EAST HADDAM — Diana Jacome Dutch was behind the counter at Moodus Package Store Wednesday night when "all of a sudden, there was a big bang and everything shook."
"We thought something hit the building," the native of East Haddam's Moodus section said Thursday.
James Siena said he was home in East Hampton when he heard, "Kaboom!" Siena said he thought at first that his boiler had blown up.
As it turned out, the explosive sound came from a small earthquake about 1-1/2 miles under the legendary home of the "Moodus Noises." The quake measured 2.3 magnitude, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, far below even the "moderate" level of 5.0 that can cause some damage to weaker structures.
Another small quake, measuring 1.3 magnitude at a depth of about three miles, was recorded in Stamford Monday. No damage was reported from either event.
While officials warn that quakes on the East Coast can cause damage, the events tend to be much tamer than temblors that shake western states.
The quake in Moodus also was felt in East Hampton, Colchester and Hebron. Community social media boards lit up with questions and comments. Elizabeth Banks, who works at the Hometown Market grocery store in Moodus, said she eventually learned what happened through one of those Facebook community pages.
Banks said she was at her home in the village with her daughter and husband "when everybody jumped out of their seats."
"It sounded like a bomb went off, and then the house shook," she said.
The Mississippi native said this was her first exposure to the legendary sound and fury in Moodus, named for the Indian word "Mackimoodus," meaning "place of noises." The Wangunks and other natives came to the Mount Tom area (Machimoodus State Park), as the story goes, to pay homage to Hobomoko, who lived there in a cave with battling good and evil witches. When Hobomoko could no longer tolerate the conflict, he would wave his wand and create a thunderous wind that blew the witches out of the cave and caused the earth to shake.
An early historian, John de Forest, explained that “strange noises and rumblings have been heard at times in the bowels of Mount Tom ... and slight shocks, as of an earthquake, have been felt through the surrounding country."
Booms, rumblings and rattling have been recorded in the area for centuries, dating back well before a larger earthquake, recorded on May 16, 1791, knocked down stone walls and chimneys, Robert Thorson, an earth sciences professor at the University of Connecticut, told The Associated Press earlier this year.
The occurrences were frequent enough that the federal government, worried about the possible effect of seismic activity on the nearby, now-decommissioned Haddam Neck Nuclear Power Plant, conducted a study of the “Moodus Noises” in the late 1980s, Thorson said. Researchers found the noises came from unusually shallow seismic displacements within an unusually strong and brittle crust, where the sound is amplified by rock fractures and topography.
“There is something about Moodus that is tectonic that is creating these noises there,” Thorson said. “And then there is something acoustic that is amplifying or modifying the noises and we don’t really have a good answer for the cause of either.”
Thorson said there could be a series of underground fractures or hollows in the area that help amplify the sounds made by pressure on the crust.
“That’s going to create crunching noises,” he said. “You know what this is like when you hear ice cubes break.”
Dutch, the village package store owner, said she first heard the noises at age 8. She's now 43 and has witnessed the phenomena several times, usually a rumbling and not the crashing noise heard Wednesday night.
When she's in the store and it happens, Dutch said, all the bottles clink against each other.
"It's like everything's shivering," she said.
Nov 21, 2024
Reporter
Jesse Leavenworth is a reporter with Hearst Connecticut Media Group. He is a New Britain native living in Hebron, U.S. Army veteran (1979-83) and married (Lynn) father of three (Kerry, Kate and John). Jesse worked as a reporter and editor for about 35 years for The Hartford Courant, covering all kinds of stories across the state. Jesse is especially interested in Connecticut history, crime, veterans affairs and news of the weird.