Devil's Hopyard State Park

At Devil's Hopyard State Park in East Haddam, Connecticut, the holes at the base of Chapman Falls don't look like anything water should leave behind. They're cylindrical, bored straight down into solid Scotland Schist, some a few inches across and some several feet wide and deep. The settlers who found them had an explanation. The Devil, they said, got his tail wet in the falls and was so angry he burned the holes into the rock with his hooves as he bounded away.

There's an older version, too. In it, Satan sits on a boulder at the top of the 60-foot falls playing his fiddle, while the witches of Haddam stir their brews in those same stone cauldrons below. Connecticut keeps a lot of company like this — folklore catalogs count some 34 places in the state named for the Devil, from Devil's Dens to Satan's Kingdoms to a Hell Hole. But the potholes are the reason this one stuck.

Geologists have their own account. Stones caught in an eddy spin in place for thousands of years, and the friction wears the rock down into a perfect bowl. Both explanations have been printed side by side for generations, and the one with the fiddle keeps winning.

The human history here is darker than the lore. Dr. Abner Beebe ran a grist mill at Chapman Falls and stayed loyal to the crown as the Revolution broke out around him. In the winter of 1774-75, a mob calling itself the Sons of Liberty came for him. A loyalist judge, Peter Oliver, wrote down what they did: Beebe was "stripped naked, & hot Pitch was poured upon him, which blistered his Skin," then "carried to a Hog Sty & rubbed over with Hogs Dung." They broke his mill and, an 1881 account says, "rolled the principal stone down the falls."

In 2002, a colonial millstone turned up in the dirt downslope from where the mill once stood — rolled down toward the same potholes the Devil is supposed to have burned.