(mysterious music)
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- [Narrator] This might seem like just another folktale.
It begins like so many rural legends.
A car full of kids on a country road
as they encounter something frightening and unexplainable.
But unlike stories told to children to keep them inside
after dark, this particular encounter was real.
For 13 months, the citizens of West Virginia
were haunted by a bizarre entity
that descended like a shadow from the sky.
And with it came a symphony of strange
and unsettling events that would eventually crescendo
into the ultimate nightmare.
To add to this heightened state,
the mysterious entity was not alone.
It was accompanied by other seemingly supernatural beings,
both from above and below.
At the eye of the storm was the tiny town of Point Pleasant,
West Virginia, a bustling little 'burb
on the banks of the Ohio River.
A town whose people would confront
this carnival of horrors head on.
Now, thanks to years of pop culture references
and a major Hollywood movie,
those that live in Point Pleasant may seem
like fictional characters to the outside world,
but the people are real,
and this is their story.
(mysterious music)
- My family's been here since about 1774,
so my mother's family.
I've lived here, for other than going to college, 58 years.
Obviously, Point Pleasant is a rural community.
It's a town of less than 5,000 people.
And most of the people's families
have been here for a very long time.
Everyone knows everybody.
It's a very close-knit community.
In a big city, this would just be a small suburb.
And literally, it's neighborhoods.
From end to end, the town's only about three miles long.
- [Narrator] The Ohio River flows from Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois.
Access to two major waterways is just one of the reasons
Point Pleasant has survived as long as it has.
It also boasts a National Guard armory
and has been home to various manufacturing facilities
for the U.S. Navy, as well as a Naval Reserve Center.
Across the river from Point Pleasant
lies its sister city of Gallipolis, Ohio.
With a population of less than 4,000,
most locals think Gallipolis is merely
an extension of Point Pleasant.
The people of Point Pleasant represent
the best of blue-collar America,
a people who are both hardy and resourceful.
- It's different.
Most of West Virginia's mountains.
You're in the high valley.
You're where the two main rivers,
the Ohio and Kanawha come together,
so you have a lot of farmland here.
You have rich, fertile river valleys.
- [Narrator] Point Pleasant's history
is a bloodied, messy affair, even to this day.
Native American bodies are still buried
throughout the area, with a mass grave
located somewhere in the vicinity of what
is known as the McClintic Wildlife Management Area.
Native tribes in the region traditionally avoided
the area of modern-day Point Pleasant
due to bad omens associated with lands where waters mingled.
However, they would be forced to stand ground
in this very area.
In 1774, the Shawnee and Mingo tribes banded together
to defend their homes located south of the Ohio River
from what they perceived as an invading Virginia militia
led by Colonel Andrew Lewis.
The natives waged a furious battle in an attempt to halt
continuous advances into their territory
in the now-infamous Battle of Point Pleasant.
After a vicious fight between the two parties,
the natives were forced to retreat
and were overtaken by the militia.
The Shawnee chieftain by the name of Cornstalk
negotiated a treaty with the white men.
Three years later, Chief Cornstalk returned
to the area for a diplomatic visit
at the nearby Fort Randolph.
However, upon arriving at the fort,
Cornstalk and his sons were taken captive
and murdered by the soldiers.
- He was the principal chief of the Shawnee Nation.
He was instrumental in this war.
He did not want this battle,
but he really didn't have a choice.
He had to fight for his land, he had to fight
for his people, he had to do,
he had to do what he felt would be
right for his future generations.
We didn't own the land.
We just cared for the land.
- Chief Cornstalk was a Shawnee chief
who was reportedly murdered by
some settlers over a land dispute,
him and his son both.
The legend is told that upon his dying breath
that he cursed the town of Point Pleasant for 200 years.
But I think that all towns have their
share of problems and tragedies and things like that.
- The first time it was heard of was in a play
in the early 1900s.
- We found when they tore down a local grade school here
about six years ago,
we found a closet that they didn't know about.
We found a play from 1923
that the entire town put on on their history.
And in that play, one of the big scenes,
is Cornstalk getting shot and cursing Point Pleasant.
- They just ran with it.
They
told it to their daughter, and their daughter
told it to her son and it just,
and by the time it escalated and escalated,
he was responsible for everything
that went wrong in the whole state.
- [Narrator] For over a century, Point Pleasant
has been plagued with a string of unfortunate incidents
that many would call bad luck.
On four occasions between 1913 and 1937,
the Ohio River overflowed its banks,
proving catastrophic for the town.
The flooding cost citizens thousands of dollars in damage,
and worse, untold grief in the number of lives lost.
During the early part of the 20th century,
with frequent disasters befalling Point Pleasant,
rumors about a bizarre birdman began to circulate.
The most startling fact about these birdman stories
is that they occurred over 50 years prior
to the Mothman encounters of the 1960s.
Professor James Gay Jones of Glenville State College
documented multiple sightings of the birdman in his book,
Haunted Valley and More Folktales of Appalachia.
The sightings began around 1914,
with the creature being described as a large bird
with the head of a man and a wingspread
of at least a dozen feet.
It was said to be of monstrous size,
and was covered in dark reddish feathers
that glistened in the sunlight.
According to Jones, sightings of the birdman
persisted well into the 1940s, where it was reported
by motorists who drove along the Ohio River
just outside of Point Pleasant.
These encounters were also said to be a prelude
or epilogue to a tragic occurrence.
As the 1960s dawned, so too did a new wave
of birdman sightings.
America was now in the throes of a space race,
launching multiple manned missions
in an effort to put the first man on the moon.
In Vietnam, American soldiers were in
their third year of ground combat
in a war that seemed to have no end.
