Mike Reed

Mothman - an introduction

April 10, 2008 |  24 comments
Image Credit: During my exams, I was often given spending money by my parents to while away the hours waiting for my bus home. On one of these occasions, I was kicking round the DVD section in Woolworths when I spotted something. It was the Richard Gere film The Mothman Prophecies, one I’d read about, and given my fetish for the paranormal, eager to see. I took the film home without any real idea what the Mothman phenomena was.

I loved the film, and still do. But what really interests me is the documentary ‘Search for the Mothman’ which is one of the special features on the DVD. Watching it, I realised just how chilling the events in Point Pleasant were. The witnesses. The newspaper headlines. The stories. The tragedy of the Silver Bridge. I got curious, looking up websites, setting up discussions on forums, trying to get my hands on John Keel’s book The Mothman Prophecies. This article has been written to introduce people unaware of Mothman to his story and to, perhaps, attract other people who may know more about the phenomena and encourage them to get in contact via the forums on this website.

The Mothman Prophecies detailed the events that occurred in Point Pleasant, a town in West Virginia. Mothman was first seen by two couples – Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette – on November the 15th 1966. Driving near the West Virginia Ordinance Works, seven miles from Point Pleasant, they saw two red lights by an old generator plant. Stopping the car to take a closer look, they caught sight of a figure “shaped like a man, but bigger, maybe six and a half or seven feet tall, with big wings folded against its back,” with red eyes. Scared, they raced back to Point Pleasant, but the red eyed beast followed them until they got back to the town. They immediately went to the police who found nothing there when they returned that night.

Other reports soon followed. Marcella Bennett was walking towards her car with her daughter when a grey red eyed figure appeared behind her car, looking like it had been lying down on the ground and was just getting up. She ran back towards her friend’s bungalow where they called the police. The creature, however, had followed her and shuffled onto the porch where it started to peer through the windows at the terrified witnesses. Once again it had disappeared when the police arrived. Ruth Foster supposedly saw the frightening being standing on her lawn and Thomas Ury was driving when he saw Mothman in a field before it stretched its wings and began trailing his car. People also saw strange lights in the sky and residents received unexplained telephone calls. More sinister still, people claimed to have been confronted by men in black who threatened them not to talk about Mothman. Were these men government agents? Possible, but then why has the government denied having any reason to cover up the events in Point Pleasant?Then it happened.

The Silver Bridge, which connects Point Pleasant and Ohio, collapsed into the Ohio River on December 15th 1967 killing 46 people. It was thirteen months to the day the Scarberrys and the Mallettes first saw Mothman. The investigation found that the disaster had been caused by a single manufacturing fault. After the collapse, Mothman sightings became less common, as did reports of lights in the sky. Then people claimed to have received mysterious phone calls before the tragedy warning them not to drive over the bridge that day. There were theories that the bridge had collapsed to provide a distraction as dozens of UFOs fled Point Pleasant or that the Mothman had acted as an unread premonition.

This theory is supported by other cases of large bird like animals from around the world.

Oddly enough, these accounts occur before a major disaster. For example, employees at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant described seeing ‘a large, dark, headless man with gigantic wings and fire-red eyes’ as well as receiving menacing telephone calls and having terrifying nightmares. These sightings occurred in the days before April 26th 1986 when 30 people were killed by an explosion at Chernobyl. Countless others were killed by radiation exposure and the damage to the environment was enormous. In China, stories of a large, black creature known as the ‘Man-Dragon’ preceded the Xiaon Te Dam collapse which killed 15, 000 people as 40 billion gallons of water destroyed whole villages. Before the dam burst, the Man-Dragon was seen at the dam itself. If these cases are of the same phenomenon witnessed in Point Pleasant, maybe he is some sort of prophet of catastrophe. However, this theory does not explain the lights in the sky seen in Point Pleasant – are they a different thing completely or are the two linked?

This article is, I suspect, only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Mothman lore, so if anybody has more information on this phenomena, please feel free to get in contact via the forum on this site. Comments (24)

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