Five of the strangest tales associated with Connecticut lighthouses.
When you hear the words “world-changing invention,” you think of names like Edison, Bell and the Wright brothers. You think of the light bulb and radio and electric cars. You think of lone inventors or groups experimenting and tinkering, discovering some fundamental truth in the fabric of cr…
Though his work was uncredited, Lewis Latimer's inventions were key to making electric light a practical reality.
Did a vanished vessel return to desperate colonists in June 1647?
Since the state’s earliest days, residents looking to the skies have been reporting otherworldly sights
“When you look at the position, when you look at the mass grave, when you look at the demographics, it all suggests military.”
It will begin with a feeling of depression and weariness. You will try to shake it off, pretend that it is nothing, but soon the symptoms will really start.
Stories of a spectral hound haunting the Hanging Hills of central Connecticut have endured for more than 100 years.
In 1895 Louis Lassen opened the steak sandwich food cart that would later become Louis’ Lunch restaurant. At the time, trolley tracks cut through the city streets and their wires webbed the air. Weaving between them were steam-powered cars and horse-drawn carriages. At the turn of the centur…
Judge Nathan Wheeler was in the midst of his early-morning stroll when he saw the light.
Nils Nilson was a hero. Even afterward no one disputed that.
Legend says that the firearms heiress built her labyrinth home to confuse angry spirits.
It is fortunate for vaccine science that John Franklin Enders settled on the field. He would develop the measles vaccine, and ultimately be remembered as the “Father of Modern Vaccines.”
At first no one believed the mom from Lyme.
It has attacked humans throughout recorded history and been called “the white plague” and “Captain of all these men of death.”
A strange, half-cat, half-dog creature with a bit of bear thrown into the ungodly mix was said to be prowling the woods of Essex.
In the woods ahead I see the outline of what looks like the ruins of a castle. Myth and rumor had brought me here. Guided by directions found on the internet, I’d ventured on foot down an abandoned roadway in a tree-filled area adjacent to Interstate 84. The castle-like structure I see is la…
When John Ledyard died in 1789, Thomas Jefferson called him “a man of genius, of some science, and of fearless courage and enterprise.”
In the fall of 1868, a break was discovered in a dam on the Kohanza Reservoir, but was ignored. That was a terrible mistake.
In late 1919 a bad batch of booze killed 100—and a Brooklyn gangster got away with it
It was a brush with death paired with a dog’s surefootedness that inspired the now-classic piece of footwear: the boat shoe.
Legend says that following a murder the tree produced fruit with "bloody" specks. The truth is even more disturbing than the myth.
In Igor Sikorsky’s childhood dream, he was walking along a narrow, luxuriously decorated passageway. He realized he was on a flying ship.
When it comes to slavery it's easy to condemn the South, but Connecticut has a harder time facing its own past.
Spending time on Candlewood Lake as a kid, I heard the rumors. Supposedly, beneath the lake’s pristine surface were the remains of an old town called Jerusalem. In addition to buildings and homes, the story goes, the town’s graveyard had been swallowed by the waters.
The Pioneer Parachute Co. developed the first nylon parachute and supplied thousands of them to Allied soldiers throughout World War Two.
The involvement of Robert Ballard, the legendary oceanographer who discovered the Titanic, in the discovery of two fallen nuclear submarines was top secret for nearly three decades.
Southbury resident Alan Abel had an unparalleled gift for getting people to believe what he said, no matter how outlandish.
In 1936, Connecticut’s governor, Wilbur Cross, commissioned a Survey of the Human Resources of Connecticut that seemed better suited to Nazi Germany than the Constitution State.
Did a Native Princess and Her Lover Really Jump to Their Deaths?
The stories surrounding the headstone, marked only "XYZ," and the man buried beneath it have woven their way into local folklore in Deep River.
It seems like something from an alternate reality imagined in the book and TV show The Man in the High Castle. But in the 1930s, the Nazis were literally marching across America.
Thirty miles behind enemy lines, 133 U.S. soldiers from the Army’s 6th Ranger Battalion crawled as silently as they could toward Japan’s infamous Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines.
In September 1917, The New York Times reviewed a new book by Mark Twain, the legendary author and longtime Connecticut resident. The only problem was Twain had died seven years earlier in the small Fairfield County town of Redding.
Now under threat of demolition, Bridgeport's Freeman Houses were once at the heart of a thriving 19th-century community.
Modern anesthetic practice and Dr. Horace Wells’ personal descent into darkness began in Hartford on the same night: Dec. 10, 1844.
On April 25, 1777, British ships delivered upward of 1,500 troops to Compo Beach (today part of Westport). Their target was a military supply depot in Danbury, but as they marched inland that night and the next day, news of their arrival spread.
In 1965, the day before Columbus Day, Yale announced the existence of a spectacular rediscovered historic document: the Vinland Map. Dated to 1440 A.D., the purportedly Norse map depicted “Vinland,” the land discovered by Leif Ericson around 1000 and known today as Newfoundland. The document…
“There is probably no other inert substance,” Charles Goodyear once said of rubber, “which so excites the mind.”
Bathsheba Smith’s body was stolen, taken unceremoniously from her not-so-final resting place in the West Haven burial ground in the predawn hours of Jan. 11, 1824.
John Curtis was willing to die for his country.
At the Riverside Cemetery in Waterbury there is a grave with curious markings.