On November First, 1966, a National Guardsman
at the armory near the McCintic Wildlife
Management Area claimed to see a brown half-bird,
half-man figure perched in a tree.
Less than two weeks later, the birdman appeared again,
nearly 80 miles east of Point Pleasant.
- On November 11th, 1966,
in Clendenin, West Virginia, which is a little bit
over an hour from here in Point Pleasant,
there were four men digging a grave.
It was later in the evening, almost dusk,
and they claimed to see a flying man
who flew over top of where they were digging this grave.
That was reported to the newspapers
and the media at that time.
That was one of the first Mothman sightings
or big bird sightings that took place,
even before here in Point Pleasant.
- [Narrator] The birdman is only one such figure
known to West Virginia folklore.
Aside from centuries of ghost tales and stories
of mysterious spook lights, there's also
the notorious Flatwoods Monster.
The Flatwoods Case, which took place in 1952,
revolves around a small town where eyewitnesses
came upon a bizarre creature
after seeing a glowing object streak across the sky
and come to rest on a farm.
Like the Flatwoods Monster, the birdman was often
accompanied by unusual aerial phenomena,
like that witnessed by Merle Partridge
near his home located less than 90 miles
from Point Pleasant.
- [Merle] And all at once, the TV started winding up
like a high-pitched generator, like winding up
to a fever pitch.
At the same time, my dog, Bandit,
on the front porch, that dog is carrying on and
all at once,
as it was winding up and I thought, what in the hell,
more than anything else.
And I got up to go over and turn it down
because it was hurting our ears,
the way the thing was a-screaming.
And the whole picture tube and everything
just blew out in the middle of the floor.
And man I run out the front door to the,
like the front door here and the porch there,
and I run out on the front porch,
the dog, as I run out, he took off
down through the field.
Well the only thing that was in that field
was a little pump house.
And I looked down at where he was going,
I hollered for him to come back and he wouldn't come back.
He wouldn't mind me at all.
But when I looked down there, all I seen was red lights
going around, like intermittent.
They weren't eyes or anything like that
because, so,
the dog would not come back.
I stood out there and called him for a half,
well, this thing,
in fact, this thing disappeared after just a few minutes.
The first thing that entered my mind
was that it was a helicopter.
But there was no noise.
(laughs)
And, so I guess I called the dog there for a little bit
and I just went back in the house,
more or less kinda putting it outta my mind,
something weird.
My wife was cleaning up the glass and everything
from the television, sweeping it up.
Well as far as I can remember, we just went to bed.
- This was all reported to the local authorities,
the state police, and the media outlets
and things like that, but that dog was never located.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Though locals refer to it as the TNT,
or TNT Area, the McClintic Wildlife Management Area
was at one time home to a $45 million munitions
manufacturing facility that encompassed
an area of more than 8,000 acres.
Known as the West Virginia Ordnance Works,
the plant was in operation from 1942 to 1945,
when it was abandoned after World War Two.
Shortly thereafter, it became a dumping ground
for chemicals and toxic waste before being given
to the state for use as a wildlife reserve.
During the 1960s, it was frequented by teenagers
who took advantage of its seclusion
for the purpose of drag racing,
or better yet, as a secretive lovers' hangout.
- We had a pretty good size farm out there,
and if you would walk clear to the back of the farm,
it was about a mile and a half
into the TNT Area from there.
Steve Mallette, I'd heard his name quite a bit,
and Roger Scarberry, I'd heard of their names quite a bit.
They were well known around school.
The way I heard it back then was,
that Steve Mallette and his wife, Mary,
and Roger Scarberry and his wife, Linda.
- About 11 o'clock that night,
they had been up riding around, showing off their car,
that Roger had a '57 Chevy Belair.
As they went past that north power plant,
they saw what they thought was a man standing in the road.
It stood about seven foot tall.
It was light gray in color.
And Linda said that it had wings folded against its back.
As they got closer in the car, she said the wings
spread out and it ran towards the north power plant.
She said it ran in a very awkward manner.
It hobbled through the grass,
went into the north power plant.
- They backed out onto the main drag,
rushed back down the fairground road
and took off towards Point Pleasant.
- They decided to go to the sheriff's department.
They were hesitant about telling anybody
because they thought people would just
think they were making the story up.
- When they got over on Route 62,
they turned south towards Point Pleasant.
They discovered that this creature was chasing them.
- Linda said, as they turned left onto Route 62,
they saw it again, standing by a billboard.
She said the wings came out, it went straight up in the air.
And as they hit the straight stretch there on Route 62,
that's when it came over top of the car.
They were doing 90, 95 miles an hour
down the straight stretch.
It never got in front of the car,
but it stayed above the car.
It would disappear for a few minutes and then come back.
At this point, they were a little concerned
because they thought they could possibly
have a wreck or an accident.
- He chased them all the way to the city limits.
And they said that they reached
100 mile an hour in their car.
- That's when they went on to the sheriff's department
and set down and explained
what they had experienced.
(mysterious music)
- I had seen something on TV.
It was just real short, and it was during those days
when that happened, during that week.
- As soon as the media caught wind
of Linda Scarberry and the Mallettes' sightings,
curiosity piqued here in Point Pleasant.
- It was like Jaws.
They said there's a monster in the TNT,
everybody grabbed their gun.
- People armed with rifles and guns,
miles and miles of cars up in the TNT Area.
It got to the point where the National Guard
had to step in and control the amount
of people that were coming into the TNT Area.
- There was only two questions they wanted to know.
Number one, are we allowed to shoot it?
Number two, if there's more than one, can we shoot two?
