Downs Road

Downs Road in Hamden, Connecticut is a stretch of dirt that goes nowhere now, gated shut at both ends about a mile apart, running through dense woods. Teenagers still park there after dark, and as locals tell it, something comes out of the trees: the Melon Heads. Pale, aggressive, four to five feet tall, with oversized heads. They claw the outsides of parked cars, the lore says, and chase hikers back out of the woods.

The Melon Heads turn up all over Connecticut, and the origins people give them are always different — escapees from an asylum fire who turned cannibal, a witchcraft family banished into the wilderness and left to inbreed. The legend surfaced here after World War II, and the New England Historical Society notes it has no historical support at all — that it "probably reflect[s] the New York exurbanite's prejudice and fear of isolated rural folk."

But people keep reporting things on this particular road. Glowing balls of light through the trees. Apparitions of children. UFOs over the ridge at the far end of the reservoir. In a January 2009 snowstorm, the Damned Connecticut team watched a small leafless tree shake violently next to them with no animal anywhere in sight: "if there was any sort of animal around, we would've seen it instantly."

The road's real history is stranger than the creature grafted onto it.

Downs Road once connected Hamden to Bethany before it was bypassed and left to the forest. Stone cellar holes still line it, the foundations of farms lived in into the 1800s. And on New Year's Day in the 1850s — most accounts say 1856 — a 26-year-old Hamden man named Charles Sanford, in and out of mental institutions, sharpened an axe and walked this valley. He nearly decapitated a 70-year-old farmer named Enoch Sperry in his sleigh. Then he went to the house at the corner of Brooks Road and killed a man named Ichabod Umberfield.

Umberfield's gravestone, in Sperry Cemetery, still reads: "killed by a madman."