The Flatwoods Monster

It was a little after seven o’clock on the evening of Friday, September 12, 1952, in the small town of Flatwoods, West Virginia. A group of boys was playing football on the grounds of the local school when they saw something streak across the darkening sky and come down on a hillside farm just outside town.

It was bright, they said — a fiery, glowing object. It seemed to land on the hilltop. And it pulsed with a red light.

Brothers Edward and Fred May, thirteen and twelve, and their friend Tommy Hyer, ten, ran home to get Edward and Fred’s mother, Kathleen May. A small group soon gathered and set off up the hill to see what had landed: Mrs. May, her two sons, Tommy Hyer, another boy named Neil Nunley, and a seventeen-year-old member of the West Virginia National Guard named Eugene Lemon, who brought his dog.

What they said they found at the top of that hill has never been explained.

The Climb

The group climbed up through a field on a farm belonging to a man named Bailey Fisher. It was dark by now, and foggy. As they got closer to the top, they noticed a strange, pungent smell — some said it was metallic, some said it was like burning sulfur — and a thick mist that stung their eyes and noses. Eugene Lemon’s dog ran ahead of them, then came running back with its tail between its legs.

At the top of the hill, they said, they saw a large, pulsing, glowing red light, like a ball of fire, sitting on the ground, perhaps fifty feet away.

Then, to their left, under the branches of an oak tree, they saw two glowing eyes.

Eugene Lemon shone his flashlight toward them.

The Monster

What they saw in that beam of light, they said, was a creature about ten feet tall.

It had a round, blood-red face, with glowing greenish-orange eyes. Around its head was a tall, pointed hood or shield, shaped like the ace of spades. Its body was dark — some said green, some said black — and seemed to be covered in a kind of pleated skirt or robe. Some witnesses later said it had small, claw-like hands. It didn’t seem to walk; it seemed to glide or float toward them, making a high-pitched hissing sound.

Lemon dropped his flashlight and fainted, or nearly fainted. The others screamed and ran, tumbling back down the hill in a panic.

The Aftermath

Back in town, the group was terrified. Several of the witnesses began vomiting. Their throats were swollen and irritated. Some had nausea and convulsions that lasted through the night. Eugene Lemon was particularly sick. A doctor who examined some of them later said their symptoms were like those of people who had been exposed to mustard gas, though others attributed them to hysteria.

The local sheriff, Robert Carr, and a deputy went up the hill that night to investigate. They found nothing but a strange, lingering smell. In the morning, the editor of the local newspaper went up with others and reported seeing what looked like skid marks in the grass and a patch of strange, oily residue.

The story spread across the country within days. Kathleen May and Eugene Lemon appeared on national television. Newspapers called the creature the “Braxton County Monster,” the “Phantom of Flatwoods,” and eventually the Flatwoods Monster.

Something in the Sky

What makes the Flatwoods story especially interesting is that something really was in the sky that night.

On the evening of September 12, 1952, people in Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia reported seeing a bright meteor streak across the sky. Some reports described it as a fiery object falling to earth. Many researchers believe this is what the boys saw — a meteor that seemed to land nearby but was actually far away.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the skeptical investigator Joe Nickell came up with an explanation for the rest of the story. The pulsing red light on the hilltop, he suggested, could have been a red aircraft warning beacon on a nearby hill. And the monster, he proposed, was a barn owl perched on a tree branch — a bird with a round, flat face, large eyes that reflect light, and a hissing shriek — seen in the dark and fog by terrified witnesses, with leafy branches below it creating the illusion of a body and skirt.

The witnesses rejected that theory. They knew what an owl looked like, they said. What they saw was ten feet tall.

The Same Week

The Flatwoods sighting didn’t happen in isolation. 1952 was one of the biggest years for UFO sightings in American history. That summer, radar operators in Washington, D.C., had reported mysterious objects over the nation’s capital, and Air Force jets had scrambled to chase them. The newspapers were full of flying saucers.

According to later accounts, other strange incidents were reported in the same area of West Virginia around the time of the Flatwoods encounter, including a couple who said their car was approached by a similar creature on a nearby road a week earlier.

The Monster Today

In the decades since, the Flatwoods Monster has become a beloved piece of West Virginia folklore — and a symbol of Braxton County.

In the town of Sutton, there’s a small museum dedicated to the creature, the Flatwoods Monster Museum, displaying witness accounts, newspaper clippings and memorabilia. Around the county, there are several large wooden chairs shaped like the monster, with its spade-shaped hood and glowing eyes, where visitors can sit and take pictures. The creature appears on signs, T-shirts and mugs. It has appeared in video games.

The witnesses, for the most part, never changed their stories. Kathleen May and others continued to insist, for the rest of their lives, that they saw something on that hill that they couldn’t explain.

Whether it was an owl, an alien, or something else entirely, it gave a small West Virginia town one unforgettable night.