The Moodus Noises

CONSIDERING THE VARIETY and longevity of the traditional lore they have inspired, it is probably safe to say that no Connecticut phenomenon has occasioned more wonder, imaginative speculation and even scientific investigation than the mysterious underground rumblings and accompanying earth tremors known collectively as the "Moodus Noises." Apparently centered in an area which includes Cave Hill and neighboring Mount Tom, near the place in East Haddam where the Salmon and Moodus Rivers flow together, the Noises have awed and confounded all who have heard them from time immemorial.
For the earliest inhabitants of this region, the people of the Pequot, Mohegan and Narragansett tribes, the thundering and quaking around Mount Tom were evidence of the living presence of the god Hobomoko, who sat below on a sapphire throne and decreed all human calamity. The Indians called the area "Matchemadoset" or "Matchitmoodus" -- now "Machimoodus" -- meaning, literally, "Place of Bad Noises." Since Hobomoko's thunder was sometimes loud and violent and at other times soft and gentle, it was said that Connecticut's Indians depended upon the local Machimoodus tribe to interpret the many voices of the evil deity. Living, as they did, in the shadow of sacred Mount Tom, the pious men of the Machimoodus were thought by others to have direct access to the raging spirit beneath its slopes.
Thus, when Hobomoko spoke, the resident medicine-men listened. Then, as chieftains from other tribes gathered with their offerings, the Machimoodus priests would engage in great powwows, finally emerging with the right formula for calming the angry god through sacrifice and prayer. They say that many were the times when the Machimoodus medicine-men were kept very busy consulting with visiting sachems and preparing offerings to the underground deity.
When the first white settlers came to the region in the 1670s, they were shaken by the Noises -- in more ways than one. As might be expected, those devout Puritans were inclined to believe that the Indians' Hobomoko and their own Satan were one and the same being, and speculation about this possibility occupied much of their energies. Such notions appeared often in letters like the following, written by the Rev. Stephen Hosmer, Haddam's first minister, to a friend in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and dated August 13, 1729: As to the earthquakes I have something considerable and awful to tell you. Earthquakes have been here (and nowhere but in this precinct as can be discerned; that is, they seem to have their center, rise and origin among us), as has been observed, for more than thirty years. I have been informed that in this place before the English settlements, there were great numbers of Indian inhabitants, and that it was a place of extraordinary Indian Powwows, or in short, that it was a place where the Indians drove a prodigious trade at worshipping the devil. Also I was informed, that, many years past, an old Indian was asked, what was the reason of the noises in this place? To which he replied, that the Indian's God was very angry because Englishman's God was come here. Now whether there be anything diabolical in these things, I know not; but this I know, that God Almighty is to be seen and trembled at, in what has been often heard among us. The Haddam ministry must have been an unusually challenging post for the Rev. Hosmer. Not only was he the messenger of God in the only parish around where the Devil lived right underfoot and constantly made threatening noises, but he was also spokesman for the God who was responsible for keeping the Indians' resident evil spirit all stirred up. Indeed, Pastor Hosmer had reason to tremble!
As time passed and the Indian influence waned, other causes for the Moodus Noises were noted in the records of East Haddam's inhabitants. For instance, during the years when the witchcraft mania swept southern New England, there was a popular belief in the neighborhood of the Noises that they were the sounds of violent battle -- between the good witches of Haddam and the bad witches of Moodus, engaged in unending and inconclusive warfare. In 1816 and 1817, during a period of earthquakes so violent they were felt in a band stretching from Boston to New York City, the Noises were attributed by some to "mineral or chemical combinations exploding at a depth of many thousand feet beneath the surface of the earth." Others suspected the explosion of subterranean gases powerful enough to move large boulders beneath the earth, but not strong enough to open fissures at the surface.
All of these notions pale, however, in comparison with the imaginative theories inherent in the legend of Dr. Steel and the "carbuncle." As the story went, there arrived in East Haddam sometime in the 1760s a mysterious stranger who claimed that his name was Dr. Steel. They say he was an Englishman possessed of strange and magical powers, who had been sent to Connecticut by King George to lift the curse of the Moodus Noises, which had lately been reported to the monarch.
