Mothman
Point Pleasant, West Virginia
Reported 15 November 1966. Thirteen months of sightings, then nothing.
Just before midnight on 15 November 1966, two young married couples from Point Pleasant, Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette, drove out to the abandoned West Virginia Ordnance Works north of town. Locals called it the TNT area, after the munitions it had produced during the Second World War. It was a few hundred acres of concrete igloos and access roads going back to woodland, and it was where you went if you were young and wanted somewhere to park.
They said a figure was standing near the old generator plant. Grey, roughly the height of a man, with wings folded against its back and two red eyes set not in a head but in the upper chest. They drove. They said it followed them down Route 62 at close to a hundred miles an hour, and that it did not flap, it simply rose.
They went straight to the Mason County sheriff's office, which is the detail that has always made the case difficult to dismiss cleanly. Four people, sober, frightened, and volunteering their names to law enforcement on the same night. Deputy Millard Halstead drove back out with them and found nothing.
The Point Pleasant Register ran it the next day. The name came from a copy editor somewhere in the wire pickup, borrowing from the Batman television series then airing. Within a week, dozens of people had reported the same figure across Mason County. Then, after thirteen months, the reports stopped.
Reported from
- The TNT area, north of Point Pleasant. The original sighting, and the
densest cluster. Now the McClintic Wildlife Management Area, and open to the public. The concrete igloos are still there.
- Route 62 toward Gallipolis Ferry. The pursuit stretch, reported repeatedly
through the winter of 1966.
- The Chief Cornstalk Hunting Grounds and the Mason County back roads.
Sightings through 1967, mostly by drivers at night.
- Point Pleasant itself. A twelve foot steel statue by Bob Roach has stood on
Fourth Street since 2003. The festival every September draws thousands.
On the record
The Silver Bridge over the Ohio River collapsed during rush hour on 15 December 1967 and forty six people died. The cause was established: a single eyebar in a suspension chain failed from stress corrosion cracking, a flaw that could not have been seen in an inspection of the era. It changed how the United States inspects bridges.
The association between the sightings and the collapse is genuinely later. It does not appear in the 1966 and 1967 reporting, and it enters the story with John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies in 1975 and hardens in the 2002 film. The Institute keeps the two facts in separate files on purpose, because the grief in Point Pleasant is real and it belongs to the bridge.
The standing zoological explanation is a sandhill crane, offered at the time by Dr. Robert L. Smith of West Virginia University. A sandhill stands nearly as tall as a man, has a seven foot wingspan, a red patch around the eye, and was well outside its normal range. A barn owl caught in headlights has been argued for the same reasons. Neither accounts for what the four witnesses said about speed.
The Institute records four names, one date and one road. Everything after that is other people's arithmetic.
Also in the guide: Sasquatch · Chupacabra · Wendigo · Jersey Devil