- [Narrator] The Mothman incidents weren't the only
unusual events taking place in West Virginia during 1966.
On November Second, a man named Woodrow Derenberger
is accosted on Highway 77 while driving home
from Parkersburg, West Virginia.
His antagonist is the occupant
of an unidentified flying object,
which lands on the road in front of him.
The being speaks to Derenberger telepathically,
referring to himself as Indrid Cold.
Much like the Mothman stories would just two weeks later,
Indrid Cold draws national media attention
as Derenberger calmly and matter of factly
relays the details of his encounter to reporters.
Today it stands as one of the most fascinating
UFO stories on record.
Also on November Second, in nearby Gallipolis, Ohio,
a woman is outside when she sees
a bright flash in the sky above her.
She looks up in time to see a massive cylinder-shaped
object appear in a downward trajectory.
The object lands in a parking lot,
and two plain-dressed men exit the craft
and proceed to ask her a series of questions
in a bizarre dialect.
At the same time, two men traveling on Highway 77
near Parkersburg, in the same vicinity
as Woodrow Derenberger, have their own brush
with a man who sounds suspiciously like Indrid Cold.
Or as they refer to him, the Grinning Man.
Meanwhile, up and down the Ohio Valley,
scores of UFOs are appearing on a nightly basis.
(mysterious music)
- Well I discovered everything.
At that time, I was a general assignment reporter.
Whatever happened, whether it was in town
or within our coverage area,
I was Johnny on the Spot ready to go cover it.
Young and ambitious.
There was an outbreak of UFO sightings
in that whole area from Point Pleasant
up Route 35 almost all the way to Charleston.
And they would all start out by saying,
I know you think I'm crazy, but.
And they would tell me these stories
about sightings that they had on their land.
Usually, it involved some sort of machine, like a UFO.
It got so bad that we basically had
a special assignment desk for when people called in
to report the UFOs.
They would send them over to me,
and I would talk to these people about it.
- It seems like, to me,
that there were some UFO sightings
exactly at the Mothman time.
People went to the TNT Area on Friday night,
and while they were there,
several claimed to have seen UFOs in the sky
over the TNT Area.
And I believe, the night after the Mothman was seen,
Marcella Bennett and her brother, Raymond Wamsley,
and his wife, I think Cathy Wamsley,
those three went to the TNT Area, and on the way,
they saw a UFO in the sky.
(mysterious music)
- My brother and sister-in-law had decided
one night to take a ride to the TNT Area,
to my sister's house.
And then we visited for, approximately maybe
an hour and a half, and we decided that
we were just gonna journey back home.
So my brother, Raymond Wamsley,
and myself and his wife, Catherine Wamsley,
went out and my brother Raymond kept saying to me,
Marcella, look to your right,
at this light in the sky.
And I said, oh, hopeless, you know.
And I kept walking, and he said, no, you've gotta see this,
it's not a plane.
I kept walking.
And when I got to the car, I had my daughter, Tina,
which was about three years old at that time.
And I reached for the door handle on the car.
And when I reached for the door handle of the car
with Tina, I saw this figure,
and somehow, I was holding on to the door handle
And I started at the feet, and I came up
with my eyes, looking up.
And I could see, I saw no feet.
But I saw gray, a grayish cast.
And I kept going up, looking up at this creature.
And it had wings, like a bird,
with its neck stuck down and stood
in a position about like this.
At that point, I turned and tried to run
back towards the house.
And when I did, I couldn't
I got within maybe a foot from the creature.
And I fell facedown,
and I laid there on top of my daughter,
which I could hear her crying.
So by that time, I could hear my brother
in the background, hollering, Come on, Marcella,
get up, get up, come on, hurry.
So I went back with him, and then we went in the house.
And then after we got in the house, he,
it hit the door.
It came to the door and tried to get in the door,
which they had locked.
And I was just in and out.
They took me to a sofa and laid me down on the sofa.
But I just, I just couldn't,
I couldn't grasp what I saw.
I knew it was nothing from this Earth.
I knew that the creature, whatever it was,
didn't live here.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] As sightings continue in neighboring
communities, the Mothman continues to make
frequent appearances in Point Pleasant.
Most often, the creature is encountered
in the abandoned north power plant,
inside the TNT Area, as it was one night by Bob Bosworth
and a friend in November of 1966.
- [Bob] He and I decided to drive that evening,
just riding around.
There was a very bright moon out.
And we were just riding around.
And Al said, Wanna drive through TNT Area?
And I said, yeah, we might as well.
So we're riding out through there, and I remember,
you know how guys will mess around,
well, the moon was so bright
that just, I guess outta boredom, Al turned
the headlights off on the motorcycle
and dodged the chuckholes by the bright moonlight.
So we're riding out through there.
And Al said, Look at that.
And we stopped, and up on top, on the roof
of that old power plant building,
it was, I believe, a three-story building,
and up on top we seen two big,
what looked like red eyes, looking at us.
We sit there and looked at it, and I said,
Let's go out and see who it is.
He said, Yeah.
So we went out there.
Well we stopped at the,
you know, right there underneath the building.
- [Jeff] Like an entranceway.
- [Bob] Yeah, we stopped right there, and we looked up.
Well, it looked like these eyes
were looking down at us then.
So we decided to go up.
Well, the moon was so bright,
that it was shining through
these openings.
Well, we could make out
an outline of something in that dark.
Well all of a sudden, this,
I really don't know what, whatever I saw,
Al was right beside of me,
it very slowly and precisely walked towards us.
We heard it walk.
It walked right up and just stayed
on the dark side of that distinct line.
- [Jeff] Did you notice any red eyes
or anything at the time?
