Have you ever visited a place that seems plagued by mysterious events and bizarre phenomenon?
In 1966, the small town of Point Pleasant, WV and it's surrounding areas became such
a place, when reports of a large humanoid with wings and red eyes made national headlines.
Dubbed Mothman by newspapers, the creature was spotted by several eyewitnesses and was
also accompanied by reports of UFO activity and other strange events.
So what was Mothman and why did it strike fear in anyone who witnessed it?
At 7PM on November 2nd, 1966, a sewing machine salesman named Woody Derenberger was driving
down a dark stretch of interstate 77 near Parkersburg, West Virginia.
A car that was trailing him close behind sped up and passed him, and Woody noticed that
the car was being followed by another vehicle.
The vehicle wasn't a car, but instead an unidentified object that Woody described as being shaped
like an old-fashioned kerosene lamp.
To Woody's amazement, the object stopped in front of him and a door slid open.
Out of it came a tan-skinned man with a large grin on his face.
He was wearing a coat, and his hair was neatly slicked back.
As the man made his way to Woody's truck, the strange vehicle floated up 40 ft. into
the air and hovered there.
The man approached the right side window of Woody's truck and spoke, but he did so without
moving his mouth as if he was communicating telepathically.
I told him my name, and when I told him my name he said he was called Cold.
That was the name that he was called by.
After asking Woody some questions about the nearby city of Parkersburg, as well as about
the kind of people that lived there, Cold told Woody that they would see each other
again soon and walked back to his vehicle.
The craft descended down, Cold stepped in and then sped off into the distance.
Just 10 days later in the nearby town of Clendenin, five gravediggers working in a cemetery spotted
what they described as a large, brown creature with wings rise out of the trees and fly into
the distance.
Three days after that on November 15th, in the nearby town of Salem, a contractor named
Newell Partridge was watching TV when his signal seemed to malfunction.
He saw strange patterns on his screen and heard a loud whining noise.
He also heard his dog barking outside.
He went out to investigate and saw that the dog's attention was directed toward a field
near the haybarn.
Newell grabbed his shotgun and headed toward the field, he shined his flashlight at the
darkness and saw two red orbs shining back at him.
He would later say they reminded him of bicycle reflectors.
The dog took off toward the lights and was never seen again.
That same night, only a half hour later, Roger and Linda Scarberry, along with their friends
Steve and Mary Mallette were riding their 1957 Chevy near a local hangout known as The
TNT Area when they also encountered the creature.
Located north of Point Pleasant, the TNT area was used to store and manufacture ammunition
during World War 2.
It contained almost a hundred concrete dome-shaped bunkers that were built to house explosives.
Abandoned after the war, it would later be discovered that the area was heavily polluted
and it was declared a Superfund site in the 80s and an effort was made to clean it up.
But at the time that the teens were exploring it in 1966, it was just a place for young
people to gather in privacy.
As their car approached an old generator plant, they noticed two red glowing lights in the
darkness.
They stopped the car and were horrified to see that the lights were actually the eyes
of a seven foot tall creature with large wings folded on its back.
They drove away in a panic, but when they looked back a little while after, they saw
the creature sitting on a ridge near a road.
It spread its wings and took of flying, in close pursuit of the car.
Interestingly, it seemed to not flap its wings at all when flying.
The teens noticed a dead dog on the road as they sped away and could also hear the creature
hitting the top of their car.
The creature gave up the chase once the teens reached the city limits.
They eventually headed to the Mason County courthouse where they told their story to
a deputy who believed that they were telling the truth.
Together they went back to the area in search of the monster but found nothing.
Newspaper dubbed the creature Mothman and sightings continued all over Point Pleasant
and the surrounding areas.
On November 16th, the creature was spotted by Marcella Bennett and her brother Raymond
near the home of a relative.
Marcella was so spooked that she fell to the ground while carrying her infant daughter,
On November 20th, a couple saw a large bird with a huge wingspan near Ferry Branch, a
man named Howard Miller saw Mothman on top of a school bus shelter in Dixie and Brenda
Jones saw it beside a rock quarry at Campbell's Creek.
On November 26th, a woman in Charleston spots the creature outside of her small home and
the next night a girl in the same town has a similar sighting.
These sightings continued for several months and throughout all of it, people kept spotting
lights in the sky and some even reported being visited by men dressed in suits, similar to
the man encountered by Woody Derenberger before the Mothman sightings.
Some people have suggested that the sightings of these strange men and of Mothman are related.
After all, they occurred at roughly the same time and were all confined to areas surrounding
Point Pleasant, WV.
