October 9, 2025 • 31 mins
Grab your binoculars and maybe don’t drive through any small towns alone at night, because today we’re getting a broader understanding of The Mothman: red-eyed omen? Government experiment? Or just another winged warning that we’re not alone?
Sources:
Sources:
Mothman Legacy
https://youtu.be/W0qE1xQ_Db0?s...
John Keel & The Mothman
https://youtu.be/LUKDtRVVaOI?s...
Smithsonian Center for Folklife
https://folklife.si.edu/magazi...
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/broads-next-door--5803223/support.
Sources:
Sources:
Mothman Legacy
https://youtu.be/W0qE1xQ_Db0?s...
John Keel & The Mothman
https://youtu.be/LUKDtRVVaOI?s...
Smithsonian Center for Folklife
https://folklife.si.edu/magazi...
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/broads-next-door--5803223/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Now member of our church parties are pamp thing to
pine and yep, that's what it is.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
No one as sure.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
And then when I came up moll in the carees,
I could say it was a mold that hungeboil.
Speaker 4 (00:13):
I forgodn't believe that we really saw this thing. Was
standing there with boys like a man. I've seen message
in the lines, there's a different and looked at each
other and then we took on.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
It's been almost fifty years as the first sighting of
the so called mothman. What was it just an urban
legend or is there really some truth in the bizarre
encounters with this bird like creature. The first recorded sighting
of it was on November twelfth, nineteen sixty six, when
five grave diggers working near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, a
small town with a very tight kning community, claimed to
have seen a manlike figure with huge back wings fly
down from nearby trees straight over their heads. Then, just
(00:44):
a few days later, on November fifteenth, Roger Scarberry, his wife,
and three other people ran terrified into the Mason County
Courthouse and reported that they had witnessed a seventh foot
creature with glowing red eyes and huge wings. At first,
they thought the red eyes were kr lights, but when
they realized it was in fact a creature, they sped
off very quick, with everyone in the car later reporting
that the creature followed them closely, but flew.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Off into the night sky as they approached the courthouse.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
The Deputy Minard house Said, who had been on duty
the night of the incident, said he was convinced that
people were not lying. Everyone knew everyone in the community,
and he knew that people had never been in any
trouble before. All five of them gave exactly the same
account of what they had seen, even though they were
interviewed in separate rooms, and the deputy said the terror
in their eyes was very real and that he was
convinced they were not lying and did see something that
followed them.
Speaker 5 (01:27):
Hello, neighbors, lovers, friends, and anyone who's ever locked eyes
with something impossible in the fog. I'm Danielliscreama, and this
is Broad's next door. Grab your binoculars and maybe don't
drive through any small towns alone at night, because today
we're getting a broader understanding of the mothman. Red eyed
(01:49):
omen government experiment were just another winged warning that we're
not alone.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
The incident was taken so seriously that the Deputy went
with Scarborough back to the site neither Mclinton Wilder Management
Area where the creature had first been spotted, and although
nothing was found, it wasn't long before this sighting and
the grave figger sighting got around and frightened the locals.
In fear that this creature was roaming nearby. The townspeople
took up arms and started coming the area to try
and track down and kill it, but their effort was
futile and nothing was found. Not long after, Marcella Bennett,
(02:17):
who was completely unaware of the sightings, was visiting a
friend who lived.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Close to the wildlife area.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
As she left the house to walk to a car,
she was confronted by a large, gray, humanlike creature that
had giant wings and glowing red eyes. Marcella was so terrified,
she said, she dropped her infant daughter and then fell
on top of her to protect her from whatever this
thing was.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I think that's going to come out.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
Hi, Hello, how is everyone? I hope you are doing well.
