Megan Chacalos now has over 78,000 followers on TikTok stemming from a viral video she posted during Thanksgiving. (Photo Provided)

WHEELING — A Wheeling Park High School graduate has “slipped” into internet fame through a viral video recounting the story of an olive oil hair treatment that went awry.

Megan Chacalos is a Wheeling native who works as a Broadway producer at ArtLab Productions in New York City. While she now lives in the “Big Apple,” the viral video she posted on TikTok, which now has more than 61 million views, stems from a teenage mishap when she was a senior at Wheeling Park High School.

During the fall semester of her senior year, Chacalos was informed by a classmate in an acting class that her hair looked “like hay.”

Since she wanted to look her best for auditions for the fall play, Chacalos turned to the product her Greek grandmother used for skin care, nail care and hair care — olive oil.

Chacalos began her olive oil hair treatment at 2 a.m. that school night, hoping to awaken the next morning with hair as soft as her grandmother’s.

“I thought, ‘Yia Yia puts olive oil in her hair, and her hair is very soft,'” Chacalos said. “I wanted to figure out how to do it, so I looked up a tutorial on Seventeen Magazine’s website that said I needed to saturate my hair in the oil.”

Chacalos began brushing more and more olive oil through her hair to ensure it was saturated. Once her hair was completely covered, she turned her head upside down and made a “column” of plastic wrap on top of her head to hold it in place.

Once she was finished, Chacalos headed to the garage to get a drink from the fridge. Since she had “completely saturated” her hair, she left a path of oil from her head to the ground as she walked.

When one of the family’s cats startled her, Chacalos slipped on the oil, slammed into the garage door and passed out. After she awoke in the dark, “covered in oil,” Chacalos panicked and ran to the house door, accidentally setting off the alarm.

Due to the burglar alarm now “blasting” through the house, Chacalos’s father, WPHS science teacher John Chacalos, jumped out at her, wielding a titanium baseball bat. After the two screamed at each other, he turned off the alarm.

Chacalos returned to her room to sleep, putting a towel on her pillow to protect it from her saran-wrapped oil head. She only slept for 15 minutes before she was awoken by noises below her bedroom window.

Chacalos looked out her window and saw three men in black with flashlights trying to get into the house. Assuming they were burglars, she panicked and woke up her father again. The three men were the police, already in the neighborhood due to a waterline break, checking out the triggered alarm.

At this point, Chacalos had to be up for school in an hour, so she stayed awake until she had to get ready while her hair soaked in the olive oil.

When she turned on the shower in the morning to rinse the olive oil out of her hair, no water came out due to last night’s waterline break. This forced Chacalos to go to school that day with a Saran-wrapped head covered in olive oil.

“I went to school that day with Saran wrap on my head and a hoodie on, too, but you could still see something mysterious was happening under there,” Chacalos said. “It was funny because all my friends laughed and wondered what I was doing, but it was within my normal realm of chaos.”

Chacalos could not rinse the olive oil out until her third-period speech class when she begged former WPHS speech and drama coach Bill Cornforth to let her go to the locker rooms and shower.

Chacalos’s TikTok recounting the olive oil incident went viral overnight. Chacalos posted the story before she left her family’s home in Wheeling over Thanksgiving break. When she got off the plane at Newark Airport to return to New York, she couldn’t use her phone due to the number of notifications from the TikTok app.

“I couldn’t use Apple Pay on my phone because I was getting so many notifications,” Chacalos said. “I had to pay a couple of dollars to buy an old-fashioned subway MetroCard to get home. It was so funny.”

Chacalos’s olive oil fame spanned beyond her original TikTok recounting the story, which now has over 7 million likes and 35,000 comments. Her next video reenacting the story has over 22 million views and 3 million likes.

Chacalos also saw her follower count on TikTok grow exponentially after the original viral video. Over the past five years, she has had about 700 followers on the app, and now she has over 78,000 followers.

