The Mothman of Point Pleasant

About 5 miles north of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, along State Route 62, lies the TNT area. It was a munitions works during the Second World War. Today it is the Clifton F. McClintic Wildlife Management Area. In November 1966 a legend began there.

Tuesday, November 15, 1966. Between 11:30 p.m. and midnight. Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette were in the TNT area, near the old power plant. The figure they saw was six or seven feet tall. It had a 10-foot wingspan and was light grey. Its red eyes were about two inches across and six inches apart. "It was like a man with wings," Steve Mallette said. "It wasn't like anything you'd see on TV or in a monster movie."

It was clumsy when running. In the air it was fast. It kept pace with their speeding car at about 100 mph. It hovered over the car, apparently gliding, and followed them to the city limits making screeching sounds. At the C.C. Lewis farm gate it rose straight up like a helicopter. It seemed afraid of light. Deputies and city police reached the scene about 2 o'clock that morning. They found nothing. Three days later, Roger Scarberry sketched what he had seen.

Others came forward. Kenneth Duncan said that on November 12, while digging a grave near Clendenin, he saw a human-like figure fly out of the woods and glide over the crew's heads. "It was gliding through the trees and was in sight for about a minute." Near Salem, Newell Partridge shone a flashlight into a meadow. Eyes glowed back "like bicycle reflectors." His German Shepherd, Bandit, never came back.

Around November 25, Tom Ury watched it "rise up just like a helicopter" from a field along Route 62. On November 27, in broad daylight, Connie Carpenter saw a seven-foot, grey, manlike figure near Mason. It unfolded ten-foot wings and flew toward her car. By then the press had a name for it. With the Batman TV series in fashion, it was Moth Man.

Sheriff George Johnson blamed large herons. WVU wildlife biologist Dr. Robert L. Smith said the descriptions all fitted the sandhill crane. The red eyes, he said, were "the large circles of bare reddish flesh around the crane's eyes." Ohio University zoologists disagreed. A science club adviser in Proctorville, Ohio, pointed to gas-filled plastic balloons. Decades later, Joe Nickell favoured the barred owl and its strong eyeshine. Benjamin Radford argued that the glowing red eyes were mostly later folklore. Witness Marcella Bennett said the same: "I did not see any red eyes."

December 15, 1967. About 5:00 p.m. The Silver Bridge, which carried US 35 between Point Pleasant and Ohio, collapsed. Of the 37 vehicles on it, 31 fell. The disaster killed 46 people. After that the sightings diminished, and the legend tied the two events together. The NTSB traced the collapse to a flaw in eyebar 330 that had grown over 40 years through stress corrosion and corrosion fatigue. "Supernatural forces do not bring down bridges; neglect does," investigator Don Karol wrote in 2017.

John Keel arrived in December 1966 and worked with reporter Mary Hyre. His book The Mothman Prophecies came out in 1975, and a film starring Richard Gere followed in 2002. Point Pleasant now has a festival, a 12-foot stainless statue by Bob Roach and a Mothman Museum. No photograph of the creature from 1966 or 1967 is known. There is only a sketch, and the words of the people who saw it.