THE NORTHERN ARMY
By Joseph A. Citro
In the summer of 1770, the mysterious "Northern Army" descended upon the town of Guildhall, Vermont, and the citizens feared all would be lost.
Though the hardy locals had battled Indians and Tories, bears and big cats, abusive Vermont winters, and occasionally each other, this new band of invaders was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. For these intruders – inching steadily southward, innumerable in multitude – were a plague of biblical proportions. They were a giant army... of worms.
So vast were their numbers that the History of Guildhall, says they extended from Guildhall all the way to Northfield, Massachusetts. To many, such an improbable flood seemed to signal the end of the world.
Guildhall's "queer visitation" started during the latter part of July as worms began to appear from the north. Soon a trickle became a deluge –
worms were everywhere! The wriggling masses were so prolific they covered whole fields. Rev. Grant Powers wrote, "...a man could not put down his finger in a single spot without placing it on a worm."
He went on to provide this description of the invaders: "[T]here was a stripe upon the back like black velvet, on either side a yellow stripe from end to end, and the rest of the body was brown. They were sometimes seen not larger than a pin, but in their maturity, they were as long as a man's finger and proportionally large in circumference."
The incredible crawlers carpeted the forests, blanketed cleared land, and polluted the wells. "[T]hey would go up the side of a house and over it in such a compact column that nothing of boards or shingles could be seen."
They entered and filled the houses. People would discover them in their larders, burrowed into bread dough, and twisted into the folds of their bedding. Clothing had to be thoroughly shaken in the morning before it was put on.
In general, the worms seemed to be in a hurry to get... somewhere. They'd pause only long enough to eat. And to the farmers of Guildhall, eating meant destruction. Worms leveled fields of wheat and corn, thus cutting off major food sources.
Farmers tried to dam the relentless tide by "drawing the rope," as they termed it. Two men would each take an end of a rope and pull it through their wheat field in an effort to knock the worms off the stalks. This effort proved fruitless.
They also tried digging foot-wide trenches around their fields. The trenches were soon filled; the advancing worms used the bodies of their fallen comrades as bridges, so the organic tide continued to flow.
If the devastation had been complete, the fledgling settlement of Guildhall itself would have been "nipped in the bud." The settlers would have had to abandon their town – which was just six years old at the time.
Luckily, the invaders had no appetite for pumpkins, peas, potatoes, or flax. With other crops gone, pumpkins flourished astonishingly, offering abundant, if tedious, sustenance.
Then, mysteriously, around the first of September, 1770, the worms suddenly vanished. Rev. Powers wrote, "[W]here they terminated their earthly career is unknown, for not the carcass of a worm was seen...."
Maybe the answer is implicit in the next plague that befell the town of Guidhall. This time it was pigeons. Masses and masses of pigeons!
Everett Benton writes, an "immense number of pigeons... came through this section immediately upon the disappearance of the worms. Nothing could equal their number unless it was the worms which had preceded them."
Perhaps the pigeons fed upon the worms that had apparently vanished so suddenly. In any event, the famished settlers fed on the pigeons.
And the town of Guildhall has survived till this day.
Joseph A. Citro is a Vermont author and folklorist known for collecting New England’s ghost stories, legends, and strange-but-true lore. His most recent book is The Vermont Ghost Experience, available at local bookstores or wherever books are sold. You can also ask your local library to order it for your enjoyment and the enjoyment of other library patrons. In Passing Strange, Citro shares folklore with a curious eye, a storyteller’s warmth, and just enough mystery to make you look twice on the ride home.