On the Trail of the Mothman

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. Amanda McGowan: Every small town has that one spot where people sneak off to at night. In Point Pleasant, West Virginia, back in the 1960s, that place was the McClintic Wildlife Management Area. The locals called it the TNT area. During World War II, this had been a giant munitions factory that produced explosives, but after the war, the factory closed, the land was open to the public, and you could wander around the crumbling remains of all the buildings there. Sherri Brake: There’s an old power plant there, lots of woods, just acres and acres of gravel and dirt roads, and it’s really easy to get turned around while you’re up there in the TNT area. People would go up there and have parties. People would go up there parking, you know, sweethearts would go up there and watch the full moon, etc., etc. And that’s basically, you know, what these two young married couples did, the Mallettes and the Scarberrys. Amanda: Two young couples, the Mallettes and the Scarberrys, headed to the TNT area on the evening of November 15, 1966. What happened next would be immortalized in town lore forever. They were hanging out in the Scarberrys’ car parked near the old power plant, and just around midnight they saw something. Sherri: And it was Linda Scarberry that first saw this creature and of course all four of them saw it and panicked. I mean, what would you do if you saw something 8-foot-tall with black wings and, you know, crouching up in a tree with red glowing eyes. You’re going to get your car, you’re going to start your car, and you’re going to get the heck out of there. Amanda: Roger Scarborough, who was driving, peeled out of the park, but the creature followed them. Sherri: This creature, this “birdman,” as they first called it, was able to keep pace with the car. Amanda: The couple’s report of their sighting was published the next day in the “Point Pleasant Register” under the headline, “Couples See Man-Sized Bird, Creature, Something.” It kicked off a frenzy in Point Pleasant that is arguably still going on to this day. Though the nickname Birdman did not stick. Over time, this creature became known by a different name: the Mothman. I’m Amanda McGowan and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. This episode is brought to you in partnership with West Virginia Tourism. Today, we’re talking about the legend of the Mothman, one of America’s most famous cryptids, and the story starts with a strange sighting near an abandoned power plant that drew the attention of the press, visitors, and those interested in the paranormal and the unexplained. It generated a powerful legend that, over time, became woven into the story of the town, from its tragedies to its triumphs. And today, this creature has gone from being a source of terror to a kind of folk hero. This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. Amanda: Today, if you’re driving through the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, you are guaranteed to have a Mothman sighting. Kind of. Because there’s a giant statue of the Mothman right in the middle of downtown. Sherri: It’s like one of the first things that you see as you’re driving through town. This gigantic Mothman creature with red eyes that’s, I don’t know, probably 8-foot tall, 9-foot tall on a big pedestal, and it’s right smack dab in the middle of town. I mean, you can’t miss it, and they have a spotlight on it at night. Amanda: This is Sherri Brake. She’s the owner of Haunted Heartland Tours and the author of “Point Pleasant: A Haunted History.” This fall she’ll be speaking at the annual Mothman Festival, which drew 30,000 visitors to Point Pleasant last year. Of course, most of these visitors will be in town looking to have their own Mothman sighting, and to improve their chances, they’re going to have to venture out north of downtown and check out the old TNT area. Sherri, of course, takes her tours there and she guides visitors by flashlight around the old power plant and through the maze of overgrown concrete bunkers that look like igloos. Sherri: There’s hundreds of bunkers sitting around everywhere and you just get the feeling that you’re being watched. You, you’re not alone. I mean it definitely is a creepy vibe there. You think you’re going to see something, you’re almost anticipating it around every little turn in the woods and then you take 50 people down this little trail in the middle of nowhere and everybody’s looking over their shoulders. Amanda: Back in 1966, after the Millette and Scarberry sighting, the creepy vibe of the TNT area and the possibility of seeing this unidentified giant flying creature, well, it didn’t keep people away from the site. Actually, it had the opposite effect. Sherri: Once word spread — small town — everybody wants to go out in the woods, and people would gather up and they would drive out in the middle of nowhere and they would sit and they would park and they would watch for the creature. In a very short time, many, many people started seeing this bird-like creature. Amanda: Reports of sightings flooded in. One local reporter named Mary Hyre made them the subject of many of her columns in the “Athens Messenger,” which is a paper based right across the river in Ohio. Here’s just a few of her headlines from that time: “Winged Red-Eyed Thing Chases Point Couples Across Countryside.” “Monster Returns to Mason.” (That’s the name of the county.) “Is Mysterious Creature Balloon or Crane?” Let’s talk about that last one. There was this theory put forward by a biologist at West Virginia University that the giant bird-like creatures people were seeing might actually have been sandhill cranes that were passing through the TNT area on their migration path. Sandhill cranes do have these really, really striking red feathers across their eye area, and their wingspans can be more than 6 feet wide. And another interesting thing is that in recent years, there’s been more research and observation, and it seems like these birds have become really good at adapting to urban environments and sort of living among people. But Sherri tells me that she’s skeptical. Sherri: I know there was speculation that it was a sandhill crane. Well, all right, 8-foot tall, red eyes, terrorizing people, keeping, you know, speeds of 100 miles an hour? I don’t know if I buy the sandhill crane theory. Amanda: Of course, many other ideas were put forward to try to explain exactly what was going on. Sherri: Is it a creature? Was it a loon? Was it a bird? Was it a man who somehow got up into the TNT area, maybe got around some of those chemicals and kind of morphed into a creature? Is it an alien? Is it interdimensional? You know, there’s a lot of different theories out there, but the truth stands. People saw something. Amanda: Whatever it was, the sightings continued. And they started to draw in writers and journalists and people from out of