- [Bob] No, and I've thought about that,
and I think what it is, is because there was no light
where it was at in the dark to reflect.
And it had a taper to it like,
well, I compare it with a robin.
You know, a bird.
When their wings are folded, how they're bulged at the top
and then when you come down to it, tapered.
And it had no long neck like a bird,
you know like some of these birds they tried to say it was.
It just, as though it had a head,
a large head, sitting on its shoulders.
Then, it very slowly and precisely turned
towards the catwalks.
Could here it's footsteps in the glass right in front of us.
And then when it started walking on the catwalk,
never a hesitation, kept on walking.
Then, we heard that
sound like wings.
- [Narrator] On November 18th, one of the first
major newspaper articles about the Scarberry-Mallette
Mothman encounter is published.
Within days, more articles run in newspapers
across Ohio and West Virginia.
The Athens Messenger, the newspaper from the nearby town
of Athens, begins covering the Mothman stories
extensively thanks to a local report named Mary Hyre,
who happens to reside in Point Pleasant.
Only three days since the sighting had occurred,
Mothman hysteria is in full swing.
Paul Yoder and Benjamin Enochs,
two volunteer firemen stationed at the TNT Area
to help control traffic, have their own brush
with a large bird at 1:30 a.m. on the 18th.
The two men see a large white shadow
that flies across their car as they're driving
near Camp Connolly Road.
Though they immediately stop the car and search
for the bird, they find no trace of it.
Both men insist that what they see is nothing more
than a large bird, most likely an owl.
As more sightings occur, the mystique surrounding
the TNT area grows, and so does the number
of curious explorers looking for the creature.
- We went up there several times,
my brother and my twin brother and my sister,
and a baby brother.
And once we turned off the main road,
and all the time my brothers just kept giving me
a funny look, I said, well what is it?
They said, Well, don't look,
but there's something right beside the window there.
So I turned and looked,
and that thing was right beside my window.
It was so dark, I don't know,
if it was running or if it was flying.
I didn't see any wings.
But it was keeping up with the car.
I kept hitting my brother on the leg,
telling him, hurry up, go faster, go faster.
He saw that he wasn't losing it by going faster,
and so he saw the turn that goes up into
the TNT factory building.
And I guess it come in his head at the split second,
if he turned up in there, it would keep going straight.
And we would turn up in there and lose it.
But it didn't.
He made that sharp turn, a left turn,
and it was still right there beside my window.
And we went straight up in there and come to another turn
that you had to make because you went into the loading dock.
And so he whipped around that turn,
and just like that, he stopped.
And we was trying to collect ourselves.
That thing just jumped on the hood of our car,
and just kinda squatted like,
and just watched him, and then me,
and then him, and me.
We was just setting there, we didn't know what to do.
We was afraid to move.
My sister, my two brothers,
crying, carrying on the back.
He told them, Get down on the floor and shut up.
It's just like we were frozen
for a split second, I'm sure it wasn't no more than that.
And it just jumped down off the car.
It ran a little bit to that great big,
I'd say it was five stories high
because the fourth floor, that I didn't even know of
til way years later, had like a little porch
top to it, with a tin slanted roof.
And that's where it jumped up to.
I still say jumped, because I still recall no wings.
If it did, it's blanked outta my mind.
And so he just opened up the door and stood
right behind the door, and he's picking up chunks of coal.
He was picking that up and just throwing it,
and going, Shoo, shoo.
And he threw a little bit bigger one,
and it landed just probably
four inches from his foot.
And when it did, it's like that thing said,
Okay, enough's enough, and it stood up.
And I thought, Oh, he's coming to get us,
now see what you done?
And he jumped back in the car and slammed the door
and locked it and hollered at me, Lock the doors.
Well, I never did unlock mine in the first place.
He jumps up, and just as he gets ready to go over,
instead, he just opens up the prettiest set of wings
you ever seen on anything.
I mean big wings, big enough to carry
you or me or anybody else at least six feet.
And he just
easily, he didn't flap them like I bird would real fast
to hurry up and get flying, he just spread them out
and just glided over them there
and just went on up in there and just flew away.
- [Narrator] In the five days since
the Scarberry-Mallette sighting,
reports of encounters with Mothman
spring up around Point Pleasant.
Reports during that time have one unifying theme.
The creature seems to be a massive bird.
On November 20th, a man named Howard Miller
of Nicholas County sees a large bird
about four feet tall with red, half-moon eyes
land on a bus shelter.
Later that same day, a couple driving near Ferry Branch,
55 minutes south of Point Pleasant,
also see a large bird-like creature.
They later report the incident to the Charleston Police,
adding that the creature landed
in a nearby tree after it flew by.
Also on the 20th, Brenda Jones of Point Lick,
a suburb of Charleston, only an hour from Point Pleasant,
sees a large bird dart off on foot into the woods
near her home.
The next day, a man in Charleston calls police
at 10:15 p.m. to report a bizarre sighting.
Richard West describes a batman, six feet tall,
with a wingspread of up to eight feet,
sitting on the roof of his neighbor's home.
He noted its great big red eyes.
And when asked if the creature flew, he said,
Straight up, like a helicopter.
The helicopter description appears again
when Thomas Ury, a Point Pleasant businessman,
sees a giant bird circling his car
while driving beside the Ohio River outside of town.
Mr. Ury, though aware of the bird reports,
was not out hunting for monsters when it crossed his path.
- [Thomas] Well, when I first saw it,
I thought it was a helicopter.
Couldn't hear any noise at all, but that far away.
But then, as it
rose over the trees,
and proceeded to make the big circles,
you know, how birds fly.
It started out, I would say, 500 feet in the air.
