"The bane of all that dread the devil!"

      The Idiot Boy
      William Wordsworth
      As fortean journalist Jerome Clark so succinctly put it, "Whatever it was, Mothman was no hoax." Over 100 people claimed encounters with Mothman and, as you will see, while their stories might appear outrageous, many of them are not so easily dismissed.

      Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the Mothman episode is the wide range of paranormal activity associated with it. While the name "Mothman" refers specifically to an enigmatic creature which made its presence known in the Ohio River Valley during 1966-67, the events surrounding the Mothman sightings are a veritable potpourri of paranormal phenomena: UFOs, Men In Black (MIB), poltergeist/ghostly phenomena, possibly even cryptozoology. While there may be a great deal of debate over what Mothman was (or wasn't) there can be no debate that the story of Mothman, whether scientific fact or science fiction, is an eerie one indeed.


      The Mothman Cometh

      The Mothman "flap" is generally considered to have begun on the evening of November 14, 1966 in a field near Salem, West Virginia (although there were earlier reports of similar encounters). On that evening building contractor Newell Partridge was relaxing in front of the television when a series of strange events began to rapidly unfold. Quite suddenly the picture on the tube "blanked out" and was replaced by "a real fine herringbone pattern." The new image on the screen was accompanied by a "loud whining noise" issuing from the speaker. At the same time Bandit, Partridge's seasoned hunting dog, began howling on the front porch. Puzzled, Partridge grabbed a flashlight and stepped outside to investigate.

      Partridge found Bandit in a highly agitated state staring intently at the hay barn, some 150 yards distant. He aimed his beacon in that direction and was startled when the beam picked up two huge red eyes the likes of which Partridge, a veteran night hunter, had never seen. As soon as the light fell on the mysterious eyes Bandit flew off the porch and raced toward whatever it was they belonged to. Partridge, on the other hand, was inexplicably overcome by a wave of abject terror and bolted back inside to spend the rest of the night with a loaded gun on the bedside table.

      The following morning, Partridge went out to the barn to see if he could find any clues as to what exactly had transpired the night before. He could easily follow Bandit's footprints in the soft soil, right up to where Partridge had seen the "creature." At that point Bandit's prints began to go around in circles as though he had been chasing his tail, something Partridge had never before seen him do. There were no other tracks. Bandit would appear to have vanished from that very spot. He was never seen again.

      Or was he?


      TNT Terror

      Late the next evening, in nearby Point Pleasant, two young couples, Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette, were driving past the abandoned TNT plant (known to the locals as the "TNT Area") on the outskirts of town when their headlights picked up a figure that "was shaped like a man, but bigger." It also boasted bat-like wings which it folded against its back and, notably, two huge red eyes "two inches wide and six inches apart." The thing appeared to have no head, its eyes situated in its "shoulders." Roger Scarberry stopped the car as the four gazed on this strange being in mute amazement.

      After a few moments the creature began to move away from the vehicle in an odd, shuffling manner. At this point the weirdness of the experience began to set in and the quartet panicked. Scarberry punched the accelerator and headed for town at speeds of up to 100 mph.

      Further up the road they were dismayed to come upon either the same or an identical creature which proceeded to take to the air and keep pace with their car. ( And this without even flapping its wings!) As it flew overhead the witnesses heard a sound "like a record played at high speed, or the squeak of a mouse." The thing followed them right up to the city limits, where they noticed a large dead dog by the side of the road. The witnesses stopped in town only long enough to alert Deputy Sheriff Millard Halstead before heading back out toward the TNT Area with the lawman in tow.

      When they got to the city limits, they noticed that the big dead dog they had seen only minutes earlier had vanished. They stopped and searched, but the dog was nowhere to be found.

      They pressed on to the TNT Area. When they got there they found nothing out of the ordinary, but Deputy Halstead's radio did begin to emit strange sounds which were similar to those of a record or tape played at extremely high speed.

      (Please note that at this point no one but Newell Partridge was aware of his own bizarre experience.)


      Mothman and the Media Machine

      As Daniel Cohen, author of (among other things) The Encyclopedia of Monsters, put it, "while the two young couples may have been frightened by the creature, they were not shy." The following day a press conference was held and soon afterward the Scarberry/Mallette story had traveled the globe. The creature was dubbed "Mothman" by the press, borrowing the name from one of the lesser known villains on the Batman TV series.

      Most (if not all) of the Mothman sightings reported after the press conference should probably be taken with at least a grain of salt. However, there are some post press conference encounters worth mentioning.