town, and also folks who are interested in other unexplained phenomena like UFOs. We’ll come back to that later. But the frenzy came to a halt, or at least it began to morph into something else on December 15, 1967 when tragedy struck the town. Sherri: And you know when terrible things happen, you try to make sense of it. Amanda: We’re going to take a quick break, but coming up after this, how the story of a tragedy became intertwined with the story of the Mothman. That’s after this. Amanda: From November of 1966 to December of 1967, a period of about 13 months, the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, was rocked by a number of sightings of a strange winged creature with red eyes. This creature became known as the Mothman. But then came December 15, 1967, a day that really changed everything. Sherri: For your listeners who aren’t familiar with the Silver Bridge, well, it connected Ohio to West Virginia, so it spanned across the Ohio River. And on December 15 at about 5 p.m., 1967, 13 months after the first sighting of Mothman, the bridge began to sway. It was full of traffic at 5 o’clock. You have all your workers going home. It was also the week before Christmas. So you have a lot of people going back and forth between Kanauga, Ohio, and Point Pleasant doing Christmas shopping. All of a sudden you have this bridge starting to lurch sideways and, within a minute, it had fallen. It fell loaded with traffic. Forty-six people lost their lives and the icy Ohio River water. Amanda: The Silver Bridge disaster shocked Point Pleasant and the country. The bridge had failed because of a single crack in one of its metal suspension linkages, and the disaster led to a major federal investigation and later the creation of the first national bridge safety inspection program. And after the bridge collapse, the sightings of Mothman began to peter out. Years went by. The reporter who broke many of the Mothman stories, Mary Hyre, died in 1970, and it kind of seemed like the Mothman legend was maybe fading away. But then something odd began to happen, which was, the story of the bridge collapse began to become intertwined with the lore of the Mothman. One of the writers and Ufologists who had descended on Point Pleasant back in 1966 was this guy named John Keel. In 1975, he published a book called “The Mothman Prophecies,” where he wrote all about his time in Point Pleasant. And not only did he write about the Mothman sightings, but he also connected them with other alleged sightings in the area of UFOs and also these mysterious men in suits that would turn up and ask people questions. He called these the Men in Black. And maybe most importantly, Keel framed the Mothman as a kind of bad omen, a sign that something was about to go wrong — this creature that was trying to warn people of the impending collapse of the bridge. This is what he wrote in the “Mothman Prophecies: “I’d had warnings about something terrible that was going to happen. If I could have put things together sooner, maybe we could have saved all those lives.” Sherri: You know, when terrible things happen, you try to make sense of it. You try to maybe tie things together. Is it a coincidence? Is it not a coincidence? Keel’s book introduced the Mothman story to a wider audience, and it got even wider in 2002 when the book was adapted into a popular movie starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney, also called “The Mothman Prophecies.” And the release of this movie is when Mothman Frenzy really took off again. In 2002, the year that the movie came out, some local enthusiasts about the Mothman legend decided to hold a Mothman festival in Point Pleasant for the first time. It was organized by a guide named Jeff Wamsley, who today also owns a Mothman museum downtown. Museum Voicemail: For more information about the museum, visit us online at mothmanmuseum.com. And if you’re currently being followed by the Men in Black, then the only solution is to book your Mothman 66 Escape Room Experience at mothmanescaperoom.com. Amanda: Today, the Mothman Festival has grown and so has Mothman culture all around Point Pleasant. Sherri: There’s so much cool merchandise that you see people walking around on the streets. There’s Mothman t-shirts, of course, but there’s, you know, everything from coffee mugs to ball hats to stuffies for kids. They have a Mothman putt-putt course indoors that’s black light. So it’s like anything that you could dream up about Mothman. It’s there. There’s a coffee shop just across the street from the Mothman Museum, and of course they have a Mothman coffee. Amanda: The Mothman, who once terrorized couples in the TNT area, is now kind of an emblem of the town with its own fan base. Colin Dickey: There’s also a kind of fan culture of people who treat it like a, you know, like a Marvel Comics character or somebody like that. Amanda: This is Colin Dickey. He’s a frequent contributor to the show and has written a ton about the history of American cryptids and folklore, and Colin told me that what fascinates him about the Mothman is the way that this legend has become intertwined with the real tragedy of the Silver Bridge collapse. Colin: My feeling is that the Silver Bridge was, you know, a huge disaster for this community, not only in terms of the loss of life, but it was, it was the connection across the Ohio River to Wheeling, Ohio, and its destruction really, really traumatized the region. Because of Mothman and because of the fandom and because of the festival every year, the Silver Bridge collapse is never really far from anybody’s memory, which is, you know, different than other infrastructure failures, and I think that’s a really fascinating aspect of this story that doesn’t happen in any other stories of cryptids or UFOs. Amanda: Sherri Brake’s Mothman tour of Point Pleasant brings visitors to the spot where the bridge once stood. Today there’s a mural there and a plaque that commemorates the victims of the disaster. She also brings people to the Mothman statue and, of course, to the TNT area. For Sherri, what keeps drawing visitors to these places and keeps drawing her to these places is just the mystery of it all. Sherri: I think it’s the fascination with “What is it and will I see it?” You know, the fact that you can still drive up into the TNT area, pull your car off the road, and walk through the woods. and go to the the site that it happened…You know, 99% of the time nothing happens, but it’s just that expectation that we have of humans of going beyond the glow of our flashlight, you know, and making ourselves uncomfortable and putting ourselves in a, you know, kind of a spooky situation. It really gets your imagination going. Amanda: Are you trying to see The Mothman? We will post links in the episode description to Sherri’s tours as well as other information about the Mothman Festival and the Mothman Museum.

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