But every time it'd make a circle,
I could see it when it came in front of my car.
It would come lower and lower.
Now the last pass it made was
probably 75 feet over my car.
I had a pretty good shot at it.
And I would guess,
and it's purely a guess,
it was at least 10 feet.
Wingspan.
Yeah, I guess I was scared to a certain extent.
But then when I saw it wasn't gonna
attack me or anything, when it first started,
kept getting lower, I think it was more curious of me.
You know, a mutual curiosity.
After that, it wasn't scared.
It was
apprehensive.
I told George Johnson, the sheriff,
I asked him, I said, you're not gonna
give me a ticket, are you, for speeding?
But I was probably going 75.
When I hit that straight stretch, I was probably doing 90.
Of course, then I started slowing down
after it went back to the river.
- ]Jeff] It went back towards the river.
- Yeah, right, it came from the river,
went back towards the river.
So I don't know if it was nesting over there or what.
- [Narrator] The sightings of the Mothman increase.
So do the number of descriptions.
What first seemed to be an abnormally large bird
begins to take on another form altogether
in the eyes of some witnesses.
Some feel the creature is trying to communicate,
but perhaps is unaware of how to do so.
Mothman witness Linda Scarberry would later claim
to see the creature over 18 times
following her initial sighting, including an incident
wherein she saw the being lurking
outside her home one night.
As she stared at it through a window,
she sensed a sadness and a vague curiosity
emanating from the creature.
The odd nature of some reports led to speculation
that the creature may not have been of this Earth.
- There were various reports of
the Mothman sightings of being of a supernatural nature.
Almost a mental type vision
of whatever this thing was.
- I lived up on Jefferson Avenue.
Of course, my wife and I,
and we were about 19 years old I think at the time.
We went to bed that night.
The bed, the way the bed was, there was a window on my left,
and sometime in the night,
and it seems to me like it was about three o'clock.
And I was facing that window, and I looked out the window
and looked out at the street light,
and there was a crossing.
I remember distinctly there was a car
come across the crossing.
And I turned my head
to the right.
I mean, I can still feel that really.
Turned my head to the right,
and there this,
to me it was the devil,
Mothman, standing there by my bed.
And I just sorta froze up.
And I tried to talk.
And I couldn't, it was this awful horrible feeling.
And I thought, Lord, what can I do?
This thing is here, this evil presence.
And it was standing there and it had a body,
about six feet tall, sort of a dirty lunar color.
I didn't see any buttons or zippers or anything like that,
but it was a gray form,
like a solid robe, without seams, down the arm,
then the hands were down, or whatever those were
on the other end, they kinda disappeared by the bedside.
I didn't see that.
And red eyes.
And kinda back end like.
But it was this
presence.
I can feel that.
It was just evil.
100% evil.
So my being a churchgoer and a Christian,
knowing what the Bible says about the blood of Christ,
I began to plead to the blood in my mind,
and little by little, that thing just
disappeared, like putting I guess salt on a slug.
I mean, it just
kinda evaporated.
And I've never never never forgotten it.
And I never will.
I'm 74 years old, and that was 50 years ago.
But it's just as plain in my head today as it was then.
- You had the professor from West Virginia University
came to town and tried to calm
the masses, you know, he said that what people
were actually seeing was nothing more
than just a large bird or a sand hill crane.
- There was a biologist from WVU.
They contacted him by phone and asked him
what his opinions were.
And he felt, well, it's a big bird, so
the sand hill crane migrates through this area.
He thought it landed in the TNT Area.
A lotta people suspected the birds migrating
through that area had,
drank water or something
and picked up some kind of chemicals
left over from the TNT Area, and it caused them
to do a genetic mutation and you've got some
weird creature that developed because of it.
There was that talk.
- This was not a mutation.
This was something that was perfectly formed,
the way it was supposed to be,
just like any other thing is.
- [Narrator] On November 26th, sightings of the creature
continue to come in as several people in Hocking, Ohio,
50 miles north of Point Pleasant,
report seeing four large birds
sitting in bare trees for two hours.
The birds are described as four to five feet tall
with a 10-foot wingspan.
In St. Albans, West Virginia,
Miss Ruth Foster is startled to find the Mothman
standing in her front yard that evening.
She tells a reporter that the creature
is over six feet tall with big red eyes.
The next day, Sheila Kane and her sister
see a seven-foot-tall gray and white figure
with big red eyes near Miss Foster's home in St. Albans.
In nearby Charleston, a woman describes seeing
the same red eyes peering at her through a window.
For the most part, many of the early sightings
are nocturnal in nature.
But Connie Carpenter, like Thomas Ury,
encounters the creature in broad daylight
on Sunday, November 27th.
At 10:30 a.m., Connie, a New Haven resident,
is driving home from church when she sees
what she first takes to be a man standing near
a deserted golf course.
As she draws closer to the figure,
her car slows until suddenly, large wings unfold
from the back of the creature.
Connie estimates the wingspan was at least 10 feet wide.
The thing then flies straight up into the air,
and swoops toward her car as if to attack.
Connie is transfixed and horrified by the being's
large red eyes, saying, Once they were fixed on me,
I couldn't take my own eyes off them.
To further add to the bizarre situation,
Connie contracts klieg conjunctivitis,
a condition that causes severe redness,
itching and watering of the eyes.
Connie never speaks publicly about her experience,
instead prefers to forget it ever happened.
Perhaps it's Connie's own encounter with the Mothman
which helps to motivate her aunt, a local reporter
named Mary Hyre, to search for answers
in the ongoing series of events.
Mary does as much to catalog the high strangeness
unfolding in and around Point Pleasant
during that time as anyone.
