A Steady Observer for Trembling Moodus
By ANDI RIERDEN
Published: August 6, 1989
IN Moodus, they call her the Earthquake Lady. Each time the ground moves, the windows of Cathy Wilson's house rattle and the stereo speakers that hang on the wall shake. At times, loud thumps send ripples through her water bed, waking her at all hours of the night. And sometimes, rumbling jackhammer-like noises from below send her 20 cats scattering in every direction.
Geophysicists call them microquakes, but these small tremors that rumble through Mrs. Wilson's 120-year-old Colonial house on the Salmon River, about 10 miles southeast of Middletown, are what local residents have known for centuries as the ''Moodus noises.''
The swarms of tremors at Moodus, which recur periodically and whose cause is unknown, are bizarre for the special property of the noises. Often compared to distant thunder or cannon fire, the noises have long occurred there. While scientists have offered various theories as to what causes the quakes, no one is sure why they are so noisy and why they occur in that particular place and depth: about a mile deep in an area a few hundred yards wide.
Since 1981, Mrs. Wilson has faithfully recorded every serious thunder and pop in a journal she shares with the Weston Observatory of Boston College in Weston, Mass., which monitors all earthquake activity in New England and has been seeking clues to the Moodus noises. And because her farmhouse is just 1,500 feet away from what is thought to be the epicenter of the Moodus earthquakes, scientists there take what Mrs. Wilson records seriously.
Over the years, the observatory has placed various seismic instruments that measure the magnitude of the earthquakes on the Wilsons' property. Though Mrs. Wilson receives no money for this, she has received considerable fame as the village's guide to the celebrated movements.
''Every time there's a fairly good boom around here, people in town and all the experts start phoning, wanting to know if it was or if it wasn't an earthquake,'' said Mrs. Wilson, sitting in the tidy cedar-paneled farmhouse that she shares with her husband, Barry, and their four children.
For centuries, the Moodus noises have been the subject of folklore. Records of the noises go back to the Indians, who thought the noises emanated from evil spirits. Puritans, on the other hand, conjectured that it was God's way of punishing them.
The name Moodus derives from Machemoodus, a Wangunk Indian name meaning ''place of noises.'' The Wangunk created a religion around the noises, believing that the area was the dwelling place of Hobbamock, a vengeful god angered that the Europeans had come to Connecticut. Colonial settlers attributed the noises to fights between the black magic witches of Haddam and the white magic witches of Moodus.
The fight supposedly took place under Mount Tom in a cavern lighted by a great carbuncle. When the devil tired of the fights, he would blow the witches out of the cavern, extinguishing the carbuncle's light and producing ''deafening peals of thunder.'' Other legends tell of an old wizard named Dr. Steel who, for a time, cured the region of the noises by removing the carbuncle from the earth. But after the doctor's ship to England was lost at sea, rumors circulated that an evil spirit had murdered him for removing the carbuncle. ''Actually, I think he probably just took money given to him for removing the carbuncle and ran,'' Mrs. Wilson said.
She and her husband had never heard of the Moodus noises when they bought their 30-acre farm in 1969. Over the years, the family became accustomed to the sporadic noises coming from the back area of their house. ''It sounded like thunder,'' Mrs. Wilson said, ''only it just didn't make sense.''
In 1979, the Wilsons built an addition to their house in which Mrs. Wilson opened a crafts store. At that point she began to meet more local residents who told her of the famed noises. ''That's when we started to realize that what we were hearing could be the Moodus noises,'' she said. ''Though nobody knew for sure if they were earthquakes.''
Known for its vacation resorts and golf courses, the quiet village within East Haddam has experienced thousands of earthquakes. Experts speculate that the biggest occurred in 1761, when a quake toppled chimneys and was felt in New York and Boston.
In the early 1980's, the Wilsons contacted Dr. John E. Ebel, the director of the Weston Observatory, who, along with a team of geophysicists from Columbia University in New York, visited the Wilson farm and installed a seismograph 50 feet from their back door.
In 1982 alone, Moodus experienced hundreds of earthquakes, though many of them were too tiny to be felt. Mrs. Wilson still refers to the largest, which registered 2.9 on the Richter scale, as ''the big one.''
Another swarm of quakes hit Moodus in 1987 and 1988. The most prominent of that group hit a magnitude of 2.3, terrifying Mrs. Wilson, who had not heard any tremors for more than a year. ''We had been having trouble with our furnace, and I first thought the thing had blown up,'' she recalled. ''It was like this huge crash under my feet, followed by moderate quakes. That really shook me up.''