Scott's Random Thought For The Day (The Many Uses of Spam)



For nearly my entire life I've been dogged by a mystery. I grew up on in house on Beelzebub Road in South Windsor CT. How the heck (hee hee) did a street get that name? There are no similarly named roads nearby, and no obvious geographical features that might lend themselves to that naming.

Of course early in life I didn't know what "Beelzebub" was. All I knew was that when it came to that grade school exercise where you write your address, I got hosed. But then I got Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual and I found out it was another name for the Devil. Usually geographical features are named for the Devil, not streets. The story I always heard was that it was because there was a bad murder on the street, but that never really made complete sense. First of all, why commemorate it in a street name? Secondly, no one seemed to know the details of the alleged murder. Wouldn't someone have said, our street is named for the Devil and no one remembers why, let's change it? When St. Pete decided to name their baseball team the Devil Rays people objected because that was too evil. How did Beelzebub Road survive unchallenged?

Part of it is probably that most people don't know what "Beelzebub" means. Someone even built a church on Beelzebub Road. But I can't help but think that there has to be more.

In recent years I've contacted two historical societies in the South Windsor area, and got nowhere. No newspaper articles describe the naming of the street, the issue of the name had never been brought up in city council since good records were kept. The story of a murder was repeated to me, but with no useful details. No records or newspapers could verify that it happened at all.

Then earlier this week I got one of those spam e-mails of allegedly funny signs. Things like "Amigone Funeral Homes" and the like, some real, some Photoshopped. One included with this e-mail was a sign from the Connecticut town of New Hartford which said "Satan's Kingdom Recreation Center."

Hmmm, another Devil reference, in Connecticut, that had survived to the present day. Could I figure out where it came from? Turned out to be easy. Satan's Kingdom was a name for a certain area near the town because Native Americans had a village there. To the Puritans who founded the Connecticut colony in the late 1600s/early 1700s the natives were Devil worshippers, or close enough.

I have a feeling that this is the explanation for Beelzebub Road. It's probably a name left over from the 1700s that early settlers used to refer to the place near the newly founded town of South Windsor where the Native Americans lived. Geographically it would make sense, Beelzebub Road is far from the earliest part of town, but an area of many ponds and streams. Early names like that, no matter how silly, tend to last in New England. Thank you spam, I'll sleep better tonight.

Posted: Sat - May 1, 2004 at      

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