She even went so far as to look for mysterious creatures
and strange lights in the sky for herself.
- And Mary Hyre was a reporter
for the Athens Messenger, Athens, Ohio.
She had an office here on Main Street
here in Point Pleasant.
- She was the typical small town newspaper person.
She wasn't gonna let this get away from her.
And I admire her for what she did.
- Mary Hyre is the first person who really wrote
an article about the sightings in the local newspaper,
the Point Pleasant Register.
- We really didn't send anybody up there.
It's interesting because the people who saw the Mothman
didn't call the Herald Dispatch in Huntington.
I think it's because Mary was so tied into it.
They would talk to Mary, but they weren't talking to us.
I wish we had sent somebody up there prior to this.
But we had some editors who thought,
well, this is just a bunch of malarkey.
- John Keel was a author from New York City,
who caught wind of the Mothman activity and the sightings
and things, and he came to Point Pleasant
right after those first initial sightings.
He joined forces with a local newspaper reporter
named Mary Hyre.
She and John Keel would work together back and forth.
- There was a certain part of the community
that he visited all the time.
He visited some of the Mothman witnesses
and some people like that.
He was in here a lot.
- [John] Point Pleasant, West Virginia,
it's about 50 miles from where Woodrow Derenberger
had his contact.
They said it's 2,500 acres.
There are hundreds of these igloos there.
There are four families living within this area,
so it's very thinly populated.
If the Mothman wanted to live there,
not very many people would bother him.
And I have some more leads now.
As I thought it would, a pattern is building up now.
And we may be able to get to the bottom
of this one particular case.
And find out whether Mothman is mechanical,
or an angel or what he is.
- It got so bad that a friend of mine,
who is a photographer at the newspaper, and I
decided a couple of nights, because we were so sure
that what they were seeing was real,
we decided to go up there and see for ourselves.
Unfortunately, the UFOs and the creatures
didn't appear for us.
But we tried.
- [Narrator] With December dawning, area residents
fully expected the Mothman and UFO sightings to die down.
But instead, there is a marked increase.
As the number of occurrences escalate,
so too does their bizarre nature.
On December Fourth, five pilots at the Gallipolis airport
are killing time between flights when they see
a small plane swerving erratically through the sky
over the landing strip.
As it passes directly overhead, they realize that what
they are looking at isn't a plane at all.
But rather a massive bird.
They describe the creature as being enormous
and having a sizable neck and build.
As the sightings continue, so does John Keel's
investigation into the phenomenon.
On December Seventh, Keel and Mary Hyre journey
to the TNT Area with a group of five original witnesses,
including Linda and Roger Scarberry,
Mary and Steve Mallette and Connie Carpenter.
Keel, Carpenter and her boyfriend, Keith,
wander into the abandoned power plant and proceed
to walk its length for some time.
Suddenly, Connie lets out a scream,
proclaiming that she's seen the monster
as she dissolves into hysterics.
For Keel, this would be the beginning of a series
of unusual encounters and experiences in Point Pleasant,
which would later be documented
in his bestselling book, The Mothman Prophecies.
However, Keel isn't the only person
seriously investigating the case.
A science fiction writer by the name of Gray Barker
documents a number of events from this time period,
and later released them in a semi-fictional
novel titled The Silver Bridge.
Of course, Point Pleasant's own Mary Hyre
continues her own dealings with the story.
Her news column, Where the Waters Mingle,
becomes the most consistent place to find
updated information about the high strangeness.
Throughout much of December 1966,
activity is rampant around Point Pleasant,
much of it going unreported.
In the streets and in diners and barbershops,
residents all have a story of their own.
Usually whispered in hushed tones,
they tell of voices in the sky,
strange lights in the forest, flying creatures,
and mysterious dark-suited individuals asking questions.
John Keel himself begins to feel that he is
at the center of something even he can't make sense of.
- John Keel had a lot of weird things happen to him
after he came to Point Pleasant
to investigate the Mothman sightings.
His phone calls were monitored.
He always felt that somebody was following him.
It coulda been some of the men in black.
His mail would be intercepted from time to time.
- [Narrator] 48 miles south of Point Pleasant,
an appliance story owner named Tad Jones
is head to work when he sees a UFO land
on Interstate 64 at around nine a.m.
The next morning, he finds a note under his door,
reading, We know what you have seen,
and we know that you have talked.
You'd better keep your mouth shut.
Around town, more and more people encounter strange men
who claim to work for undisclosed branches
of the government.
The majority of these men are dressed in black suits
and fedora hats and are driving in black sedans.
Their behavior is extremely unusual
and at times described as unearthly.
Mary Hyre herself receives a visit from the men in black
one night in January 1967, while working
at her Point Pleasant office.
- As soon as those witnesses started reporting
their stories to the newspaper reporters, the TV stations,
then these men in black, as some called them,
started showing up on people's doorsteps,
places of business, asking these witnesses,
why they were talking about this,
that they really had no reason to be causing panic.
Some of those witnesses were pretty spooked
by the sudden appearance of these strange people.
They didn't know who they were.
They didn't know if they were military.
They didn't know if they were government agents or whatever.
- [Witness] This guy, he was in plainclothes,
and he said, I want you to stand out here
and point down there where this thing was at.
My wife told him, Go to Hell.
I'm not gonna stand here some like dumb hillbilly
and point to an empty field.
Just get outta here.
We run them off.
But it was a spooky thing.
- You had several witnesses who claimed that
these men in black were actually coming to their house.
One lady in particular went out to get the mail one day,
and a black sedan pulled up.
A man got out and tried to pull her into the car,
actually ripped her sleeve off of her blouse.
