I just want to start out by saying that this edition of Spooky Saturday is for my favorite forest frolicking faerie friend, Laura/Larael, aka @forests_and_fairytales on Instagram. The Mothman is her absolute favorite urban legend, and she suggested I do a Spooky Saturday about it/him, and since she’s an excellent friend and a kind soul, I’m going to go ahead and do it.
Plus, the Mothman legend is creepy AF. Read on to find out more.
Mention of The Mothman may bring to mind the early-2000s-but-looks-like-it’s-from-the-90s film The Mothman Prophecies, which is arguably when this urban legend rose to more mainstream fame, as opposed to lurking on the outskirts of pop culture. But the tales of the Mothman go back way farther than that. (For the record, and for the bookish among us, that movie is based on a book of the same title by John Keel, in case anyone is interested in checking it out.)
The real life story of the Mothman mainly takes place in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Over the course of about one year, several people gave very similar reports of seeing a terrifying, humanoid, winged creature lurking around the Point Pleasant area. It began with some local gravediggers who were working in a cemetery when they saw what looked like a man fly out of some nearby trees and over their heads.
I can only imagine how terrifying it would be to be working in a graveyard at night and see a huge, humanoid figure with wings just fly over top of your head. Just imagining that sounds horrible. I truly hope those guys had a change of pants in the truck or something, because holy hell.
But it didn’t stop there. Three days later, there was another report of the Mothman. Two couples, Steve and Mary Malette and Roger and Linda Scarberry, were out for a drive on some country roads because this was the 60s when people still went for drives for fun and we weren’t all glued to our phones like we are now because, as you know, millennials are the devil. Anyway, while they were on this drive, all four of them claimed to see a huge grey-ish, humanoid creature with an enormous wingspan swooping low over their car and seeming to follow their vehicle. They described it as having ten foot wings, which, when you really picture that, is just insane.
They claimed it followed their car for miles, giving them a chance to get a really good look at it, and that it was mainly following them through an area called “the TNT area”, which is apparently the former site of a World War II munitions plant. Whether or not that location has anything to do with the Mothman remains up in the air, but some people claim they think that’s where he lived. It? I guess we shouldn’t really assume its gender, but all descriptions of it seem to indicate that it specifically looked like a flying man.
Okay, so two groups of people supposedly see this giant humanoid figure flying around on ten-foot wings. That’s not that many, right? Except that these two groups of people add up to nine people total, and the sightings didn’t stop there.
Two volunteer firefighters also claimed to have seen it, and described it as a large bird with red eyes. A contractor heard something rustling around in a field and when he pointed his flashlight in that direction, he saw something with red eyes that glowed, in his own words, “like bicycle reflectors.” That night, this same man claims his dog—a German Shepherd—went missing and never came back and his television set went berserk and was buzzing and malfunctioning. Could these incidents be related to the appearance of the Mothman, as well?
While these people are the only people whose “I saw the Mothman” stories are really well known, there are rumors floating around the Point Pleasant area that as many as one hundred people actually had Mothman sightings of their own but were too hesitant to come forward and talk about them publicly, especially because the people who did were often looked down on or talked about a lot by their peers who thought the whole story just sounded way too crazy or that they might have been making it up for attention. Even the local media handled the whole thing really weirdly: when they first published an article about the Mothman the headline literally read “Couples See Man-Sized Bird…Creature…Something!”
That’s professionalism in journalism right there, folks.
So just one month after all these random sightings of the Mothman started, the whole situation came to a head with a major tragedy in the town of Point Pleasant. A bridge called the Silver Bridge, which was part of U.S. Route 35 and connected Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, suddenly collapsed in the middle of rush hour on December 15th, 1967. Cars were sliding into the water in an absolutely horrifying scene which ended up killing 46 people, two of whom were never found. While this doesn’t directly have anything to do with the Mothman, some people who had sightings of the Mothman claimed that after their sightings, they also had visions or premonitions of the bridge collapsing, something which John Keel talks about more in his Mothman Prophecies book. Then right after the collapse, sightings of the Mothman came to a sudden halt, leading a superstitious subset of people to believe that the Mothman sightings had actually been a dark omen or supernatural warning that something horrible was about to happen. Of course, others will say there’s no way this has anything to do with the Mothman. The bridge was simply supporting more weight than it was designed to support and that’s that. But for some, the timing of when the sightings started, how long they continued, and when they stopped just seemed like way too much of a coincidence.