      On the evening following the press conference, November 16, Mr. and Mrs Raymond Wamsley and Mrs. Marcella Bennett, along with Mrs. Bennett's two-year-old daughter, Tina, drove out to the TNT Area where their friends, the Ralph Thomas family, resided. On the way out they observed a "funny big red light in the sky" which seemed to be moving slowly over the TNT area. They didn't think much of it, as at that time UFOs were almost common place in the area. In fact, between the end of 1966 and the end of 1967 (roughly the time frame of the Mothman episodes) over 1000 UFO sightings were reported in the Ohio River Valley and environs.

      Soon the party arrived at their destination and clambered out of the auto. As they were preparing to go up to the house their attention was diverted by motion at the back of the car. A strange figure "rose up slowly from the ground." It was "a big gray thing, bigger than a man, with terrible, glowing red eyes." The group was understandably terrified, Marcella Bennett so much so that she dropped her daughter. Tina was quickly gathered up and the four of them raced into the Thomas' house. Only the three Thomas children were at home.

      Their encounter with Mothman was not quite over. Soon they heard a shuffling sound on the front porch. Moments later their worst fears were confirmed when Mothman's piercing red eyes appeared in the living room window. In utter desperation they called the police, but by the time they arrived Mothman had made good its escape. (Mothman did, however, seem to have an affinity for the Thomas house. Mrs. Thomas would see the creature, virtually in her front yard, nearly a year later.)

      (It should be noted that Marcella Bennett was extemely affected by her brush with Mothman. She was unable to speak with anyone about her experience for months and became convinced that the creature visited her at her home on numerous occasions. Although she never actually saw it again, she claimed she heard it several times, comparing the sound to that of a woman screaming.)


      Mothman Over Mason

      Several days later, on November 27, eighteen-year-old Connie Carpenter was driving home from church when she saw what she thought was a large man dressed in gray clothing standing in the middle of the otherwise deserted Mason County Golf Course near Mason, West Virginia. Unlike most men, however, this one had ten-foot wings which he suddenly unfolded. The next thing Connie knew the thing was air-borne (again without benefit of wing-flapping) and making a beeline for her car. Even from a distance she could clearly see those terrible red eyes. In fact, she "couldn't take [her] own eyes off of them." Mothman headed directly for her windshield and she was certain they were going to collide, but the creature veered off at the last possible moment. This afforded Connie a brief view of the thing's face, something few others, if any, got. Still, the best description she could give of it was "horrible."

      Interestingly, following her encounter with Mothman, Connie Carpenter came down with a case of klieg conjunctivitus, a swelling, reddening, and itching of the eyes often suffered (in the old days, at least) by people who have had close encounters with UFOs. The condition persisted for about two weeks.

      Like several Mothman witnesses, Connie Carpenter's bizarre experience did not end with the sighting itself. On the morning of February 27, 1967, as she was walking to school, a car which she later identified as a 1949 Buick pulled up beside her and the driver, a man she estimated to be in his mid-twenties, well-tanned, and wearing no coat despite the fact that it was near freezing, motioned her to come over. Thinking he needed directions and being the helpful sort, she readily complied. As she approached the vehicle she noted that despite its age, the car gave all appearances of being brand new. She was puzzling over this when the driver suddenly grabbed her arm and told her to get in. A brief struggle ensued, but Connie finally wrenched her arm free, ran home, and locked herself in, nearly hysterical.

      She remained indoors the following day. At approximately 3:00 p.m. she became aware of sounds on her front porch followed by a loud knock on the door. When she went to the door she found that a note written in pencil had been slipped under it. The note read: Be careful girl. I can get you. Connie and her new husband took the note and their story to the police, but fortunately neither the car nor the strange man were ever seen again.


      Ongoing Oddness

      Meanwhile, Mothman related activity was continuing at an impressive pace in Point Pleasant and neighboring areas. Linda Scarberry and Mary Mallette were individually visited by a bizarre couple who offered them free annual family portraits. The man was extrememly large and very strange-looking. The woman must have been stranger-looking still, as she stayed in the background as much as possible and made very obvious efforts to hide her face.

      Visits from bizarre individuals, however, were not limited to actual Mothman percipients. It would appear that Mrs. Mary Hyre was singled out merely for doing her job as the Point Pleasant correspondent for the Athens, Ohio Messenger. Late one evening in January, 1967, not long after her stories on Mothman and the massive UFO sightings in the area first appeared in the paper, Mrs. Hyre was visited at her office by an extremely bizarre individual. He was, she estimated, barely four and a half feet tall, wore extremely thick glasses that did nothing to hide the strangeness of his eyes, and was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and trousers made of thin material despite the fact that it was over ten degrees below freezing outside. This strange man proceeded to ask directions to Welsh, West Virginia, but it soon became apparent in the ensuing conversation that the man knew far more about West Virginia than Mrs. Hyre did. At one point the man picked up a ball-point pen and marvelled at it, as though he had never seen one before. When Mrs. Hyre told him that he was welcome to it he laughed a loud, strange laugh and ran out the door, into the freezing night.


