Scientists Finally Solved the Weird Mystery of the Booming New York Lake

For centuries, something beneath Seneca Lake in upstate New York has been making a very loud, very disturbing noise. Locals called it the “Seneca Guns,” a cannon-like boom that erupted without warning and rolled across the water like distant thunder. The Seneca people once said it was the voice of an angry spirit. Early settlers blamed ghostly soldiers still fighting the Revolution. James Fenimore Cooper turned it into myth in his 1850 story The Lake Guns. Every few years, the lake would roar again, then fall silent, as if taunting anyone who tried to explain it.