorr Felt as a summer home for his wife Agnes. After the Felts, it became a Catholic seminary, then later a state police post and even briefly a prison — but never an asylum, and never a home for experimented-upon children. The whole tale appears to be pure folklore, and a somewhat unkind one, built on old fears about a real medical condition.

The mansion, though, is genuinely worth visiting — beautifully restored, set against the dunes, and yes, said by some to host the gentle ghost of Agnes Felt herself.