- [Narrator] On March Fifth, Miss Alice Bradshaw
reports seeing a shiny, saucer-shaped UFO
while traveling on Beyond Street.
Across town, Dolly Grady confirms her own sighting
of the same craft to Mary Hyre the next day.
On March 20th, near Marietta Manufacturing Plant,
more UFOs are seen, and throughout much of 1967,
flying saucers became all the rage in the area.
Sightings are in the hundreds as people flock
to the TNT Area on clear evenings
to watch for strange lights in the sky.
On May 19th, two women driving along Route 62
near the TNT Area, observe a dark form with two,
brilliant red lights hovering in the sky above them.
Though it's airborne, it appears to be some sort of man.
Suddenly, a larger red light appears and floats
toward the red-eyed man until the two seem to merge.
The two women rush into town and report the incident.
A few hours later, many others in Point Pleasant
report seeing a flaming UFO land in a field
near the junior high school.
During this time, the Mothman sightings begin to taper off.
From April through November 1967, few reports are noted,
and even fewer recorded.
On November Second, Miss Ralph Thomas sees
the familiar red eyes of the Mothma behind her home
near the TNT Area.
Then, on November 16th, one year and one day
after the Scarberry-Mallette sighting,
the creature appears again when two hunters
encounter it moving on foot through
the McClintic Wildlife Area.
In the November 16th, 1967, edition of her column,
Mary Hyre reports sightings of the creature
are at the forefront again.
Most commonly, it's seen buzzing cars on county roads.
In late November 1967, an elderly businessman
in downtown Point Pleasant sees what he describes
as a flaming-eyed gargoyle standing on his front lawn.
The two stare at each other for a brief second
before the creature flies into the sky
without so much as one flap of a wing.
It is now December 1967.
The pattern has formed.
The stage is set.
- It did build in a crescendo.
There were more and more people looking for it.
- In hindsight, I think there was a pattern
of escalation, and I have thought about this many times.
I wish we had covered the Mothman
prior to the collapse of the bridge.
But we didn't.
(mysterious music)
- December 15th, 1967,
is a day that everybody who lives here
in Point Pleasant will remember if they were alive
at that time.
That is the day that the 40-year-old
Silver Bridge, which spanned from Point Pleasant
over to Kanauga, Ohio, and Gallopolis,
collapsed at about five o'clock in the evening.
- The light was out in town
that monitored the traffic on the bridge.
It was very busy.
A lotta semis.
Semis don't come to our town at all now.
We just built the bridge around it.
But there were a lotta semis on the bridge.
Bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Traffic stopped on the bridge, and it collapsed.
- This was on a Friday.
It was payday.
It was 10 days before Christmas Day.
Lotta people out and about Christmas shopping,
Christmas parties and things like that.
- That cable broke, and the bridge swung.
It dumped half the cars into the river.
It swung back the other way, broke,
dumped the other half in the river.
And then it fell on them.
And the river, it was right before Christmas.
So hypothermia immediately, but the people in the cars,
I'm sure in the middle of a conversation,
they're in the river and boom, the bridge just falls.
It's over.
And in seconds.
- A woman picked me up in front of the house
and took me to Oak Grove Church for this play practice.
And we got there at the church,
about a little after five.
And a car pulled in, and someone said,
they'd just heard on the car radio
that the Silver Bridge had collapsed in Point Pleasant.
- [Denny] Kinda give you an idea,
I was in the third grade at the time.
Everyone here remembers what was going on,
you could hear the boom.
My mother was on Main Street when the bridge fell.
She says there were cars and Christmas gifts
floating in the river.
It happened quickly, very very quickly.
- I arrived back at my house
at about 5:30.
My dad had just arrived.
We drove down here and parked behind G.C. Murphy's,
on that parking lot, because they were closed.
And we got out and walked through the Fourth Street Bridge
and up there to where the bridge crossed the flood wall.
The bridge was clear gone, except for the ramp.
It was down the river,
and there were search boats out searching.
Looking for bodies.
So we stayed there til late at night.
- One lady in particular, who was on the ramp
here on the Point Pleasant side,
she was actually pregnant with twins.
As she approached that ramp,
the bridge just basically fell right in front of her.
Her car almost teetered right on the edge
of that, that ramp.
And I guess a policeman pulled her out of the car.
She went into shock.
- I got up there and saw very few people on the Ohio side.
Most of the people who were in shock
were hanging around the West Virginia side that night.
But I got up that night and from the Ohio side
what I saw were boats coming in.
It was interesting because they were
towboats coming in to see if they could do anything,
pick up any debris
or bodies or whatever.
So I reported that night from the Ohio side,
and it was very quiet, almost spooky,
because there was nothing on the Ohio side.
- Lost a girl in my class.
Went down with her, her body was never recovered.
Our mayor, his parents, lost his parents.
A lotta prominent people went down on that bridge
from both towns, and then a lotta people
who were in the ultimate wrong place at the wrong time.
(downbeat music)
It was numbing.
Plus, you were watching them
drag the bridge out of the river.
And they were piling it up right here on the other side.
And every day they were dragging the river for bodies.
Some of the bodies they could get, some they couldn't.
People were still trying to figure out,
who was on the bridge, who wasn't.
- Yeah that ramp when you would drive through town,
you would just see the ramp just a dead break,
right off the edge there.
And that was a real somber reminder for people here,
as they drove for years after that,
that ramp was there, so that was a bad reminder for people.
- Other than that, but that's people my age.
The kids now don't think anything about it.
They don't know anything about it.
In fact, the Silver Bridge is part of the Mothman legend,
to them, not a disaster that we went through.
- People are definitely still affected by it.