I hope you are doing better than me who decided
to do a deep dive into Poultery Ice that is
consuming my life. The Poulter Iace project is a much
bigger task than I thought it would be. I should
have known. There's three movies, there's a curse, there's murders,
there's child's death. It has it all. But that is
(03:00):
not what today's episode is about. Today's episode is about
a kind of cryptid, and that is the Mothman. This
is one I always just kind of believed. But let's
see how I feel about that after this episode, and
let's see how you feel about it too. So let's
get into it, the Mothman of Mount Pleasant, And if
(03:23):
you live anywhere near a large bridge or a military
munition stump, maybe be extra cautious today, because, after all,
this is basically the patron saint of a pending doom,
a cryptid with very bad pr a leathery winged prophet
of tragedy, and maybe, just maybe probably not the creepiest
(03:45):
thing to ever come out of West Virginia. So let's
go back to November twelfth, nineteen sixty six, point Pleasant,
small town, cold night. A group of grave diggers, like
real grave diggers, off to a cinematic start. They're working
late when they see a massive winged finger or soaring
low above the trees. They tell their friends, rumors start
(04:08):
to swirl. People are like those grave diggers, a little
nuts hut. But then a few days later, two young couples,
Roger and Linda Scarberry and Stephen Mary Mallett, are driving
near the TNT area, an old World War II munitions factory,
and that's when they see it, A tall, dark eyed figure,
glowing red eyes, ten foot wings. They say it followed
(04:29):
their car, keeping up at over one hundred mile per
hour speeds. They give a legit sheriff's support. The sheriff says,
there seems sincerely shaken, and the town officially begins to panic.
And thus the Mothman enters American folklore, as the Smithsonian
Center for Folk Life tells it in an ode to
(04:50):
hometown creature, The Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia by
Gwen Mallow. The town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia offers
its residents a landscape once claimed for France by seventeenth
century explorer, a namesake battle site that many swears the
first of the Revolutionary War, and a bi pedal human
(05:11):
mothlike creature with glowing eyes. The last of these locals treasures,
of course, is Extraordinary. Lovingly dubbed Mothman, the creature has
risen from local appearances to the national stage as a
leader in the cryptid revival of the last twenty years. Cryptids,
creatures whose existence is unsubstantiated, like Bigfoot and the Lockness Monster,
(05:33):
are found in folklore throughout the United States and the world.
The cryptid comeback not only brings exciting mysteries into the
lives of outsiders, but promotes pride of place to the
residents of towns like Point Pleasant. According to competing theories,
it was here on November fifteenth, nineteen sixty six, that
the Mothman emerged, either from the depths of Hell or
(05:54):
the upper echelons of space. Roger and Linda Scarberry and
Stephen Mary Mallet were driving together. They're on State Route
sixty two near the abandoned National Guard Armory building and
power plant, when they saw a menacing figure standing six
to seven feet tall. In the headlights, giant eyes shone
bright red. Panic set in Roger. The cars driver sped
(06:15):
away toward town, but the creature followed. According to the
eyewitness accounts, the thing rose up like a helicopter. Though
a clumsy runner as they saw the power plant, it
excelled in gliding easily keeping pace even as the car
reached one hundred miles per hour. The creature's debut ruffled
the town's feathers, making an unsure headline. The next day
(06:35):
in the Point Pleasant Registry, couple sees man like birdsides
creature something The stereotypical inclination for small town to form
an angry mob heightened. Rather than raising pitchforks and torches
for several nights, curious townspeople made hunting rifles their preferred weapon.
With this initial contact, and according to written reports, Mothman
(06:57):
would be responsible for a host of strange tightings events
in Point Pleasant and the surrounding areas, lurking out to
hide homes, chasing cars, and even stealing pet dogs. Stealing dogs.
The day before Mothman stretched its leathery wings above the
couple's car, It's possible he made a stop at Newell
Partridge's home in Salem, West Virginia. This account, chronicled in
(07:19):
Ken Keell's book The Mothman Prophecies nineteen ten seventy five,
tells of a German shepherd named bandit who bolted into
the woods after two glowing red circles. Partri says he
looked for bandit but found nothing but pop prints going
in circles and then vanishing. Oh no, I hope Christy
Nome was an import Pleasant like she's in Portland right now.
