“Suddenly a figure stirred in the darkness behind the parked car… It rose up slowly from the ground. A big gray thing. Bigger than a man, with terrible glowing red eyes.” – John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies
“O, beware, my lord of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.” – William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Twelve years ago, Mothman, the red-eyed flying monster who had first terrorised the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966 and 1967 (see FT156:26-54), made a comeback. Unlike his first appearances, this wave of sightings happened in one of the largest metropolises in America: Chicago.
Here’s how the original Mothman story goes. On 15 November 1966, two young couples – Linda and Roger Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette – were joyriding in a black ‘57 Chevy on the outskirts of Point Pleasant. They were cruising in an abandoned property called the ‘TNT area’. During World War II there was a munitions factory and a power plant here, with almost 100 concrete igloo-shaped buildings where explosives were stored. By 1966, it was empty and had become a popular destination for the youth of Point Pleasant, who drank, drag raced and made sweet love in their cars under the moonlight.
On this particular night, though, these young people would have an experience that would forever change their lives and the identity of Point Pleasant. The Chevy’s headlights fell across a winged being that stared at them with glowing red eyes. The frightened couples peeled out of the TNT area, sped into town and eventually made their way to the police station.
A headline the next day in the Point Pleasant Register read “Couples See Man-sized Bird… Creature… Something”, but soon a snappy newspaper copywriter came up with a name for the unknown entity, inspired by the popular 1966 Batman TV show: Mothman, a new terror of the night.
Many reports of this creature followed over the next year. Mothman was spotted in people’s yards and flying over the city, divebombing cars, and possibly stealing dogs. Point Pleasant also experienced UFO sightings and encounters with the Men in Black – those strange but sharply dressed men who questioned people about their sightings and warned them to keep quiet about them. The story culminated in a disaster: the collapse of Point Pleasant’s Silver Bridge on 15 December 1967. The bridge fell into the Ohio River, causing 46 people to die. Mothman was said to have been a harbinger of the event; and afterwards, the weird being disappeared into the ether.
OUT OF TIME AND SPACE
Many of the details and much of the lore of this story are due to John Keel (1930-2009; see FT253:38-42, 346:48-49, 371:58-59,), one of a handful of writers who specialised in strange phenomena in the 1960s. Keel travelled to Point Pleasant several times, teaming up with a local newspaper columnist named Mary Hyre to interview Mothman witnesses. He first wrote about the case in magazines dedicated to reports of “flying saucers”, and then included a chapter on Mothman in his 1970 book Strange Creatures Out of Time and Space, but it was his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies that would come to be seen as his magnum opus.
“I always compared it to Truman Capote’s ,” says Loren Coleman, the prolific fortean author, founder and director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. He
