The
weird events connected to the Mothman began on November 12, 1966 near
Clendenin, West Virginia. Five men were in the local cemetery that day,
preparing a grave for a burial, when something that looked like a “brown human
being” lifted off from some nearby trees and flew over their heads. The men
were baffled. It did not appear to be a bird, but more like a man with wings. A
few days later, more sightings would take place, electrifying the entire
region.
Late
in the evening of November 15, two young married couples had a very strange
encounter as they drove past an abandoned TNT plant near Point Pleasant, West
Virginia. The couples spotted two large eyes that were attached to something
that was "shaped like a man, but bigger, maybe six or seven feet tall. And
it had big wings folded against its back". When the creature moved toward
the plant door, the couples panicked and sped away. Moments later, they saw the
same creature on a hillside near the road. It spread its wings and rose into
the air, following with their car, which by now was traveling at over 100 miles
per hour. "That bird kept right up with us," said one of the group.
They told Deputy Sheriff Millard Halstead that it followed them down Highway 62
and right to the Point Pleasant city limits. And they would not be the only
ones to report the creature that night. Another group of four witnesses claimed
to see the “bird” three different times!
Another
sighting had more bizarre results. At about 10:30 on that same evening, Newell
Partridge, a local building contractor who lived in Salem (about 90 miles from
Point Pleasant), was watching television when the screen suddenly went dark. He
stated that a weird pattern filled the screen and then he heard a loud, whining
sounds from outside that raised in pitch and then ceased. “It sounded like a
generator winding up” he later stated. Partridge’s dog, Bandit, began to howl
out on the front porch and Newell went out to see what was going on.
When
he walked outside, he saw Bandit facing the hay barn, about 150 yards from the
house. Puzzled, Partridge turned a flashlight in that direction and spotted two
red circles that looked like eyes or “bicycle reflectors”. They moving red orbs
were certainly not animal’s eyes, he believed, and the sight of them frightened
him. Bandit, an experienced hunting dog and protective of his territory, shot
off across the yard in pursuit of the glowing eyes. Partridge called for him to
stop, but the animal paid no attention. His owner turned and went back into the
house for his gun, but then was too scared to go back outside again. He slept
that night with his gun propped up next to the bed. The next morning, he
realized that Bandit had disappeared. The dog had still not shown up two days
later when Partridge read in the newspaper about the sightings in Point
Pleasant that night.
One
statement that he read in the newspaper chilled him to the bone. Roger
Scarberry, one member of the group who spotted the strange “bird” at the TNT
plant, said that as they entered the city limits of Point Pleasant, they saw
the body of a large dog lying on the side of the road. A few minutes later, on
the way back out of town, the dog was gone. They even stopped to look for the
body, knowing they had passed it just a few minutes before. Newell Partridge
immediately thought of Bandit, who was never seen again.
On
November 16, a press conference was held in the county courthouse and the
couples from the TNT plant sighting repeated their story. Deputy Halstead, who
had known the couples all of their lives, took them very seriously. “They’ve
never been in any trouble,” he told investigators and had no reason to doubt
their stories. Many of the reporters who were present for the weird recounting
felt the same way. The news of the strange sightings spread around the world.
The press dubbed the odd flying creature “Mothman”, after a character from the
popular Batman television series of the day.
The
remote and abandoned TNT plant became the lair of the Mothman in the months
ahead and it could not have picked a better place to hide in. The area was made
up of several hundred acres of woods and large concrete domes where high
explosives were stored during World War II. A network of tunnels honeycombed
the area and made it possible for the creature to move about without being
seen. In addition to the manmade labyrinth, the area was also comprised of the
McClintic Wildlife Station, a heavily forested animal preserve filled with
woods, artificial ponds and steep ridges and hills. Much of the property was
almost inaccessible and without a doubt, Mothman could have hid for weeks or
months and remained totally unseen. The only people who ever wandered there
were hunters and fishermen and the local teenagers, who used the rutted dirt
roads of the preserve as “lover’s lanes”.
Very
few homes could be found in the region, but one dwelling belonged to the Ralph
Thomas family. One November 16, they spotted a “funny red light” in the sky
that moved and hovered above the TNT plant. “It wasn’t an airplane”, Mrs.
Marcella Bennett (a friend of the Thomas family) said, “but we couldn’t figure
out what it was.” Mrs. Bennett drove to the Thomas house a few minutes later
and got out of the car with her baby. Suddenly, a figure stirred near the
automobile. “It seemed as though it had been lying down,” she later recalled.
“It rose up slowly from the ground. A big gray thing. Bigger than a man with terrible
glowing eyes.”
Mrs.
Bennett was so horrified that she dropped her little girl! She quickly
recovered, picked up her child and ran to the house. The family locked everyone
inside but hysteria gripped them as the creature shuffled onto the porch and
peered into the windows. The police were summoned, but the Mothman had vanished
by the time the authorities had arrived.
Mrs.
Bennett would not recover from the incident for months and was in fact so
distraught that she sought medical attention to deal with her anxieties. She
was tormented by frightening dreams and later told investigators that she
believed the creature had visited her own home too. She said that she could
often hear a keening sounds (like a woman screaming) near her isolated home on
the edge of Point Pleasant.