(07:40):
We'll never know if this was true or the true
birth of Mothman's story. Two glowing circles may not a
mothman make. The bandit's story would never have surfaced without
the frightening tale of the Scarbury's close encounter. Mary Hire,
a journalist with the Athens, Ohio Messenger, the local news
force for the northern neighbors of Point Pleasant, found herself
(08:01):
covering these strange sightings and encounters. Her first article, entitled Winged,
Red Eyed Thing Chase's Point Pleasant Couples across the Countryside,
appeared without delay on November sixteenth, nineteen sixty six. Good
for her girl, she knew when something was going to
go viral. She joined forces with big shot New York
paranormal journalist John Keel for his previously mentioned work The
(08:23):
Mothman Prophecies. This nonfiction record of the odd occurrences and
the subsequent two thousand and two film, which starred Richard Gear,
would launch Mothman in the West Virginia Town onto the
national stage, but by the time of the movie's premiere,
Point Pleasant itself had lost direct side of Mothman. The
creature had laid low since the deadly collapse of the
(08:43):
Silver Bridge in December nineteen sixty seven. Many saw no
connection in alleged sighting just before the collapse, while some
viewed Mothman as a sinister harbinger of doom. Since then,
Mothman seems to have kept to himself until recently. In
twenty nineteen, accounts of the flying moth creature in Chicago
stoked the paranormal creature craze, but he met as he
(09:05):
makes national news once again. An NPR inquiry was entitled
to the case of the Chicago math Man. Lovers of
the unknown and unsubstantiated to remember exactly where his roots
lie and wear a twelve foot statue of his likeness
by Bob Branch stands Point Pleasant. From the story of
the Mothman, one can learn the importance of hometown, homegrown
(09:28):
heroes of the dark Woods and the roads less traveled.
In two thousand and six, Jeff Wamsley, a Point Pleasant
native who grew up listening to the stories his father
worked at the National Guard Armory, opened the Mothman Museum
to showcase all archival material he had assembled. The collection
featured police reports and witness accounts from various sightings. Though
he was just six years old when the Mothman bewildered
(09:50):
the people of Point Pleasant the first time, Whamsley released
two books on the subject through the Mothman Press, Mothman
Facts Behind the Legend and Mothman Behind the Red Eyes.
Wamsley's museum offers Mothman history and produces an annual festival,
which grows in attendance each year. Had it not been
for the pandemic in twenty twenty, Wamsley estimates that Point
(10:11):
Pleasant would have again welcomed crowds totally over fifteen thousand,
a staggering influx for a town with fewer than five
thousand residents. Mothman finds his way onto t shirts, local cafe, cookies,
and etsy shops. I think the Mothman's story is timeless,
Wamsley says. It's never been fully solved or proven as
to what these people were seeing. People come here to
(10:32):
see for themselves and to investigate on their own, to
make up their own minds. Everyone has their own theory.
It's part of the town's history. Rosemary Hathaway, an associate
professor of English at West Virginia University, defines the revival
of cryptid Mania as a renaissance at the heart of
the comeback of the Mothman and as West Virginia cryptid
contemporaries like the sheep Squatch and the Flatwoods Monster, is
(10:56):
a bubbling sense of pride and resurgence of traditional storytelling
by and for small town residents. Historically, West Virginia's identity
had been defined by outsiders by its extraction industry. If
they do know about West Virginia, they tend to have
stereotypes Cletus, the slack jawed yokel and a miner, says Hathaway,
the daughter of two West Virginia natives. By introducing their
(11:19):
legends to outsiders, they've made an advantage, an advantageous grab
for financial gain, and invented a new way to educate
and engage tourists. Thank you Smithsonian for keeping such good
track of cryptids. But the December fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven
bridge collapse, So that killed forty six people. It's one
of the deadliest bridge disasters in American history. After that,
(11:42):
like they said, the Mothman wasn't really seen again, but
locals did start to wonder was the Mothman a warning?