Chacalos has been dubbed the “Olive Oil Girl” on TikTok from the viral video. With the internet fame has come numerous sponsorship offers and brand deals from companies that want Chacalos to promote their products.

The “first and funniest” of these brand deals for Chacalos was a sponsorship from Graza Olive Oil.

“Graza Olive Oil was nice because I actually do love their olive oil and it’s expensive, so I was very excited,” Chacalos said. “They sent two of their marketing team employees dressed as olive oil containers to my front door. It was hilarious, but I also felt bad for them because they had to walk up five flights of stairs to get to my apartment.”

Chacalos also received a package of merchandise featuring the cartoon character “Olive Oyl” from “Popeye the Sailor.” Other companies that send her merchandise include Cerave, Curology and Megafoods.

Though it has been hard to keep track of the number of brand deals and sponsorship offers she’s received, Chacalos has made a point not to do sponsored posts unless she uses the product in her daily life.

“I’ve always found that some brand deals and sponsored posts can be kind of sketchy on social media, so I only want to promote products that I actually use,” Chacalos said. “I’ve turned down a lot of brand deals because I don’t like the product. When the ‘Olive Oil Girl’ tells you she likes a product, she actually does.”

Chacalos still gets waves of notifications every time the video goes viral in a different country.

“Every time I open TikTok, it’s insane because I can tell where in the world the video is popular that day because of the languages in the comments,” Chacalos said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, look at that, the video made it to France today.'”

The video’s “big day” was when it hit Greece. Chacalos recalled all the comments commemorating the Greek hair treatment.

“My cousins were commenting in Greek, ‘She’s one of us,’ and I was like, ‘Bravo, yes, the olive oil things is Greek,'” Chacolos said.

In addition to going viral in Greece, Chacalos knows her video has also garnered her new fame at the Greek church she attends in Wheeling, St. John the Divine Greek Orthodox Church.

“Apparently, ever since this has happened, I’m one of the main topics of discussion back home at the Wheeling Greek Church,” Chacalos said. “They’re all very proud since it was for olive oil, which is very fitting for the Greeks. I’m trying to represent St. John’s and Wheeling as well as I can.”

Chacalos returns to Wheeling every summer to put on a cabaret-style show, “A Night with Megan Chacalos” at Towngate Theatre & Cinema.

“I love going back to Wheeling, it’s such a golden place to grow up,” Chacalos said. “I truly believe if I had gone to any other high school, I would not be where I am right now. I’m very excited to return every summer to do the show because the audiences are so lovely and welcoming.”

Chacalos wants to continue to “represent” her culture, hometown and high school alma mater while she “rides the wave” of viral fame. She noted that participating in the WPHS speech and debate team and WPHS theatre program prepared her well for working in entertainment in New York City.

“I’ve accidentally and partly intentionally worn a lot of Wheeling Park High School and Ohio County Schools shirts for videos and interviews,” Chacalos said. “When I’m in the city, I feel like I have to be ‘Megan the actor and producer’ and look very fancy and put together. Whenever I’m not on a carpet or at an event, I’m chilling in a Wheeling Park t-shirt, so it’s fun wearing Park stuff around the city.”

The next step for Chacalos is to secure an agent or manager to help her manage the brand deals and interviews, which she noted are getting “very overwhelming.” She also plans to continue to post “silly” videos on TikTok, noting she has made “the same stupid stuff for years.”

“The people want more silly stuff, so I shall provide more silly stuff,” Chacalos joked.

Chacalos also plans to do the olive oil hair treatment again soon, as she now has plenty of Graza Olive Oil bottles to use.

“I had never done the olive oil treatment since that day in high school because I was low-key traumatized, but when Graza reached out and said it would be funny if I did another, I decided to retry it,” Chacalos said. “I did one the other day, and my hair looked beautiful, and I got so many compliments. I get why it works, in ancient times, it was their main beauty practice.”