Edwin Way Teale wrote in A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm:

"From them (the Witch Hazel branches), a year later, mature the shining black seeds. During our first September at Trail Wood I brought home from the North Woods a branch of witch hazel bearing several clusters of seed capsules. Late that night I was awakened by sharp rapping or striking sounds repeated again and again. The next morning I found that the capsules had opened and pressure from within had shot the seeds out as an orange pip is propelled when squeezed between a thumb and forefinger. They lay scattered over the floor of my study where they had fallen after striking the walls. On occasion such seeds are hurled through the air as far as forty feet. Just such an experience as mine is recorded by Henry Thoreau in the twelfth volume of his Journal. The date of his entry was September 21, 1859. Thus 100 years later, in the same month of autumn, history had repeated itself at Trail Wood."

Henry D. Thoreau's words, referred to above, were originally from his Journal of September 21, 1859 and were retold this way in The Dispersion of Seeds:

“One September I gathered some of the peculiarly formed nuts of the witch hazel, which grow in pretty clusters, clothed, as it were, in close-fitting buckskin, amid the yellowing leaves, and laid them in my chamber. The double-fruited stone splits and reveals the two shining black, oblong seeds. Three nights afterward, I heard in the night a snapping sound and the fall of some small body on the floor from time to time. In the morning I found it was produced by the witch hazel nuts on my desk springing open and casting their hard and stony seeds across the chamber. They were thus shooting their shining black seeds about the room for several days. Apparently it is not when they first gape open that the seeds fly out, for I saw many if not most of them open already with seed in them; but the seed appears to fit close to the shell at its base, even after the shell gapes above, and when I release one with my knife, it being still held by its base, it flies, as I have said. Its slippery base appears to be compressed by the unyielding shell, which at length expels it, just as you can make one fly by pressing it and letting it slip from between your thumb and finger.”