There were reports of people seeing a cringed creature near
the bridge before it fell, so could the Mothman actually
be a good guy. In nineteen seventy five, journalist and
UFO researcher John Keel publishes The Mothman Prophecy, connecting the
(12:05):
sightings not just to the bridge collapse, but to UFOs,
men in black and a series of paranormal events, dreams, prophecies,
unexplained lights, and mysterious strangers. Keel claimed the town of
Point Present was under siege, not by tourists, not just
by flying creature, but by something deeper, darker, and more organized.
(12:27):
Phone calls from nowhere, time slips, people going into fugue states,
government agents showing up with blank stares and questions that
didn't make sense. And whether you believe Keel was uncovering
something real or just writing the ultimate paranoid paranormal paranoid thriller,
Something Strange did happen in Point Pleasant. This is from
(12:47):
Search for the Mothman two thousand and two with John A. Keel.
The following is based on true events Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
This fu half man, half monster arc. I guess you
call it.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
You never seen anything w I got to open every
new mum lad.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
But the very sight of this messenger filled.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
You with terror.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Those guys, that's all she'd ever say, was those eyes.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
What if it showed you a disaster was about to occur,
but no one would believe you.
Speaker 5 (13:20):
People were screaming.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
You could hear them hollering for help. It's already happened,
not just here, but all over the world, and it's
happening right now wherever this messenger appears. Tragedy follows What
went on in Point Pleasant? What did they witness? Where
will it go next?
Speaker 4 (13:36):
What if?
Speaker 1 (13:38):
And it's a big question. It's a story most of
us have never heard. Now they're making a movie about it,
called The Mouffman Prophecies. But this is no Hollywood fantasy.
The events and the people are real. You are about
to hear eyewitness accounts from the past and profound lessons
for the future. This is a search for me hidden
on the edges of accepted reality. This is the search
(13:59):
for the Muffman. Throughout history, stories have circulated of enormous
flying creatures, dark winged beings that prophesize death and destruction,
but generate such fear that eyewitnesses can't face or understand
their meaning. Author Lauren and Coleman has been researching these
creatures for over thirty years.
Speaker 6 (14:16):
Mouthman really fits right in with a long history that
we have of seeing ringed creatures, flying humanoids, big birds.
They've had many different monstrous names down through history, and
it really starts from the times of the ancient Babylonians
up until co lonth Ago.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Writer John Keel was in Point Pleasant, West Virginia when
the events there took place. His book The Mothman Prophecies
is the definitive account of those sightings.
Speaker 7 (14:41):
There's things I've always been here. The Indians in America
here called it the thunderbird, a huge bird. In the
Orient they called it the Garuda.
Speaker 6 (14:50):
You can go all the way back to eighteen eighty
when a strange flying man was seen over Coney Island,
New York, the Houston Batman.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
The nineteen fifties, Real Grand ninety in seventy six is
one case.
Speaker 6 (15:01):
Right now, you've got a wave of thunderbird sightings in Pennsylvania,
and so mothman, if you look at it in context,
is not that unusual. But what makes mothmans are interesting
and really exciting is that you have over one hundred
witnesses saying they saw it in one concentrated area in
thirteen month periods.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
It started with an incredible story that John Keel ran
across in a small town newspaper.
Speaker 7 (15:23):
I was driving around the south where they had a
lot of few post signs, and I was mathat.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
And taking broke.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
It came over the wires four.
Speaker 7 (15:31):
Young couples who have seen something in Point Pleasant Loss, Virginia.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
It was November fifteenth, nineteen sixty six, late in the evening.
Two young couples drove to a remote hangout on the
outskirts of town.
Speaker 6 (15:42):
Two couples riding around joy riding around the TNT area,
which is a munition dump from World War Two, and
all of a sudden they see these giant red eyes,
very apparent that they aren't supposed to be there, and
all of a sudden they see a form to it.
The form takes shape, they see there's huge wings for him.
