CT Road Named Among '10 Most Haunted In The US': Travel & Leisure

CONNECTICUT — As the sun sets earlier and the winds whip up, Connecticut residents' thoughts turn to haunted hayrides and other Halloween happenings. And where better to hunt for creepy, scary, ghostly, paranormal experiences than… Travel & Leisure magazine.

As it turns out, the venerable travel periodical recently updated its list of the "10 Most Haunted Roads in the U.S. for Supernatural Sightings," and one spooky Connecticut byway figures prominently.

Jeremy Swamp Road in Southbury, according to urban legends recounted breathlessly by the T&L editors, is where drivers whose vehicles get stuck "tend to disappear before their tow truck shows up."

There's even a logical, if completely implausible, explanation for the vanishing motorists: melonheads.

Among America's favorite boogeymen, urban legendary melonheads are reputed to be smallish, humanoid creatures with bulbous noggins who roam the woods in parts of Michigan, Ohio, Connecticut and at least one "B" movie.

Every state has slightly different, locally tailored origin stories for the murderous l'il miscreants. They usually involve lab experiments — ones either gone horribly wrong or diabolically crafted — or an inbred clan of outcasts (who are sometimes witches).

Midwestern melonheads often trace their ancestry to the work of one Dr. Crowe, either a mad scientist or a doctor treating hydrocephalic children (or both). The folklore has the lab rats/patients dispersing after Crowe's death.

Related: Spooky Connecticut: These Are The Haunted Halloween Hotspots

The spin in Connecticut is that our feral villains are the descendants of inmates in an asylum that burned to the ground around 1960. All the staff and patients were killed — except for those who weren't. And those have spent the last few generations getting loopier as they inbred, living off the flesh of whatever wild animals or car full of teenagers wandered their way. Variations on this variation show the melonheads escaping from either now- abandoned mental institution Fairfield Hills Hospital, or Garner Correctional Institute, both in Newtown.

According to the New England Historical Society, melonhead tales first made their way around Connecticut campfires after World War II. The spread of the legends coincided with that generation's exodus out of cities and into the suburbs, and may "reflect the New York exurbanite’s prejudice and fear of isolated rural folk."

The most detailed, non-campfire tale of Connecticut's melonheads may be found in "Weird New England." Author Joseph Citro recounts a story of a group of 1980s girls from Notre Dame High School in Fairfield who, on a lark, set out in search of a fabled melonhead clan in Trumbull after a Friday night football game. When the girls saw a group of diminutive humanoid shadows up ahead, they got out of their car to investigate. (Pro-tip: While on a monster-hunting joyride, never get out of your car.) It was then they heard the car rev up behind them, and saw their Granada brimming with big-headed freaks the size of children — one of whom, at least, knew how to drive. The car full of cackling mutants barreled past them, never to be seen again.

Jeremy Swamp Road in Southbury may be getting all the press, but there are plenty of other melonhead hotspots in the state, according to the New England Historical Society:

• Edmonds Road in Oxford
• Velvet Street in Trumbull and Monroe
• Zion Hill Rd in Milford
• The roads around Lake Mohegan in Fairfield
• Marginal Road in New Haven
• Roads in and around Roosevelt Forest in Stratford

It's not just Travel & Leisure who's entered Jeremy Swamp Road into its ghostly GPS. Pop Sugar and Mental Floss also credit the Southbury street among the spookiest in the land.