Mothman

Mothman is described as a man sized, or larger, 7 foot tall creature with glowing red eyes and the long wings that look like a moth. It has additional eyes set in it’s humanoid chest and it possesses an unusual shriek.

On November 15, 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant were traveling late at night. Roger and Linda Scarberry, and Steve and Mary Mallette, along with their young cousin, Lonnie Button, were in the Scarberrys’ car. They were passing the West Virginia Ordnance Works, an abandoned World War II TNT factory, about seven miles north of Point Pleasant, in the 2,500 acre (10 km²) McClintic Wildlife Management Area. They noticed two red lights in the shadows by an old generator plant near the factory gate. They stopped the car, and reportedly discovered that the lights were the glowing red eyes of a large animal, “shaped like a man, but bigger, maybe six and a half or seven feet tall, with big wings folded against its back,” according to Roger Scarberry. Terrified, they drove toward Route 62, where they say the creature chased them at speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour.

Another Mothman sighting was reported on January 11, 1967. This time, Mothman was hovering over the Silver Bridge. Though he sightings were reported several more times that year, they slowed after the Silver Bridge collapsed, when 46 people died. The Silver Bridge, so named for its aluminium paint, was an eyebar chain suspension bridge that connected the cities of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, Ohio, over the Ohio River. The bridge was built in 1928, and it collapsed on December 15, 1967. Investigation of the bridge wreckage pointed to the failure of a single eye-bar in a suspension chain due to a small manufacturing flaw.

There are rumors that the Mothman appears before upcoming disasters and seems to try to warn people of them, or that the Mothman causes disasters. Mothman was never again seen in Point Pleasant after the demolition of the Silver Bridge.

mothman Urban Legend
John Lepper from New York

More information about Mothman

Photo by COLIN NEWMAN
Original Post

The night after Mothman frightened the Scarberrys in 1966, on November 16, several armed townspeople combed the area around the TNT plant for signs of Mothman. Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Wamsley, and Mrs. Marcella Bennett, with her infant daughter Teena in tow, were in a car en-route to visit their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Thomas, who lived in a bungalow among the “igloos” (concrete dome-shaped dynamite storage structures erected during WW-II) near the TNT plant. The igloos were now empty, some owned by the county, others by companies intending to use them for storage. They were heading back to their car when a figure appeared behind their parked vehicle. Mrs. Bennett said that it seemed like it had been lying down, slowly rising up from the ground, large and gray, with glowing red eyes. While Wamsley phoned the police, the creature walked onto the porch and peered in at them through the window.

On November 24, four people allegedly saw the creature flying over the TNT area. On the morning of November 25, Thomas Ury, who was driving along Route 62 just north of the TNT, claimed to have seen the creature standing in a field, and then it spread its wings and flew alongside his car as he sped toward the Point Pleasant sheriff’s office.

On November 26, Mrs. Ruth Foster of Charleston, West Virginia reportedly saw Mothman standing on her front lawn, but the creature was gone by the time her brother-in-law went out to investigate. Further, on the morning of November 27, the creature allegedly pursued a young woman near Mason, West Virginia, and was reported again in St. Albans the same night, by two children.