Many said they didn't connect the vibrations to seismic activity at first — understandable, given the rarity of earthquakes in the Green Mountains. Some thought it was a passing train or a falling tree.

Kerstin Hanson, of Fairfax, thought she might be having a medical emergency when she started "vibrating" in her car in the Hannaford parking lot. Her nerves were slightly calmed when she realized the contents of the car were vibrating, too.

"Phew!" she wrote.

Others initially blamed a mammalian source.

“Felt the rumble and a bit of noise here at the confluence of the Ottaquechee and Connecticut rivers in North Hartland,” wrote Martha Coutermarsh. “Thought it must be a bear on the deck. Hmmm, no bear in sight…”

"I thought that it was the cat sneezing on my lap!” wrote Susan Smith-Hunter, of Brandon.

In White River Junction, Shannon Zabko was sitting on her bed, taking a break from installing blinds in her windows, when she felt a “bouncing feeling.” She, too, thought it was her cat, until she realized she was alone.

“I was looking around and becoming uneasy — heard a light creaking in the house and out the windows and snow was falling off the trees,” she wrote. Then, “suddenly it all stopped.” A few moments later, her boyfriend yelled from the other room, “Did we just have an earthquake?!”

A similar conversation occurred in the Waterbury Center home of Jenny Gelber, a California native who relocated from Ohio to Vermont last year.

"My husband didn't believe me at first when I said it was an earthquake," she wrote. "(This was his first earthquake.)"

The quake occurred on the heels of a big April snowstorm and came just days before a once-in-a-lifetime total solar eclipse is expected to darken Vermont's skies for roughly three-and-a-half-minutes. The succession of unusual events wasn't lost on West Bolton's Elizabeth Lawrence, who said her plates and glassware shook during the quake.



"I think I may take up religion," she wrote.