Speaker 4 (16:01):
We just didn't We couldn't believe what we really saw.
And this thing was standing there but had body, just
like a man seeing muscles in his legs. Of course,
sit dif ferment and looked at each other, and then
we took off and they.
Speaker 6 (16:10):
Get scared and they want to get out of there,
and all of a sudden, they're taking off. They're going
anywhere from one hundred, one hundred and twenty miles an hour,
and they noticed that this creature is following them, and
they didn't see it through the back end of the shadow.
You know, he's going across the car once a while,
and they can't get away from it.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
We didn't really talk about it or anything, but we
saw it all the way down the road into town,
all of us.
Speaker 6 (16:31):
They couldn't get away from it until they almost got
to the edge point pleasant.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
The creature vanished as they entered town, and the couples
headed straight for the sheriff's office. He went out that
night to investigate their story, but found no sign of
the creature. We didn't do finally got home. Family friend
Doris Deuis was there to meet her. When they got home,
she got in the house she collapsed. Of course they
had to call a doctor and have him come out.
They were something. I mean, she was hysterical, That's all
(16:55):
it was to it. The following day, the sheriff held
a press conference at the county.
Speaker 5 (16:58):
Courthouse to discuss do you think this was just like
a POI for pills back in the day, Because I
could see myself doing something like that when I was
in my twenties. Not to call I mean believe women.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
But that's the sightings. The local press jumped on the
story and dubbed the mysterious Flying Preacher the Muffman, after
a character from a Batman television show. Doris remembers vividly.
Howl Linda described him.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
The head looked like a man, and it had fory
red eyes.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
Half man, half monster.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Ark I get you call it. Something unnatural was stalking
the hills of West Virginia, and John Keele decided to
go and see it for himself. But this was only
the beginning. Others would encounter it and tragedy would soon
follow at its wake. All I could see with these
two red eyes, I kept looking from the movie. I
(17:45):
couldn't stop, And then I guess it just ook. When
writer John Keel arrived in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, he
could tell something had the community on edge.
Speaker 7 (17:57):
Yeah, you could feel something was happening. And so I
lingered there and I started getting into all of this stuff.
I found many strange things going on in the homes,
and I found it.
Speaker 5 (18:09):
It's very Stephen King and like his towns in Maine.
Like a writer shows up and it's like, there's more
to this place than it seems.
Speaker 7 (18:17):
Many many people have seen things but never reported it
to anybody.
Speaker 6 (18:22):
The past few months, people have been coming up to
me and reporting that they've been saying strange things.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And I'm not talking about the town's speedfreak. I'm talking
about good, honest, church going people.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
I've known these folks my entire life, and they seem
downright embarrassed to be bringing it up.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
I mean, the churchgoers, when have they ever done anything?
Like just because they're Protestant doesn't mean they're a step
above an exorcism anywhere.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
It's hard to explain the capital of Mason County now,
Point Pleasant is a tight knit community of five thousand,
where everyone knows their neighbors, where life moves at the
simple and welcoming pace found in the rural South.
Speaker 7 (18:55):
Everybody thinks of hillbillies when they think of West Virginia.
They were not hillbillied, and they were not the kind
of people that would make these things up.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Since the eighteenth century, farmers have made a good living
from this fertile land along the banks of the Ohio
and Kanawa Rivers. Researcher Dan Dreysen visited Point Pleasant in
nineteen sixty six to investigate the strained sightings.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
People seem like ordinary people, very friendly, matter of fact, folks.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
What you see is what you get. I felt very
welcome in the town. Just north of town is a
densely overgrown wildlife preserve, much of it almost inaccessible, but
hidden beneath the thick brush is evidence of a grim history.
Part of the area had been used during World War
II as a place to covertly manufacture and storrem munitions.
Remnants of a factory still stand, along with almost one
hundred large concrete domes that were built into the ground
(19:39):
to house the high explosives. Because of its past, locals
dubbed it the TNT Area. That's where Marcella Bennett was
headed on the night of November sixteenth, nineteen sixty six.
