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The Mysterious Moodus Noises of Connecticut

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The mysterious Moodus noises in south central Connecticut for many years frightened the Puritan settlers.

They weren’t alone. The Wangunk Indians had told the colonists of the fearful noises that they tried to appease. In fact, the Indians called the land around Mt. Tom “Machemoodus,” meaning place of bad noises. The settlers shortened the name to Moodus, now a village in East Haddam.

Today, people can still hear the strange Moodus noises, though they don’t pack the same terrifying punch they did in days of yore.

The Mysterious Moodus Noises of Connecticut

Origin of the Moodus noises: Mt. Tom at the intersection of the Connecticut and Salmon rivers.

Moodus Noises

The Moodus Noises seemed to come from underground. Sometimes they sounded like thunder, sometimes like pistol shots. Sometimes they disappeared for years, then they’d return furiously.

The Wangunk Indians believed the Moodus noises originated from the god Hobomoko, who sat on a sapphire throne underneath Mt. Tom. Hobomoko kept the Indian medicine men busy trying to interpret his voice, which sometimes raged and sometimes spoke gently. The medicine men tried to figure out the right combination of sacrifice and prayer to calm the angry god.

The Puritans, of course, thought their angry God caused the Moodus noises. They first recorded hearing the noises in 1702.

In 1729, the Rev. Stephen Hosmer of East Haddam, Conn., wrote a letter to a friend in Boston referring to ‘fearful and dreadful’ sounds that frightened local residents.

Stephen Hosmer

Hosmer believed “God almighty is to be seen and trembled at, in what has been often heard among us.”

The Indians had a somewhat different take on the noises, wrote Hosmer. An old Indian said the Indian’s god was very angry that the Englishman’s god had come here.

“I have myself heard eight or ten sounds successively, and imitating small arms, in the space of five minutes,” he wrote. “I have, I suppose, heard several hundreds of them within twenty years; some more, some less terrible. Sometimes we have heard them almost every day, and great numbers of them in the space of a year. Oftentimes I have observed them coming down from the north, imitating slow thunder, which shakes the houses and all that is in them.”

Others had more scientific explanations. One colonist thought a tunnel linked the mountain to the sea and it carried wind and tidal sounds. Some thought underground explosions of gases caused the terrifying noises..

Alchemy

The Moodus noises ceased for a while after the great earthquake of 1727.

But another legend about the Moodus noises sprang up in the mid-1700s.  King George supposedly sent an alchemist named Dr. Steele to stop them in 1760.

Steele said a great fossil called a carbuncle in the bowels of the earth caused the noises. He said his magic could remove the carbuncle and stop them. Steele then moved into a blacksmith’s shop, covered the windows and doors and at night worked in secrecy. One night the people of Moodus saw a cloud of smoke, flame and sparks coming from the blacksmith shop and concluded Steele was coming up with the carbuncle.

Eventually, Dr. Steele told the people of Moodus he had removed the great carbuncle, but he had discovered a smaller carbuncle that would cause more noises. They wouldn’t be as awful, however, as the noise caused by the large carbuncle. Then he disappeared.

Earthquakes

moodus-noises-mount-tom

Mt. Tom today

“Dr. Steele” was not exactly as good as his word.

On May 16, 1791 at about 8 p.m., an earthquake centered in Moodus shook all of Connecticut, the largest known tremor in the state. Measuring 4.5-5 on the Richter scale, it caused fish to jump out of water 20 miles away.

Tremors continued for several days, and on May 18, “the concussion of the earth, and the roaring of the atmosphere, were most tremendous. Consternation and dread filled every house. Chimneys toppled, stone walls fell and rocks of several tons moved.”

In 1929, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft used the Moodus noises for the basis of his short story, The Dunwich Horror.

Seismometer and other instruments at the Weston Observatory

But by the 20th century, scientists from Boston College’s Weston Observatory concluded tiny, shallow earthquakes called earthquake swarms caused the Moodus noises.

During the 1980s, four separate earthquake swarms consisting of 100 separate earthquakes struck the village, causing the Moodus noises to start up again.

