The Moodus Noises: Part I

Quite a few years ago I was reading The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories published by Penguin. I was reading pulpy stories of tentacled terrors, but since it was a Penguin edition they had footnotes so I could feel intellectual. I was having my cake and eating it too.

In "The Dunwich Horror," Lovecraft's tale of central Massachusetts wizardry and invisible monsters, the people of Dunwich are troubled by strange rumbling sounds that come from a hill in their village. The footnote indicates Lovecraft incorporated these noises into his story after reading about similar noises in Moodus, Connecticut. But while Lovecraft's story was fiction, the Moodus noises were real.

Dean Stockwell in the 1970 film of The Dunwich Horror. Is he blocking out the Moodus noises?

That's how I personally first learned about the Moodus noises, but people have been hearing them for centuries. Moodus, which is a small village in the town of East Haddam, was originally called Machimoodus, which means "Place of Noises" or "Place of Evil Noises" in the Algonquin language. The noises were recorded by early Puritan settlers, and continue even today. The Hartford Courant reported that the noises were heard as recently as March, 2011.

The noises are centered around Mount Tom, where the Salmon and Moodus Rivers come together. They sound like cannon shots or explosions, and when they happened in 2011 emergency responders rushed into action, looking for a fire or explosion. There was nothing to find. The noises had come from deep inside the earth.

Here's how a July 1891 Boston Globe article describes them. The noises had been heard in Moodus just a few days earlier:

They are heard intermittently. Sometimes the mountain is silent for 25 or 30 years, then suddenly the strangest sounds break forth, a deep sepulchral, voluminous sound, like the moaning of an imprisoned monster, that seems to boom in subterranean caverns of the earth, and is heard distinctly 10 or 12 miles away.

The noises begin with a seemingly far away low rumbling note that speedily swells in volume and intensity, and culminates in a vast rolling sound, like the muttering of distant thunder, and the ground trembles as if with the throe of an earthquake.

Another Boston Globe article from March 1940 gives a similar description:

Virtually every householder in Moodus rushed to the cellar last night just before midnight to see whether his furnace had blown up, and finding it hadn't called neighbors on the telephone. Thus it was learned that the famous Moodus Noises had returned after about four years.

... Moodus has been shaken at irregular intervals by strange subterranean concussions. The sounds are reported to emanate from the mouth of a great cave, high on a hillside in view of virtually every house in town. No one apparently has ever been at the mouth of the cave when the noises issued forth, however.

"You can always distinguish these noises from blasting; the concussion is so much greater," one resident said today.

They sound scary and kind of awesome, so I can understand why Lovecraft put them into one of his stories. The Algonquians who originally lived in Moodus thought they were awesome and scary too, and therefore ascribed them to their god Hobomok, who was also awesome and scary. The Indians who actually lived on Mount Tom were specialists in interpreting the voice of Hobomok and were consulted as oracles by other local tribes.

When the Puritans showed up in the 1670s they asked the Indians about the strange booming sounds. They responded that they were the voice of Hobomok, and that he was unhappy because the English had come to Connecticut. (He probably was.)

Of course, the Puritans had their own interpretation. They didn't believe in Hobomok and thought the Indians were actually worshiping the Devil. Stephen Hosmer, Haddam's first minister, wrote the following to a friend in August of 1729:

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. ... Now whether there be anything diabolical in these things (the noises), 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.

Once the Devil gets invoked you know things are going to get weird. Next week I'll post some of the crazy Colonial era legends about the noises, which involve witches, alchemists, and underground battle caves. Stay tuned!

Update: the second part of this post is now up!

Good News! Puritans Less Likely to Have Sex with Devil

Here's some good news. According to historian Richard Godbeer, only five accused New England witches reported having sex with the Devil! Well, I guess it's bad news if you're the Devil...

