Tag Archives: Connecticut

The Electrician’s House

Context: While in a class discussion, the student told me about an eerie experience she had at her old house in Connecticut, previously owned by an electrician.

Text:

“My house is pretty old in Connecticut and it was created by an electrician — and so there’s like seven outlets in my room alone. There’s so many places to charge things, which is actually very useful, but there’s a lot of switches in the house that don’t do anything. Obviously they connect to something, but we’re not sure what they connect to.

There’s two different switches for the fan on my ceiling. One of them doesn’t really do anything, but the other is a sliding switch so you can choose how fast the fan moves. There was one night where the fan kept spinning on its own. And so I turned it on and turned it back on, and I went to my parents’ room and told them the fan was spinning. I said that I feel like there’s something weird. I feel like there’s something in my room.

My parents were like it’s probably a ghost, cause we believe in that stuff a lot. My mom was like ‘go in and tell the ghost that you know that you’re here and you know something’s the matter. I need to go to bed and you have to go. You are not welcome here.’

I go back and jump into bed and I’m under my covers. I’m sitting there look up at the fan and I say all that stuff. And then the fan stops.”

Analysis:

One thing that I found so interesting about this story was the similarity we shared in our interactions with weird phenomena in our spaces. I had shared my own story about telling a possible spirit to “stop,” which was followed by a complete cessation of action. The student and I shared that the scariest part about that situation was when the mysterious force halted. As she told me the interaction, it was alarming to imagine something listening to her fears and realizing that they were finally getting a reaction. I’m curious to see if other people who have had ghost stories where they were scared and decided to face it head-on ended up having similar responses.

As Cowdell notes in the article on scary folk elements, “folk horror is a feeling.” Stories like these are passed through performance and the thrill of imagining oneself in that type of situation.

New Canaan, Connecticut, “West is the best, South is the mouth, and East is the least.”

Text:

When A was in elementary school in New Canaan, Connecticut, there was a saying for her school, “West is the best, South is the mouth, and East is the least.”

Context:

In New Canaan, CT, there were three elementary schools that existed in this town. A went to West, and their saying for the other schools was “West is the best, South is the mouth, and East is the least.” She would hear/learn about these sayings in places like the bus and playgrounds of her school. Students would say it if ever interacting with the other schools, but it was very much a kid saying – as in parents were not aware of the saying. Suddenly, in middle school, when the schools merged, there were new sayings from the other schools. East would say, “East is the beast, West is the one with the hairy chest, and South is the mouth.” A did not know if there was a South version, as she did not interact with them as much.

Analysis:

This saying is a form of children’s playground folklore that reinforces group identity and rivalry. By declaring “West is the best” and diminishing the other schools through rhyme, students created a sense of pride and belonging while establishing playful social hierarchies. Because the phrase spread among students without adult involvement, it demonstrates how children create their own social boundaries through shared jokes and repetition. When the schools later merged during middle school, and new versions emerged, it demonstrates how this kind of folklore adapts to changing social dynamics; which ultimately allows students to form identity and competition in a new shared environment and at an early age.

Melon Heads

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Residence: Oxford, Connecticut
Performance Date: 04/23/2021
Primary Language: English

Main Text: 

Melon Heads 

Background on Informant: 

My informant is a current student who has shared with me his experiences of childhood folklore and traditions that he grew up with. In a series of interviews he has shared with me his knowledge. 

Context: 

He explains:

“Growing up in Connecticut, you hear legends and myths constantly especially when you’re young as the spread of information runs rampant among kids. The one I vividly remember is the legend of the Melon Heads. 

These melon heads are said to be these small humans with giant bulbous heads who hide out and attack people in the woods. Living in Southern Connecticut, where they are said to reside, always made me feel uneasy. 

I’d honestly rather take a ghost or witch than a melon head. But they are said to eat small animals and the flesh of teenagers (I know right how convenient). 

The story supposedly goes that there was this hospital or asylum (depends on who tells you the story), but it had a lot of criminally insane patients. Well in the 1960s, it burned down, resulting in the death of all of the workers and most of the patients, but a bunch escaped into the woods. In order to survive they resorted to cannibalism and inbreeding, which is the ‘melon head’ aspect of it due to deformities from the inbreeding. 

Every so often you hear the many stories of people seeing them. Like apparently in the 1980s, a group of girls from (I forget which high school) decided to drive around and look for melon heads, so they left their car and went into the woods. Then the engine of their car started and they ‘saw’ the melon heads drive off with the car. But there’s so many stories all over Southern Connecticut with people claiming to see and hear them. 

I’m not saying I believe they exist, but I’m also not saying they don’t. I don’t want to gamble with that. But it is interesting how you can’t escape Connecticut without hearing about the melon heads at least once in your life.” 

Analysis/Thoughts: 

As a believer of a many things, I can certainly say I too was left uneasy after hearing about the legend of the melon heads. I grew up hearing about them too but I was always too afraid to fully get to know the story but now I do. It’s fascinating to think how this story stays alive because of how elementary kids and high schoolers continue to tell it over and over again, even when it dates back to the 1960’s. It’s one of the few legends of Connecticut that has stayed alive and has thrived. I also love how there are so many different versions of the same story going around as it has evolved over the decades. Overall, I enjoyed learning more about this folklore of Connecticut, and observed that these stories go out as far as Ohio and Michigan, but next time I go for a drive I will definitely be on the lookout for any melon heads out there. 

