Episode 29 - The Mothman

You are driving along an empty highway. To either side, the thick trees press close. Only a small ditch separating them and their reaching branches from the road. The fog sits thick tonight, it built over the last hour or so, and had grown enough that you are going slower than you otherwise would on the mostly straight path.

You don’t expect to see much traffic. It is, after all, very late. With nothing but the road, the forest, and your music for company, you are relaxed. This drive, just like these woods, is familiar. You’ve done it many times.

But this time, something different happens. As you break free from the tree-line, you look to where the bridge is. You know it’s there, even if you can’t see it through the fog. You can see the point-lights of other cars drifting in the distance.

Then you see the red lights. At first, you think they may be brake lights off the road. But there aren’t any hills nearby that would account for their altitude. You only see them for an instant at first, but as you draw closer they appear again. Floating fifty, maybe sixty feet from the surface of the river, and off to one side of the bridge.

You slam on the brakes as the thing disappears into the fog, but you know what you saw. Connected to those strange, red eyes was a man with massive moth’s wings.

Hailing from the folklore of West Virginia comes a strange and wonderful cryptid. The Mothman became a sensation after its initial sightings and within a decade, had become a staple of West Virginian folklore and eventually was sighted as far away as Moscow.

The sightings quickly caught the public attention after they were connected to a series of disasters, with some claiming that the Mothman predicts such terrible events and attempts to warn us of the impending doom and others believing the creature causes the calamity.

The Mothman has been described in a number of different ways, but they share some qualities in common.

The Mothman is a human-like figure, with moth-like wings that are ten feet across. It is usually described with gray skin, and massive eyes that glow red like reflectors.

Many Cryptids have been reported across the world, and they often evolve as they expand beyond their initial region. But while the Mothman has been reported in Chicago and Moscow, its home is West Virginia.

In the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, there is an annual festival devoted to the creature. Its sightings have been analyzed, evaluated, and retold a dozen times over. Some turn up as evident or even admitted hoaxes, others are yet to be disproved.

The Mothman has become a fan-favorite among locals, UFO-enthusiasts, and cryptozoologists as well as a favorite target of skeptics and psychologists.

I am Andrew Eagle, and I invite you to join me as I pass Through the Veil and learn about the strange creature known as the Mothman.

You had done your best to put it out of your mind. By the next morning, you had nearly convinced yourself that it was just your tired eyes playing tricks on you in the fog. Your headlights reflecting off the fog and bridge and maybe catching on the eyes of a bird. There were plenty of large species around. It could have been an owl, or a heron.

That was what you repeated to yourself anyway, when your mind drifted back to the figure you had seen those few days ago.

You hadn’t driven that road since. You weren’t avoiding it exactly, not intentionally, but you managed to find other routes when you needed to drive somewhere. Especially at night.

A few days later, you found yourself crossing the bridge, heading through the forest, and toward the next town over. It was midday when you left, and would be well into the night before you would be returning. But there was nothing for it, you needed to cross the bridge. Traffic was always bad in the middle of the day, and so the short crossing took awhile. Eventually though, you had crossed the bridge, gotten onto the old, two-way highway and were on your way. That’s when you saw it again.

This time in broad daylight, skimming at a high speed over the tops of the trees.

A man with moth-wings, ten-feet across, and those same large, red eyes.

In an instant it had disappeared from sight, but there was no fog to blame it on, no possibility that it was a bird distorted by night-time. That was a creature unlike any you knew.

According to most versions of the Mothman’s story, the first reported sighting came in November 1966. Five grave-diggers were out at a cemetery near Clendenin in West Virginia when they saw a large figure gliding low over the tops of the trees.

They described it as man-like with wings.

Within days, another sighting was reported. This time by two young couples driving outside of town.

Roger and Linda Scarberry were driving with Steve and Mary Mallette, all of them natives to Point Pleasant, when they saw a creature that so frightened them they reported it to police.

They described it as a large gray creature with glowing red eyes and ten-foot wings. The Scarberrys and Mallettes claimed the creature started following their car as they passed into an area known as the TNT area, which used to house a munitions plant.

Over the course of the following several days, more reports came in. Two firemen reported seeing a large bird with strange, red eyes. A local contractor reported that he had seen the creature and when he shined a flashlight at it, its eyes glowed a bright, vivid red.

The contractor went on to blame the disappearance of his dog on the creature.

A month later, the Silver Bridge nearby collapsed killing 46 people. Shortly thereafter the stories connected the mothman to the collapse. Claiming that either the creature was warning people, or perhaps caused it.

You were shaken. How could you not be? The thing you had seen was something different. Totally new. Strange, even in the brief glimpse you’d caught.

The thing had been moving so fast, there was no use trying to find it. So when you pulled over, it was just to steady yourself. You sat in your car and caught your breath. When you had calmed down, you drove onward, carrying on with your plans. What else could you do?

On your way back home that night, you drive through the same woods on edge. Constantly scanning the tree-line. You aren’t sure if you hope to see the creature again, or if you fear it.

When you break the tree-line and see the flashing lights and the emergency crews, you don’t immediately realize what’s happened.

You slow, and eventually stop, stunned. The bridge is gone, collapsed. Fallen into the waters below. It wouldn’t be until later, when others had come forward with sightings as well, that people would start trying to connect the sightings to the collapse. Saying that somehow the strange creature was to blame, or perhaps the opposite, it had been trying to prevent the tragedy… Who’s to say?

You would never see the creature again. But you would never forget it.

There have been a number of explanations offered as to what the Mothman may be, assuming of course the skeptics’ stance that it is not a real creature in and of itself.

Many claim it was a particularly tall heron or crane. One biologist, Dr. Robert L. Smith, has said the descriptions match a sandhill crane. It stands nearly as tall as a person, with a seven-foot wingspane and red rings around its eyes. Although it is not native to the area, Smith claims that it is not unheard of for such a bird to wander from its migration route.

Others claim that the Mothman sightings can be attributed to large barred owls, with some of the stranger dimensions explained perhaps by such a bird carrying prey.

Despite the claims of skeptics, mothman continued to be reported, albeit at a slower rate, even until today.

In 1975 a book was published about the Mothman entitled The Mothman Prophecies. In 2002, a movie was made loosely based on that book.

In 1999, the creature was claimed to be seen in Moscow preceding the 1999 Russian apartment bombings.

And in 2017, 55 sightings of the creature were reported in Chicago.

Some claim the creature’s origin is supernatural, that it is a manifestation of some kind. Others believe it is an extra-terrestrial. Still more simply believe it is an unknown species of animal.

Whether you believe the Mothman is an alien, an animal, or a supernatural force; whether you believe the Mothman is real at all, it cannot be argued that it has not captured the imagination of the people of West Virginia and beyond.

It has so engrossed itself in the region’s pop-culture that it has become a tourist attraction in the form of Point Pleasant’s annual Mothman festival. In 2003, they unveiled a massive metal statue of the creature, and in 2005 they opened a museum dedicated to the creature.

So whether the Mothman is really out there, flying about, trying to warn us of impending disaster, or it is simply a misidentified bird that wandered farther afield than normal, its story lives on and expands.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Through the Veil. I hope you enjoyed. I encourage you to subscribe to receive new episodes weekly wherever you listen as we continue our exploration of folklore, myth, and magic.

If you are enjoying the show, and have subjects you would like to hear covered, please email me at throughtheveilpodcast@gmail.com or reach out on Twitter, you can find me @ThroughVeil.

As always, thank you, for listening.