It's as though during this time the whole area became a hotbed of unexplained phenomena,
but it all seemed to come to a head on December 15, 1967.
The Silver Bridge was a suspension bridge built in 1928 that carried US Route 35 over
the Ohio River, connecting Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio.
Vehicles at the time the bridge was built weighed a lot less than those made during
60s and traffic was also much lighter.
By the time the late 60s rolled around, the bridge was under much more stress than it
was built to support.
A small crack that was only 2.5 mm deep eventually caused the bridge to collapse, claiming the
lives of 46 people.
This happened on December 15th, 1967, at the height of the Mothman sightings and afterwards
it seemed as though the sightings stopped abruptly.
Could Mothman have been also been related to the tragic bridge collapse?
Let's take a closer look at the case.
First of all, it's important to remember that there is absolutely no physical evidence that
Mothman ever existed.
He didn't leave any feathers behind, or even any footprints.
Everything we know about the creature is based on eyewitness testimony.
The descriptions of Mothman by eyewitnesses vary greatly.
Sometimes it's described as a bird, sometimes as a humanoid, sometimes it has muscular legs,
sometimes it has skinny legs, sometimes it's black, or grey, or white.
The only features that seem to be similar among all accounts are the wings and the red
eyes, although the eyes have been described as both glowing, and reflective.
Theory #1: Mothman was a bird-like cryptid Legends about giant birds and bird-like creatures
are by no means confined to West Virginia.
You may be familiar with a cryptid known as a Thunderbird, which is a mythological beast
from Native American folklore that has reportedly been sighted several times across the US.
Sometimes they are described as resembling pterosaurs instead of birds.
It's thought that early man and giant birds like teratorns did in fact co-exist but there
has so far been no evidence that they have survived to the present day.
That's not to say it's impossible that Mothman was some kind of large unknown bird, just
unlikely.
Theory #2: Mothman was an alien Because of all of the UFO activity and strange
encounters that happened in and around Point Pleasant during the Mothman sightings, many
people have speculated that Mothman was actually some kind of alien or inter-dimensional being
that was somehow related to UFOs.
This idea was popularized in the book The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel, which was
published in 1975 and follows the author's investigation into the Mothman sightings.
Keel inserts himself very deeply into the story, to the point that he claims to have
been the recipient of mysterious phone calls and visitations.
It's a great read, but once again, everything is reliant on eyewitness testimony and many
of his sources are unknown.
There's a lot of conjecture in the book, and Keel also went on to say some things that
were just untrue.
For example, he made a claim in 2002 that there was also a
serial killer on the loose during the time of the Mothman sightings and that the dead
bodies of teenagers were being found in a cave.
No record of this ever occurring exists.
Woody Derenberger, who first encountered the strange grinning man calling himself Cold
before the Mothman sightings, went on to claim that he had even more experiences with the
strange beings and that they even took him on a spaceship to their planet.
This was all chronicled in his book Visitors from Lanulos.
I've never read it so I can't really comment on it but I do know that it contains no mention
of Mothman.
Theory #3: Mothman was a supernatural being or curse
If you're familiar with the Mothman story, you've undoubtedly also heard about the curse
of Chief Cornstalk.
He was a chief who was the leader of the Shawnee nation just prior to the American Revolution
and although his faction was neutral, he was brutally murdered by soldiers during a diplomatic
visit to Fort Randolph.
According to legend, Chief Cornstalk placed a curse on the land just before he died and
many of the misfortunes of Point Pleasant, including Mothman and the bridge collapse,
have been attributed to this curse.
There is no historical source mentioning such a curse, and the origin of the legend has
been traced backed to play written in the early twentieth century that was performed
in Point Pleasant.
Theory 4: Mothman was an owl Take a look at this photograph.
How big would you say the creature being depicted here is?
If we turn the brightness up, you'll see that it's simply an owl resting on top of a large
bush, giving the impression that it's much larger than it actually is.
Could an illusion such as this have fooled people into believing they were looking at
a large monster?
There's other details about Mothman that point to the possibility of it being an owl.
Owls have large eyes that take on a red reflectiveness when exposed to light.
They are also silent flyers and expert gliders, two common characteristics in Mothman sightings.
The theory that the sightings were simply of a large owl and were exaggerated due to
hysteria is probably the most possible explanation, but I still have some problems with it.
I have a hard time believing that people living in West Virginia where owls and birds
are common would be so easily fooled.
Whatever the explanation for the mystery, the story of Mothman has endured for decades
because it's been so deeply engrained in the history of Point Pleasant and its people.
Today the town is host to a Mothman festival, a museum and a statue that stands as a tribute
to one of the most iconic American monsters ever.
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