She and her brother were bringing her three year old
daughter to visit relatives who lived in the outskirts of
the TNT area. As they pulled up near the house,
they spotted some strange lights in the sky that hovered
above the trees. Marcella's brother was miss.
Speaker 8 (20:01):
I tryed I didn't want to see any lights, and
he says, no, stop. He says, you got to look
at this. This isn't a plane. And I said, oh, sure,
you know, And I just kept on walking.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Towards the car she was carrying her daughter, when suddenly
a figure stirred nearby.
Speaker 8 (20:15):
I had to just to approach the car, and out
of the corner of my eyes, I saw this creature
which was over six foot tall with feathers. It just
looked like a giant bird, but yet a man, and
it was standing with his shoulders and then it was
next down like this. I just couldn't imagine what I
(20:35):
was seeing and panicked. And when I tried to run,
I couldn't run.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
It was stayed a shock. Marcella fell to the ground
directly on top of her little girl.
Speaker 8 (20:43):
I couldn't get off to get off of her, and
I thought, well, you know she's dead, you know I'm
killing her. But I couldn't move, you know, it was
just I was in a transfer.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Finally pulling herself together, and she picked up her child
and ran towards the house.
Speaker 8 (20:55):
And I finally did get up to my feet and
get my feet working. I realized that my knees were
all torn up, and my hands and my face had
been buried in the sand. I couldn't see, and I
thought I heard the creature fly off with these real
loud flopping wings. You know, I believed her, a real
loud sound.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
The family locked themselves inside the house. What hysteria gripped
them as the creature reappeared, shuffling onto the porch and
peering into the windows. It's the strange phenomena. As the
product of wild imaginations, sightings continued to be reported, Everett
Wedge was one of the community's most upstanding and respected citizens.
He was one of five pilots who were standing on
a local airstrip when they saw what they described as
(21:35):
an enormous, dark colored bird flying above them.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
And it was big enough that they could I'd say,
it could take the mirror you up, probably carry us away.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
That's how maybe it was.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
I never I've been around lots of my time, and
I never ever.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Saw heard that big. But I didn't see it.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
And like I say, I might not have quite twenty
twenty eyes now, but I did.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Then at seven fifteen am on November twenty fifth, a
shoe salesman named Tom Yuri was driving just north of
the TNT area.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
I noticed something out of corner of my eye from
the river.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
I am going to need these people to tell me
more about the TNT area. I feel like that should
just be a place you probably avoid.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
No right over here.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
And it came up over the trees. And when I
first saw it looked like a helicopter coming. And then
when it came up over the trees, I could see
it was a bird, a huge bird. Estimating the wingspan
I would say ten to twelve feet give or take
on eight ran up to fifteen.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
I've never seen anything that.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
Large before in a lot.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
I was scared, but I wasn't terrified. It's just strange feeling.
I mean, I've never seen anything.
Speaker 7 (22:44):
I got to hope and never do again.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
You know, It's it's just unbelievable. And a few months
later the local Red Cross bloodmobile was chased by the creature.
Speaker 7 (22:52):
And this thing over the bloodmobile. They could first they
sused it, and then they looked out the windows and
looked up and whatever it was, it was a huge thing,
and they thought that some claw like things were descending
and going to grab the bloodmobile.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
And he drove out of there.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Then there were a number of other cases that tied
it in with blood.
Speaker 7 (23:11):
What's interesting for me was in talking to female witnesses,
I would ask him about their menstrual period, and a
lot of these women who claim to have been chased
in automobiles, we're having their menstrual period at the time,
and that seemed to me to be a major clue.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
Of some sort.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Reports of missing dogs and mutilated kevin only served to
heighten fears.
Speaker 7 (23:31):
Usually the animal has been drained of blood. But there's
another clue to these animal mutilations. But very often the
anus of the cow is removed, and we know that
radioactivity settles in the anus, and whoever's doing it is
checking the radioactivity influencing these animals.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Obviously, something was happening here, something unexplainable and terrible, but
no one at the time had the foresight to understand
exactly how horrific it would eventually turn out to be.
