The Mothman

On the night of November 15, 1966, two young married couples were driving around an abandoned World War II munitions plant outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, looking for something to do.

The area was known as the TNT area. During the war, the government had manufactured explosives there, and afterward it was left behind: hundreds of acres of overgrown fields and woods, scattered with dome-shaped concrete “igloos” where munitions had been stored, connected by empty roads. Teenagers parked there to drink and make out. It was a spooky place, but it was familiar.

Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette were near an old generator plant when their headlights caught something standing beside the road.

It was shaped roughly like a man, but taller — six or seven feet, they said. It was gray. It had huge wings folded against its back. And it had two enormous, glowing red eyes.

The Chase

Terrified, Roger Scarberry floored the gas. The couples fled toward the highway and into town. And as they drove, they said, the creature followed them.

It spread its wings — about ten feet across — and rose into the air, keeping pace with the car even as Scarberry pushed it to a hundred miles an hour on the road toward Point Pleasant. They could hear it, a high-pitched squeaking, like a mouse or a squealing bird. It didn’t seem to flap its wings. It just followed.

They drove straight to the Mason County courthouse and told a sheriff’s deputy what they had seen. They were shaken, almost hysterical. The deputy, who knew them, said later that he believed they had seen something. He drove out to the TNT area with them. They found nothing — though the deputy reported that his police radio made strange noises.

The next day, the story was in the newspaper.

The Name

Within days, other people in the area came forward with their own sightings.

Some of them had happened before the Scarberrys’ encounter. A few days earlier, on November 12, five men digging a grave in a cemetery in the town of Clendenin, about ninety miles away, said they saw a brown, man-like figure fly low over their heads from the trees. On the same night as the Scarberrys’ sighting, a man named Newell Partridge, who lived near Salem, West Virginia, said his television suddenly went to static and made a strange whining noise. His dog, Bandit, began howling and ran outside. Partridge shone a flashlight into the field and saw two red circles, like eyes, glowing in the dark. The next day, Bandit was gone. He never came back.

Over the following weeks, more than a hundred people reported seeing the creature. Firefighters. Pilots. A young mother who said it rose up in front of her car near the TNT area.

A local newspaper copy editor, inspired by the popular Batman television series of the time, gave the creature a name. He called it Mothman.

The Investigators

Reporters came from around the country. So did UFO researchers. The most famous was John Keel, a New York writer who specialized in the paranormal. Keel spent months in Point Pleasant, interviewing witnesses. He came to believe that the Mothman sightings were part of a larger pattern of strange events in the area: UFO sightings, mysterious lights in the sky, phone calls filled with strange noises, and visits from mysterious “men in black” who seemed to be warning witnesses to stay quiet.

Skeptics had a simpler explanation. A wildlife biologist at West Virginia University suggested that people were seeing a sandhill crane — a large bird, about four feet tall, with a wingspan of up to seven feet and red patches around its eyes. Sandhill cranes don’t normally live in West Virginia, but one could have strayed out of its migration route. Others suggested a large owl, whose eyes would reflect red in a car’s headlights.

The witnesses were indignant. They knew what an owl looked like, they said. What they’d seen was no bird.

The Bridge

Then, on December 15, 1967, came the tragedy that turned the Mothman from a local curiosity into a legend.

It was a cold evening, about five o’clock, at the height of rush hour, and the Christmas shopping season was in full swing. The Silver Bridge, a suspension bridge built in 1928 that connected Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, across the Ohio River, was packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Suddenly, with a sound like a gunshot, the bridge collapsed.

Within about a minute, the entire span fell into the freezing Ohio River, carrying dozens of cars and trucks with it. Forty-six people died. Two of them were never found.

Investigators later determined that the cause was a tiny defect in a single steel link of an eyebar chain, a crack only a fraction of an inch deep that had grown over decades until the link failed. The disaster led to major changes in how bridges are inspected across the United States.

The Prophecy

In the aftermath, people in Point Pleasant began to talk.

The Mothman sightings had begun about thirteen months before the bridge fell. After the collapse, they mostly stopped. To some people, the connection seemed obvious. The creature had been a warning, or an omen of the disaster to come. Some said they had seen it near the bridge in the weeks before the collapse.

In 1975, John Keel published The Mothman Prophecies, which connected the sightings, the UFO reports, the men in black and the bridge disaster into one strange, dark tapestry. It became a cult classic. In 2002, it was made into a Hollywood film starring Richard Gere.

Keel himself never claimed to know exactly what the Mothman was. But he came to believe it was something tied to the disaster — something that appeared before great tragedies.

The Statue

Today, Point Pleasant has fully embraced its strangest legend.

In the middle of downtown stands a twelve-foot polished steel statue of the Mothman, with huge wings, a muscular body and glowing red eyes, unveiled in 2003. There is a Mothman Museum, filled with props from the movie, witness accounts and newspaper clippings. Every September since 2002, the town has held a Mothman Festival that draws tens of thousands of visitors, with costumes, hayrides through the TNT area, and pancakes shaped like the creature.

There is also a memorial to the forty-six people who died when the Silver Bridge collapsed. It’s not far from the statue.

I always think about that. The town has two monuments, a few hundred yards apart. One is to a creature that may or may not have existed. The other is to forty-six people who certainly did — mothers and fathers and teenagers, on their way home from work or Christmas shopping, who drove onto a bridge on a December evening and never reached the other side.

If the Mothman really came to warn them, no one understood the message in time.