The learned and aged physician built a crazy-looking house in a lonely spot on Mount Tom, near a cave that some said gave direct access to the realm of Hobomoko. Dr. Steel had determined that if he could find and seize the "great carbuncle" -- a pearl of gigantic size -- which blocked the mouth of the cavern, the Noises would temporarily cease and the countryside would have peace, at least for a time. After he retired behind the walls of the house, closing every window, crack and keyhole behind him, Dr. Steel and his research became mysteries as deep as the Noises themselves.
While no one was admitted to the odd little building on Mount Tom, curious observers were intrigued by the clang of hammers issuing from the house all night, the endless showers of sparks from the chimney and the sulphurous odors emitted from within. Then, one night, all activity ceased. Dr. Steel emerged from his house and, walking along a path marked by a faint light which moved before him, made his way to the closed entrance of the singular cave.
They say that as the ancient alchemist fell to his task of digging at the immense pearl that lay across the mouth of the pit, loud grew the Moodus Noises that night. Finally, with near superhuman effort, Dr. Steel pried the carbuncle from its resting place and removed it from the cavern mouth. What followed would be long remembered by astonished witnesses. From the depths of the cave a blood-red light shone forth, streaming into the heavens like a crimson comet or a spear of the northern aurora. It was, they believed, the flash of the great carbuncle, and all who looked through it said that the stars beyond appeared dyed in blood.
When the sun rose the next day, the people of East Haddam discovered that both Dr. Steel and the monstrous pearl had departed earlier that morning on a ship bound for England. Later, news reached Connecticut that the magnificent stone had continued to bring evil to its surroundings, for the galley carrying the pearl and Dr. Steel had sunk in mid-ocean, with the loss of all hands. Ever since, so they say, from the depth of a thousand fathoms the crimson rays of the carbuncle have occasionally shone forth, lighting up a morning sky and striking fear into the hearts of sailors who have seen it.
But in East Haddam, the residents were pleased that Dr. Steel's prophecy had come true. Before he sealed himself away in the funny house on Mount Tom, he had told the people that removal of the offensive carbuncle would quiet the Moodus Noises for years to come. And so, indeed, it did. Even decades later, when the sounds and shocks occasionally recurred -- and the Indians said the mountain was trying to give birth to another stone -- things never were as bad as they were in the days before Dr. Steel delivered them from evil.
With the arrival of the scientific age, traditional talk of evil gods, magic carbuncles and subterranean gas explosions began to be drowned out by scholarly discussions of such things as gneiss and mica schist, disturbed metamorphic strata, fault lines and seismic stress. Oh, a few exceptions to such scientific arguments persisted. One early nineteenth-century journalist said in print that the Noises were due to "pearls in the mussels in the Salmon and Connecticut Rivers" -- undoubtedly a survival from old Dr. Steel's carbuncle theory. And one Sunday evening in 1852, a church congregation was led to believe that a horse caused the Noises.
It seems that villagers had gathered for worship in the East Haddam Congregational Church at Little Haddam, when the services were suddenly interrupted by what people first thought was a horse and carriage striking the side of the meeting house and scraping noisily along an outside wall. Believing that a horse harnessed to one of the wagons parked in the rear carriage shed had broken loose, men of the congregation rushed outside to capture the runaway. But they found nothing amiss; all the horses and wagons were still tethered. Later, having compared notes with their non-churchgoing neighbors, the ear-witnesses to the puzzling incident had to conclude that their equine visitor had really been the Noises, up to some of their old tricks.
Nowadays, of course, the mysteries of the Moodus Noises have all but disappeared, lost to the calculations of modern seismologists, using the latest sophisticated instruments and guided by advanced geophysical research. As recently as October 19, 1981, for example, a triumphant headline in the Hartford Courant proclaimed "Seismic Detective Solves 'Moodus Noises' Mystery," while the story beneath trumpeted the scientists' discovery that shallow "micro earthquakes" were the root-cause of the Noises.
It is certainly good that the geologists and seismologists have finally answered all the questions about the legendary Noises. And men of science have to be believed. Yet, despite all the learned conclusions, there are probably some folks down in the Haddams who still get a little thrill out of saying, "There's something mighty queer about them sounds." After all, it would go against human nature if people couldn't occasionally entertain the thought that maybe, just maybe, the medicine men of Machimoodus or old Dr. Steel knew what they were talking about.

from Legendary Connecticut by David E. Philips / ISBN 1-880684-05-5 / $17.95

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