Then in March 2011, the Moodus noises returned with an earthquake measuring 1.3 on the Richter scale.

Today, if you want to hear the Moodus noises, they can be best heard from Cave Hill, which is owned by the Cave Hill Resort.

This story was updated in 2023.

Image: Seismomitor By Z22 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33745561.

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George Perkins Marsh, The Vermont Farmer Who Founded the Environmental Movement

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George Perkins Marsh, a little-known Congressman from Vermont, gave birth to the environmental movement in September 1847. On that day he gave a speech to farmers at the Rutland County Agricultural Fair after judging oxen, swine and maple sugar.

In his talk, Marsh previewed his now-forgotten book, Man and Nature, or Physical geography as modified by human action.  Modern environmental historians compare it with Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species.

They were the two big books of the 19th century that demonstrated connections between humans and other forms of life.

View of Woodstock, Vt., from Mount Tom

View of Woodstock, Vt., from Mount Tom

“It takes a real act of historical imagination to understand just how profoundly Man and Nature reshaped American attitudes toward the environment,” wrote environmental historian William Cronon.

George Perkins Marsh

Marsh ushered in a new way of looking at the world, one that understood humans don’t really dominate nature. He inspired the reforesting of the Northeast. He did it by showing how denuded hills and dammed rivers caused erosion and flooding and depleted fisheries.

In his book, Marsh demonstrated how humans connect with nature in unexpected ways. He described how wetlands increased in North America because of a new Parisian fashion. Beavers were nearly extinct on the continent because of the popularity of beaver hats. But then a Parisian manufacturer came up with silk hats, which quickly became the rage. Demand for beaver fur fell off and the beaver population came back. More beavers meant more dams – and more wetlands.

Perhaps of all the people in the world in the mid-18th century, George Perkins Marsh was uniquely qualified to connect Parisian fashions with the American environment. He was at once a cosmopolitan world traveler and a Vermont farm boy, a scholar immersed in abstractions and a businessman (although not a very good one).

Mount Tom

He was born March 15, 1801, to a wealthy landowner in Woodstock, Vt. His father owned much of Mount Tom. As a boy, George Perkins Marsh watched the clearing and planting of the hills around Woodstock for pasture and fuel. He noticed the erosion, the increased flooding; later in life, he wrote a report about the depleted fisheries.

George Perkins Marsh

George Perkins Marsh

As an adult, he tried his hand at businesses that interfered with the environment: a woolen mill that depended on dammed streams, a marble quarry that cut stone from the earth, a farm with sheep that cropped the grass, a lumber dealership. He made a failed investment in a railroad that stripped the land of trees.

Perkins was more successful at politics. He was elected to the first of thee terms in Congress in 1843, where he helped create the Smithsonian Institution. Later he was appointed minister to the Ottoman Empire. During his five years living in and touring the Middle East he observed how man had made barren the once-lush region. He also sent samples of fish, flora, fauna and rock to his friend Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian Institution.

Man and Nature

In 1864, he wrote Man and Nature with little expectation it would be noticed. He was wrong.  It was the Silent Spring of the 19th century, a book that launched the environmental movement. Man and Nature led to passage of the 1873 Timber Culture Act, which encouraged homesteaders on the Great Plains to plant trees. It laid the groundwork for the creation of Adirondack Park and the Forest Reserve Act of 1891. It also had a profound influence on environmentalists such as John Muir and Gifford Pinchot.

Marsh revised his book several times while serving as a diplomat to the Kingdom of Italy. He spent 21 years in that post, the longest serving chief of ministers in U.S. history.

Today, you can visit his boyhood home in Woodstock at the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller State Park. You can appreciate his legacy at the Smithsonian Institution – or simply by enjoying the fall colors of the trees in New England.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy The Birds Best Friend: How Ernest Baynes Saved the Animals and Winnepesaukee Water Wars: Fighting for NH Property Rights in 1859.

We are indebted to George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Book) by David Lowenthal and William Cronon for this article. This story was updated in 2022. 

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