      The Silver Bridge

      Strange phenomena of all types continued apace in the Point Pleasant area for the rest of the year. Many, if not most of the homes in and around the TNT area experienced poltergeist phenomena, and inexplicable problems with radios, televisions, and telephones plagued the entire region. Over time, while sightings of Mothman gradually diminished, UFO activity markedly increased. Everything appeared to come to a head on December 15, 1967 when the seven hundred foot Silver Bridge, which linked Point Pleasant with Kanauga, Ohio, collapsed while laden with rush-hour traffic. Thirty-eight bodies were fished from the icy waters of the Ohio River, and several more people were never accounted for. There was a brief flurry of intense UFO activity in the skies over Point Pleasant that evening, and then everything seemed to return to more or less normal.

      Many have tried to make some kind of a connection between the strange happenings in the Point Pleasant area and the Silver Bridge collapse, primarily because a number of those killed had at some point been witness to unusual phenomena of one kind or another. While some believe that Mothman and the phenomena associated with it was some kind of supernatural warning of the disaster, others believe that it was the cause of it. (A woman who lived near the bridge claimed that the day before it collapsed she saw two strange men "climbing around the sides" of it.) While it is interesting that the bulk of the paranormal activity seemed to cease with the collapse, the fact of the matter is that the Silver Bridge was nearly forty years old, poorly (if at all) maintained, and had, for many years, been carrying far more traffic than it had been designed to do. In short, it shouldn't have taken a year's worth of bizarre phenomena to either warn of or cause the collapse. Quite simply, it is a miracle that the bridge stood for as long as it did.


      What was Mothman?

      The only "rational" explanation ever offered for the Mothman episode is that it was actually comprised of a number of rare sightings of an odd-looking type of bird called the sandhill crane. Let us briefly examine the pros and cons of the sandhill crane theory.

      The argument in favor of the sandhill crane theory:

      1. Sandhill cranes are large, gray, sometimes aggressive birds with large red eye patches.
      2. The TNT Area was immediately adjacent to the McClintic Wildlife Station, a 2500 acre bird sanctuary and animal refuge.
      3. On November 18, 1966, less than forty-eight hours after the Wamsley/Bennett/Thomas sighting, Captain Paul Yoder and Benjamin Enochs of the Point Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department were driving through the TNT area when they came upon a very large creature with extremely large red eyes. They had never seen anything like it before. About the only thing that the two men could determine with certainty about the weird beast is that it was definitely some type of bird.
      4. On November 27, in nearby (70 miles) Lowell, Ohio, a group of man-sized, gray-breasted birds with wingspans of at least ten feet were observed for two hours by a group of people.

      The argument against the sandhill crane theory:

      1. If Mothman was a sandhill crane, it was quite possibly the only one sighted in the state of West Virginia during all of the 1950s and 60s, when populations on the East Coast were virtually non-existent. It would also have been the largest one ever recorded. An enormous sandhill crane would be about the size of an average-size man. Mothman was consistently described as being "bigger than a man." Numerous witnesses, in fact, estimated its height to be about seven feet.
      2. Sandhill cranes rarely, if ever, weigh more than twelve pounds. Strange footprints (bearing no resemblance whatsoever to those of a sandhill crane) found behind the TNT plant and in at least one other location indicated the presence of a creature weighing 200-300 pounds.
      3. Investigator John Keel showed pictures of sandhill cranes to literally each Mothman witness and each one, to an individual, stated emphatically that they bore absolutely no resemblance to what they had seen.
      4. If Mothman was a sandhill crane, why would it prefer to inhabit an abandoned TNT plant when there was a perfectly good bird sanctuary right next door?
      5. The rangers at the McClintic Wildlife Station insisted that, had there been a sandhill crane anywhere in the area at any time, they most certainly would have been aware of it. They were aware of none in the area during the Mothman flap (or at any time before or after, for that matter).
      6. Sandhill cranes are not known to cause electrical interference.
      7. Sandhill cranes (like most large birds) generally need to flap their wings in order to achieve and maintain flight.
      8. The top airspeed of a sandhill crane in level flight is well under 75 mph.

      The above material barely scratches the surface of the monolith that is the Mothman story. For the definitive account of the weird goings on in the Ohio River Valley during '66-'67 see John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies. Keel arrived on the scene in Point Pleasant immediately after the initial sightings and virtually lived at the Blue Fountain Motel there during the year that the story unfolded. The resulting book is a classic in the annals of paranormal literature.