Mothman

The story begins on November 12, 1966, when five men digging a grave near Clendenin saw a brown, man-shaped thing lift off from the trees and glide low over their heads. Three nights later it made itself famous. Two young couples — Roger and Linda Scarberry, Steve and Mary Mallette — were driving past the abandoned West Virginia Ordnance Works north of Point Pleasant, a maze of crumbling WWII explosives bunkers the locals call the TNT Area. In the headlights stood a gray figure, seven feet tall, with glowing red eyes 'like bicycle reflectors' and wings folded against its back.

They fled toward town at speeds touching one hundred miles per hour. The thing followed them effortlessly, wings unmoving, until they reached the city limits. Deputy Millard Halstead heard their account that night and never doubted they had seen something. Within days, the press had a name for it — borrowed from a TV villain of the era: Mothman.

Over the following year, more than a hundred people reported encounters — firemen, contractors, housewives, pilots. Newell Partridge of Salem watched his television dissolve into static and his dog Bandit charge howling into a field after two glowing red circles of light; Bandit was never seen again. Witnesses converged on the TNT Area night after night, and many left having seen the eyes for themselves.

Journalist John Keel arrived to investigate and found the valley saturated with strangeness — lights over the river, garbled phone calls, and the menacing 'men in black' who asked questions no one could answer. Keel's 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies fixed the creature permanently in American folklore, and its final, terrible chapter — the fall of the Silver Bridge on December 15, 1967 — bound Mothman forever to the forty-six souls lost in the river.

Folklorists still argue over what walked the TNT Area. Skeptics offer a misidentified sandhill crane or a barn owl swollen by fear and darkness. Believers point out that cranes do not chase cars, and owls do not make a hundred separate witnesses swear off the night roads of Mason County.

Point Pleasant chose to embrace its visitor. A twelve-foot polished-steel statue with ruby eyes was unveiled in 2003, the world's only Mothman Museum opened on Main Street, and every September thousands descend on the little river town for the Mothman Festival. The creature has become something stranger than a monster: a small town's guardian spirit, keeping watch over the rebuilt bridge — just in case he is needed again.