We've all become accustomed to some
hectic weather in the Berkshires, from early blizzards to sudden
micro-bursts to hail stones on a sunny day, but in a few instances
the meteorological conditions have become downright peculiar.
In August of 1892, a crowd of
Pittsfield residents was baffled by a strange cloud formation that
came up suddenly out of a thunderstorm, splitting apart violently
over a group of poplar trees, the tops of which, they said, were
cleanly cut off, as though by a giant razor.
On March 27, 1960, Mrs. Roche of
Dalton heard what sounded like an explosion in her front yard.
Running out to see about the commotion, she found a large hole
containing three pieces of what had been a chunk of ice weighing over
30 pounds. Subsequent inquiries could find no record of any airplanes
over the area at the time, and the ice bomb appeared to have fallen
riout of a cloudless sky.
An occasional hard object raining down
is jarring enough, but what to do when such bombardment is ongoing,
for days or even months? This was the predicament of local
residents at two different ends of the county during the 19th
century.
According to records of the time, from
November 8 to November 14 of 1802, hundreds of pieces of stone,
mortar and wood pelted at least two buildings along the ravine area
that straddles the border between Salisbury, Connecticut and
Sheffield, Mass.
The trouble began one night when a
clothier's shop at the spot called Sage's Ravine was peppered with a
rain of these little missiles, shattering windows and badly
frightening the owner and two apprentices. They called on their
esteemed neighbor, Simeon Sage, but neither they nor he could
determine the source of the objects. Over the following days,
this and the nearby home of Ezekiel Landon underwent recurring
periods of bombardment, where stones and other such bits of shrapnel
would rain down constantly for a period of hours throughout the day
and night.
Hundreds of onlookers, neighbors,
clergyman and learned men, came to see this bizarre attack, but
none could determine from whence the stones were thrown... if thrown
they were. Curiously, witnesses spoke of never seeing the rocks
in flight, until they struck. Stones would strike from multiple
directions at once, ruling out the possibility of a single
perpetrator, and some would drop neatly on the sill within the
window, as though set gingerly there by unseen hands.
Three persons were struck by the flying
debris, and 56 panes of glass were broken before the assault ended
forever, as mysteriously as it began. Some blamed witchcraft,
while others maintained that it must be the work of vandals, though
none was ever revealed.
72 years later, just over the northern
county border in Pownal, similar strife befell a farmer named Thomas
Paddock. Paddock, described by newspapermen as "a
respectable farmer, of excellent character," found his house at
the center of a sporadic stoning that lasted more than two months.
Witnesses described rocky showers that
ensued intermittently, apparently out of the clear sky. They were
said to fall randomly at all hours of the day and night, and varied
in size from tiny pebbles to five inches in diameter. At one point,
one fell that weighed more than twenty pounds, and left a three-inch
crater in solidly frozen ground. A number of people tried to
duplicate this incident by hurling similar boulders, but made
scarcely any impression at all.
Nor was this the strangest aspect of it all. The stones did not behave at all as falling stones ought. When they hit the ground, they did not bounce or skip; instead, they just rolled calmly along the ground. They also tended to be warm to the touch. Worst of all, witnesses reported that on occasion they would make contact on the roof near the eaves, then, as if possessed, roll slowly up the roof and back down the other side.
Nor was this the strangest aspect of it all. The stones did not behave at all as falling stones ought. When they hit the ground, they did not bounce or skip; instead, they just rolled calmly along the ground. They also tended to be warm to the touch. Worst of all, witnesses reported that on occasion they would make contact on the roof near the eaves, then, as if possessed, roll slowly up the roof and back down the other side.
Reporters from the many newspapers who
covered the story claimed that Paddock's house was situated
that no human prankster could have possibly thrown the stones without
being seen. One medium from Hoosac Falls claimed that the
spirit of a local woman was responsible, and would not stop until the
stones were removed from the coffin in which her body lay. The
Brooklyn Daily Eagle half-jokingly hypothesized that perhaps a new
style of catapult had been invented, and was being tested on a nearby
mountain. A group of anonymous investigators from North Adams
blamed the farmer's hired servant boy, despite the fact that he had
been accounted for during many of the stone hurlings.
Descriptions of such stonings are not
confined to the region- similar incidents have been investigated
throughout history, from a case in 1980s Tucson to an account by the
Chief Physician to the Ostrogoth King Theodoric in 540 A.D.
Lithobolia, or "stone-throwing devil," was the name
given to them by royal Secretary of the Colony Richard Chamberlain,
who documented a case he observed in New Castle, New Hampshire in
1682.
Some parapsychologists believe that
incidents of this type are poltergeists, and may be caused by natural
telekinetic operations not yet understood by science, unknown facets
of the mind acting upon matter through some complex subatomic
process. For the die-hard skeptic, there will always be some
hypothetical rebellious youth on which to pin the blame, if nothing
else will do. Whatever the nature of these stone throwing
devils, most would prefer they stay in the realm of Berkshire
history, or at least well clear of our own neighborhood.