Many
would come to believe that the sightings of Mothman, as well as UFO sightings
and encounters with “men in black” in the area, were all related. For nearly a
year, strange happenings continued in the area. Researchers, investigators and
“monster hunters” descended on the area but none so famous as author John Keel,
who has written extensively about Mothman and other unexplained anomalies. He
has written for many years about UFO’s but dismisses the standard
“extraterrestrial” theories of the mainstream UFO movement. For this reason, he
has been a controversial figure for decades. According to Keel, man has had a
long history of interaction with the supernatural. He believes that the
intervention of mysterious strangers in the lives of historic personages like
Thomas Jefferson and Malcolm X provides evidence of the continuing presence of
the “gods of old”. The manifestation of these elder gods comes in the form of
UFO’s and aliens, monsters, demons, angels and even ghosts. He has remained a
colorful character to many and yet remains respected in the field for his
research and fascinating writings.
Keel
became the major chronicler of the Mothman case and wrote that at least 100
people personally witnessed the creature between November 1966 and November
1967. According to their reports, the creature stood between five and seven
feet tall, was wider than a man and shuffled on human-like legs. Its eyes were
set near the top of the shoulders and had bat-like wings that glided, rather
than flapped, when it flew. Strangely though, it was able to ascend straight up
“like a helicopter”. Witnesses also described its murky skin as being either
gray or brown and it emitted a humming sound when it flew. The Mothman was
apparently incapable of speech and gave off a screeching sound. Mrs. Bennett
stated that it sounded like a “woman screaming”.
John
Keel arrived in Point Pleasant in December 1966 and immediately began
collecting reports of Mothman sightings and even UFO reports from before the
creature was seen. He also compiled evidence that suggested a problem with
televisions and phones that began in the fall of 1966. Lights had been seen in
the skies, particularly around the TNT plant, and cars that passed along the
nearby road sometimes stalled without explanation. He and his fellow
researchers also uncovered a number of short-lived poltergeist cases in the
Ohio Valley area. Locked doors opened and closed by themselves, strange thumps
were heard inside and outside of homes and often, inexplicable voices were
heard. The James Lilley family, who lived just south of the TNT plant, were so
bothered by the bizarre events that they finally sold their home and moved to
another neighborhood. Keel was convinced that the intense period of activity
was all connected.
And
stranger things still took place..... A reporter named Mary Hyre, who was the
Point Pleasant correspondent for the Athens, Ohio newspaper the Messenger, also
wrote extensively about the local sightings. In fact, after one very active
weekend, she was deluged with over 500 phone calls from people who saw strange
lights in the skies. One night in January 1967, she was working late in her
office in the county courthouse and a man walked in the door. He was very short
and had strange eyes that were covered with thick glasses. He also had long,
black hair that was cut squarely “like a bowl haircut”. Hyre said that he spoke
in a low, halting voice and he asked for directions to Welsh, West Virginia.
She thought that he had some sort of speech impediment and for some reason, he
terrified her. “He kept getting closer and closer to me, “ she said, “ and his
funny eyes were staring at me almost hypnotically.”
Alarmed,
she summoned the newspaper’s circulation manager to her office and together,
they spoke to the strange little man. She said that at one point in the
discussion, she answered the telephone when it rang and she noticed the little
man pick up a pen from her desk. He looked at it in amazement, “as if he had
never seen a pen before.” Then, he grabbed the pen, laughed loudly and ran out
of the building.
Several
weeks later, Hyre was crossing the street near her office and saw the same man
on the street. He appeared to be startled when he realized that she was
watching him, turned away quickly and ran for a large black car that suddenly
came around the corner. The little man climbed in and it quickly drove away.
By
this time, most of the sightings had come to an end and Mothman had faded away
into the strange “twilight zone” from which he had come... but the story of
Point Pleasant had not yet ended. At around 5:00 in the evening on December 15,
1967, the 700-foot bridge linking Point Pleasant to Ohio suddenly collapsed
while filled with rush hour traffic. Dozens of vehicles plunged into the dark
waters of the Ohio River and 46 people were killed. Two of those were never
found and the other 44 are buried together in the town cemetery of Gallipolis,
Ohio.
On
that same tragic night, the James Lilley family (who still lived near the TNT
plant at that time) counted more than 12 eerie lights that flashed above their
home and vanished into the forest.
The
collapse of the Silver Bridge made headlines all over the country and Mary Hyre
went days without sleep as reporters and television crews from everywhere
descended on the town. The local citizens were stunned with horror and
disbelief and the tragedy is still being felt today.
During
Christmas week, a short, dark-skinned man entered the office of Mary Hyre. He
was dressed in a black suit, with a black tie, and she said that he looked
vaguely Oriental. He had high cheekbones, narrow eyes and an unidentified
accent. He was not interested in the bridge disaster, she said, but wanted to
know about local UFO sightings. Hyre was too busy to talk with him and she
handed her a file of related press clipping instead. He was not interested in
them and insisted on speaking with her. She finally dismissed him from her
office.
That
same night, an identically described man visited the homes of several witnesses
in the area who had reported seeing the lights in the sky. He made all of them
very uneasy and uncomfortable and while he claimed to be a reporter from
Cambridge, Ohio, he inadvertently admitted that he did not know where Columbus,
Ohio was even though the two towns are just a few miles apart.
John
Keel believes that Point Pleasant was a “window” area, a place that was marked
by long periods of strange sightings, monster reports and the coming and going
of unusual persons. He states that it may be wrong to blame the collapse of the
bridge on the local UFO sightings, but the intense activity in the area at the
time does suggest some sort of connection. Others have pointed to another supernatural
link to the strange happenings, blaming the events on the legendary Cornstalk
Curse that was placed on Point Pleasant in the 1770's.