The Moodus Noises of Moodus, Connecticut

Nationality: United States of America
Age: 51
Occupation: VP, Renewables Engie Solar
Residence: Kansas City, MO
Performance Date: 4/16/20
Primary Language: English

Main Piece:

“So this is a story about- nearby where I grew up in Connecticut there’s a little teeny town in the southern part of Connecticut called Moodus and its where my first cousins lived and we used to go visit around the holidays, Christmas in particular I remember visiting for Christmas Eve because we would trade on and off every year, one year we’d come visit them, one year they’d come visit us and they’d host a big dinner. And they had this big farmhouse and it backed up on this lake and this farmhouse had a hill, a grassy hill, sloping down to the lake and it was extremely old it had extremely dark wooden floors that were rough because it was a farmhouse. Anyways, so I remember the Moodus noises, I don’t really know if its true or a myth, but it’s basically in this town you can hear these noises coming out of the ground and, doesn’t always happen but it can happen and scientists have looked into this and the most likely explanation is that there are micro-earthquakes that are shallow in the ground and that’s the cause of the noise. That’s something everyone talks about in the town, the mascot for the high-school sports team is the Moodus noises and so I remember being with my cousins in this creepy farmhouse and them telling us the story about the noises and then trying to startle us with noises the entire night.”

Background:

My informant is a man in his early 50s originally from Hartford, Connecticut. He lived there through his teens and had extended family in the nearby areas. The cousins described here were present for a lot his childhood and they often shared scary stories. The Moodus Noises are well documented phenomena that remain ambiguous and have little physical ties but it serves to unite the town with a common legend. While my informant did not live there, his interaction with his cousins put him in conversation with this legend.

Context:

My informant told me about this story when I was asking a group of family and friends about scary stories or legends from their childhood. He told the story in front of the group and I recorded it during that telling. 

Thoughts:

What I find fascinating about the Moodus noises is the complete lack of any form of the topic from the folkloric perspective. This natural phenomenon serves the primary function of folklore, it unites the town with a common experience. However, there is no supernatural explanation of the noises. They are not tied to spirits or cryptids, they are just ambiguously there. This is fascinating to me, as more often than not, folklore takes some physical form but the Moodus noises are just noises. In my opinion, this is the result of the fact that the noises have a very clear explanation. Compared to other strange phenomena such as Will o’ Wisps, the Moodus noises have a clear explanation of why they occur. As such, they occupy a liminal space between science and folklore, wherein they have an explanation but they still count as community legend.

The Spiritualist Camp In Niantic, Connecticut

Nationality: United States of America
Age: 51
Occupation: VP, Renewables Engie Solar
Residence: Kansas City, MO
Performance Date: 4/26/20
Primary Language: English

Main piece:

“The Pine Grove Spiritualist campground is where my dad lives in the summer and my grandma lived during summers when I was a little kid and its located in Niantic, Connecticut which is a small town kinda south-central on the water in Connecticut and the spiritualist campground is a small cluster of homes located on a point, so there’s only one road heading in or out of town, and it’s maybe 100 or 200 houses on this point and when you come in this one road from out of town, it says “Spiritualist Campground” and it looks like its from the 1800s or early 1900s so as soon as you come to this town you think what is this? And it’s a small enough town that a lot of times people just walk around for entertainment and I would walk around with my cousins and kinda tucked away in the corner of the woods is a building. That building is where the spiritualist still have meetings and I didn’t know much about spiritualism and what it meant when I was a kid but apparently it’s a religion and in that cluster of houses, there are maybe a dozen of families who practice spiritualism and they would meet periodically in this temple, which was this building, to have discussions. We didn’t know what they were meeting about so on a few of this walks, generally we would avoid the temple because it was kinda dark and it was creepy, but on some walks we’d go close to it and one night we dared my oldest cousin to look in the window of the temple because they were having a meeting so it was at night and he looked to the window and came running back and he said they were walking on the walls and ceiling sin there, it was crazy. I never went or looked or anything like that- I didn’t want to, but that’s the story of the Spiritualist campground.”

Background:

My informant is a man in his early 50s originally from Hartford, Connecticut. He lived there through his teens and had extended family in the nearby areas. As stated above, his father had a summer home in a former spiritualist camp now known as Pine Grove. Spiritualism is a religion that believes in a spiritual realm where the spirits of those have passed are located. Furthermore, it was practiced heavily in New England in the 1800s, which would make sense for the creation of this neighborhood.

Context:

My informant told me about this story when I was asking a group of family and friends about scary stories or legends from their childhood. He told the story in front of the group and I recorded it during that telling. 

Thoughts:

I think the inspiration for this story comes from the lack of in-depth understanding of the outside present in childhood. As mentioned in the piece, the informant got the information for this story from his cousins, and never explicitly saw any of the supposed supernatural. This shows that the story surrounding the spiritualist temple shows who is in the community created by these children and who is not. Another major factor for this story is the development of folklore to explain an unknown. As mentioned by the informant, as a child he did not comprehend what spiritualism was. Except, he saw the sign and the temple, both of which can be perceived as ominous. As such, the rationale for explaining something as complex as the religion of spiritualism, the informant invented this story of their strange ceremony using what knowledge he  did have about them to help himself better understand. I also think this piece is particularly interesting as it reflects the history of spiritualism in that area, and how it developed over time.