Even though the majority of the Mothman story centers on Point Pleasant, WV (and has, in fact, become the town’s claim to fame—more on that later), Mothman isn’t only isolated to one state. People from all over report sightings of this red-eyed, winged humanoid. Just a couple years ago there were 55 reported sightings of the Mothman in the Chicago area, and there was also a rash of sightings of the Mothman in Moscow, Russia, just before another tragedy—the Russian apartment bombings. Coincidence? Paranoia? The power of suggestion? We may never know for sure.
In 2016, someone claimed to have captured a picture of the mothman on Route 2 as they were driving. And of course, all you have to do is nose around YouTube for a hot minute to find countless renditions of people’s own experiences with this winged creature.
The big question is, what exactly is the Mothman?
Well, as you know, whenever there’s any kind of cryptid sighting or supernatural thing going on, there’s always that one guy who declares it’s not a cryptid or alien or ghost, it’s just an animal. Is that guy the voice of reason or does he just suck the fun out of everything? I don’t know, you be the judge.
But, of course, we have that guy in this case. We have several of those guys, actually. In fact, the sheriff of Mason County himself (where Point Pleasant is located) thought that the Mothman sightings were just people spotting a giant heron. And then Dr. Robert L. Smith, a wildlife biologist at WVU, said that it was probably a sandhill crane, which have a seven foot wingspan (close to the ten people reported seeing) and reddish coloring around their eyes (note, not that their eyes are red like reflectors, but they have reddish near their eyes—like red patches around their eyes—so…make of that what you will). Granted, sandhill cranes don’t live in West Virginia, but his excuse for this was that they wandered away from their migration path or got confused on their way to Florida for the winter and just happened to be roaming around Point Pleasant for about a month.
Other people claim it could just be a huge owl, perhaps an albino owl, and that the eyes just looked red because of the light from headlights or flashlights reflecting off of them.
Because of course, owls look just like human men with wings. I don’t know, y’all.
And then there are the more fun and much more spooky theories about what the Mothman is. (Although owls can be kinda spooky. Have you ever seen that picture of the baby owls standing in the attic? I’ll put it below, just in case you haven’t. You look like you need something to haunt your dreams tonight.)
There’s the obvious cryptid route. Perhaps the Mothman is a creature that’s been here all along, and we just haven’t discovered it yet because we haven’t discovered all the creatures that live on our planet. Perhaps he is a mysterious animal like the chupacabra or sasquatch.
Then there’s the otherworldly route. Some people believe the Mothman was an alien. In fact, there are some sources that claim that around the same time people started seeing the Mothman, there was also a spike in UFO sightings in the same area or surrounding areas, leading some to theorize there could be a correlation between the two.
Others believe that the Mothman could be some sort of supernatural manifestation—perhaps a spirit or ghost, but the most common theory in that vein of thinking is that the Mothman is a demon. The description of the creature being a dark color with huge wings and red eyes fits perfectly with the imagery of a demon, making this one of the most common—and most terrifying—theories. Plus, the fact that he seemed to show up right before major tragedies and bring with him premonitions of bad things to come seems in line with demonic traits, as well. Many agree that no matter what the Mothman is, a sighting of him is a bad omen.
The most recent Mothman sightings were in 2017, but if you want to see the Mothman, you still can. Right in Point Pleasant, WV. In the form of a giant-ass, shiny Mothman statue that hangs out in the middle of town and is conveniently creepy as all hell.
Just like Roswell capitalized off the alien thing by turning themselves into a tourist attraction for fans of little gray men with big eyes, Point Pleasant has capitalized off of their own supernatural phenomenon, as well. In addition to seeing the Mothman statue, you can visit an entire Mothman Museum or even attend a whole freakin’ festival in honor of the creepy creature. Yeah, that’s right, there’s a Mothman Festival. It’s a whole weekend long and it takes place the third week of September, so Laura, mark your calendar. West Virginia’s not that far away. The festival includes vendors, guest speakers, hayrides, and something called a Mothman pancake eating contest. I’m not sure if the pancakes are shaped like Mothman or if you have to dress as Mothman while eating the pancakes, but either way…pancakes.
So, what does everyone else think? Is the Mothman real or just a hoax? Are people seeing a giant sandhill crane and paranoia is hyping it up into something else? If you do think he’s real, what do you think he is? An alien, demon, or cryptid? Let me know in the comments! As always, I’d love to hear from you. <3
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