Even five may seem like a lot, but not when you compare the New England numbers with reports of Devil-sex from European witchcraft trials. As Godbeer points out in his article "Witchcraft and Sex in Early Modern Culture", the Europe witches' sabbath allegedly consisted of eating, drinking and orgiastic sex. Satan presided, and took part in all of the action.

By contrast, in New England the supposed witch gatherings were relatively sedate. Satan appeared dressed like a Puritan minister, waved around a book, and talked about his demonic plans. The witches just stood around and listened. Basically, it was a demonic parody of the Puritan's congregational style of worship.

Why the big difference? According to Godbeer, in Europe the authorities were concerned about regulating sex. They forced confessions from accused witches that addressed their concerns. In contrast, the accused in New England used their confessions to mock the church that was torturing them.

So, who were the five witches who took a walk on the wild side?

• Mary Johnson of Wethersfield confessed to "Uncleanness with Men and Devils" in 1648.
• Rebecca Greensmith of Hartford, "owned that the devill had frequent use of her body" in 1663.
• A neighbor accused New Haven's Elizabeth Goodman of having Hobbamocke as her husband. Hobbamocke (aka Hobbomock) was a local Native American god the Puritans equated with the Devil. To the Indians, he was the deity who presided over shamanism, death, darkness and the night.
• In the Salem trials, it was said of Sarah Parker that the "devil had come to her and kissed her."
• Sarah Bishop claimed the "Devill Did Come bodyly unto her and that she was familiar with the Devill..."

I think it's important to point out the New England Puritans had plenty of sex with each other. Trial records from the 17th century are filled with cases of adultery, incest, sodomy and even bestiality. But they just weren't into having sex with Satan.

You can find Richard Godbeer's complete article in the Dublin Seminar's Wonders of the Invisible World, 1600-1900.

The Black Fox

I've had a gross stomach bug the last few days, so I haven't updated this as much as I should. Luckily, I had this post pre-written from a while ago. The weather is still wintry outside, so this little piece of New England Gothic works well today.

Pre-stomach flu post:

Foxes, sly and crafty, are notoriously difficult to catch. The Narragansett Indians, however, knew about mysterious black foxes that were impossible to catch or kill.

In 1643 Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, wrote:

"The Indians say they have black foxes, which they have often seene, but never could take any of them. They say they are Manittooes, that is Gods, Spirits, or Divine powers, as they say of everything which they cannot comprehend."

As the years passed, the black fox took on more sinister connotations among the British settlers, and a particularly nasty black fox was said to haunt the Salmon River in Connecticut. Poet John Brainard made this legend into a verse that was well-known in its day. Later, John Greenleaf Whitter, a poet from from Haverhill, Massachusetts, expanded the legend in his own poem in 1831, incorporating elements of the Wild Hunt myth and Algonquin shamanism.

According to Whittier,

"They said it was a Fox accurst
By Hobomocko's* will
That it was once a mighty chief
Whom battle might not kill
But who, for some unspoken crime
Was doomed to wander still."

*Hobomocko is one name for the Algonquin god associated with death, night, water and shamanism.

One winter, the black fox appears near a New England town, and two cocky young Yankee hunters chase after it with rifles, vowing that they will kill it. The local Indians disagree.

"They told us that our hunters
Would never more return
That they would hunt for evermore
Through tangled swamp and fern
And that their last and dismal fate
No mortal ear might learn."

Hmmm. Obviously, these hunters had never seen a horor movie or read a horror story. When the old guy at the gas station tells you to avoid Camp Crystal Lake, avoid it! When the local Indians tell you something's cursed, it really is!

In the spring, the hunters' corpses are discovered deep in the forest. Nothing ever grows on that spot again, and animals and birds avoid it.

"For people say that every year
When winter snows are spread
All over the face of the frozen earth
And the forest leaves are shed
The Spectre-Fox comes forth and howls
Above the hunters' bed."

It's a nice little story, and it's interesting to see how over two hundred years the black fox changed from something spiritual to something spooky.