Definitely, I don't think it'll ever be forgotten.
I hope that it's not ever forgotten.
I mean, the stories are passed down.
It's a part of this community.
It's a part of who everyone is.
I hope that it's never forgotten.
That would be very sad if it was forgotten.
(somber music)
- I don't remember anybody, when I went up there that night
saying, as I have seen
in subsequent years,
well, we saw the Mothman perched on the bridge that night
before it collapsed, I never heard that.
- It was really never connected to the bridge
in terms of we've heard people say
it was around the bridge or whatever.
I'll tell you what happened at the time,
no one wanted to hear about the Mothman anymore.
And it died completely.
Completely.
- It put a real
calming effect on the Mothman and the men in black
and the UFO stuff.
Because everybody's attention went from that
to the bridge disaster.
- [Narrator] In the days following the bridge collapse,
residents along the Ohio River continued to note
the appearance of strange lights in the sky.
However, the Mothman itself is gone.
John Keel and Mary Hyre eventually part ways
for what would be the last time,
leaving Mary as the only continuing source of information
regarding unusual events in the region.
Back in New York, Keel begins work on his book,
The Mothman Prophecies.
On February 15th, 1970, Mary Hyre passes away
from an illness that left her bedridden
in a hospital for nearly a month.
Keel receives word of Hyre's passing
in a telegram from Gray Barker.
Hyre's column, Where the Waters Mingle,
was a beloved part of the community for over two decades,
and her passing is felt far and wide throughout the area.
Her death also signals the end of consistent reporting
on the strange and unusual in the area.
Five years after Mary's death,
Keel releases The Mothman Prophecies.
The book becomes a bestseller, and is widely acclaimed
for its unavoidably unnerving recounting
of not just the creature sightings,
but the multiple bizarre phenomena
occurring in and around the country during that time.
The book will later be adapted as major motion picture
by the same name, released in 2002.
Keel himself felt he was never able
to escape the lore of the story.
He continued his involvement in paranormal research
until the time of his death
on July Third, 2009.
- I admired him a great deal too.
I think he did an excellent job of making the connections.
I'm glad he did.
- And of course, you know, he's really the one
responsible for like turning us into a worldwide legend.
- Even though he'd be in New York, they would call him
and say, Hey, we've seen it again,
you need to come back.
And sadly, he never had a chance to really see it.
- [Narrator] Occasional sightings of the Mothman
continue even to this day.
From the back roads around Point Pleasant
to the creature's old stomping grounds
within the McClintic Wildlife Management Area,
tales of encounters are still told.
In other parts of the country and even the world,
the Mothman has been frequently associated with disasters,
acting as much as a harbinger of doom
as an unexplainable mystery.
Point Pleasant itself has embraced the mysterious creature
as its own.
In 2002, local residents Jeff Wamsley and Carolin Harris
created the first-ever Mothman Festival,
celebrating this particular chapter
in the Mountain State's history.
In 2005, Wamsley opened the world's only Mothman Museum.
The town is now more associated with the creature
than any other piece of its long and storied history.
Many of the original witnesses have passed away,
and in recent years, other key players
in the Mothman story, such as Carolin Harris,
passed on as well.
Still, Point Pleasant remains a sleepy little town
on the banks of a mighty river
in the heart of the Ohio Valley.
- The town hasn't changed that much, quite frankly.
Doesn't take much to turn Point Pleasant back to 1966.
Take off the new cars, bring in the old cars.
It's virtually the same.
- For several years, they've talked about the Mothman
nonstop, and it didn't die out because
journalists and book authors and
magazine writers and people like that came to town,
and they kept it pretty well stirred up.
But I actually thought that it was dying off some,
a little bit, then all of a sudden, this movie,
The Mothman Prophecies, came out.
- I was six years old, five, six years old
when the Mothman sightings started taking place,
and the Silver Bridge disaster.
As I got older, I thought it was really cool
that it was part of the history of the town.
I started collecting stuff.
My dad had shot home movies of the bridge disaster.
And I seen what kind of interest
basically the world has shown over the whole
Mothman story, so
I just kept looking and finding stuff
and archiving and things like that.
- [Narrator] The Mothman Museum acts as a sort of window
into another time.
Through decades of research, Jeff Wamsley has amassed
an impressive collection of newspaper articles,
memorabilia and historical items
related to the 1966-67 case
and the Mothman itself.
While the rest of the world continues to view the Mothman
as a kitschy folk figure and the events surrounding
its original appearance as a rural legend,
the museum helps to solidify the reality behind the case.
In recent years, the Mothman Festival has become
the largest annual event in the state of West Virginia,
with an annual attendance of more than 12,000 people.
The Mothman, it seems,
is truly immortal.
- The Mothman Festival came about back in 2003,
as a way to capitalize a little bit
on the movie, The Mothman Prophecies.
And get some people to come downtown,
help out the merchants and the downtown stores
and things like that.
And 15 years later, it's grown to be one of the biggest
festivals in the state of West Virginia.
We draw crowds of 10,000-plus now every September.
- There are a lotta people that like the festival.
And they like the Mothman Museum.
Now there's a few, in the community
there are a few skeptics.
- I hope he doesn't come back.
I don't wanna see him.
If he wants royalties, we're in trouble (laughs).
- [Jeff] The fact that there are so many unanswered
questions when it comes to the Mothman,
if it would have been two or three people that reported
the sightings and stuff, I woulda been
more than skeptical myself.
But the fact that there was over 100 reported sightings
within that first year tells me that there
was definitely something going on.
And it's always intrigued me as
as to what these people were seeing.
Where they encountered it,
how it affected their lives.
(soft music)
(piano music)