Dozens of innocent people would die before the truth was known.
How many people have seen it.
Speaker 8 (24:08):
Wasn't to be something terrible is going to happen.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
And quint go back happens. Do you mean anythink cost disasters?
Why would they need to? I didn't. I think I
think they're trying to warn me.
Speaker 5 (24:19):
Maybe their angels, their motivations humans.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
After the collapse of the Silver Bridge, the Muffman vanished
from point Pleasant. No more sightings were reported, no UFOs,
no strange man dressed in black. Their sudden disappearance lent
credence to the notion that it had all been somehow
connected to the bridge disaster.
Speaker 7 (24:40):
And it was almost continuous that these things were being
seen and got it just stopped.
Speaker 8 (24:44):
For you know, we tried to figure out what why
you all this? But there's no nothing explained that we
can explain.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
First of flying saucers, then the math man, and here
the bridge fell.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
I mean it was it was scary.
Speaker 7 (25:00):
Genobi in a new camp I'm dat Dallas in nineteen
sixty nine, just before the artyca they saw it.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Some tried to come up with scientific explanations for the mothman.
Skeptics claimed that it was a mass hallucination that had
been cleared up by the shock of the bridge tragedy.
Speaker 5 (25:14):
Also the barn owl theory, which is the camp I'm in.
It's either the government and the TNT plant or a
barn owl.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Others blamed it on a curse placed in the town
by a Shawnee chieftain over two hundred years before. I
like that, and a local ornithologists claim that it had
really been just a big bird all along a sand
hill crane, and this species superficially matches descriptions of the preacher,
but eyewitnesses disagree. Wrong color to your scamming.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
I've seen pictures of sandyal Crane's on TV, and in
my opinion, Professor Smith and West.
Speaker 5 (25:44):
Virginian, I've seen pictures of lots of birds on TV, too,
but when you see birds in person, they can be
really terrifying.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
First, he was one hundred percent wrong.
Speaker 7 (25:54):
Various college professors tried to say that it was a
historic or something done like that, and some people said
it was a giant owl.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
I've seen large jobs.
Speaker 7 (26:05):
But I've never seen an owl that as big as
a man.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
It was also later revealed that the TNT.
Speaker 5 (26:10):
Area Have you Ever Seen an Owl? Stand Up where many.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Of the sightings took place, had been horribly polluted. Many
of the ingredients that had gone into making the munitions
had been dumped and left to seep into the local ponds.
In the nineteen seventies, scientists declared the area an environmental disaster.
It is still one of the top EPA Super Fun
clean Up sights. So some wondered if perhaps the creature
was some sort of mutant bird and abomination caused by
the horrible effects of toxic waste. But that didn't explain
(26:37):
the strange lights in the sky, the abject terror felt
by eyewitnesses weeks and even years after their encounter. Even today,
you know what you saw, you know you saw it?
Speaker 4 (26:46):
Of what was it?
Speaker 8 (26:47):
Where did you come from? These are questions you asked yourself, Off,
is there something after that?
Speaker 1 (26:52):
You know, stalking?
Speaker 8 (26:53):
Yes, I mean you can't deny what you saw. It's
just a very.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Hardly explain, you know, very hard. I mean, that's something strange.
They're here one minute, go on the next.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
Why did they come to here the first place?
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Too many page squad. My favorite was for it not
to be something, and it has been seen again. Sightings
have been reported around the world since then, always just
before a major disaster.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
Some people even say now they saw it before nine
to eleven, which I had never heard before. But I
am not a large owl, so it is hard to
say that documentary came out right before the Mothman prophecy
film starring Richard gear in two thousand and two, which
dropped like a moody ambient brick onto our collective subconscious.
(27:45):
It's dark, slow, brooding, and weirdly effective. It doesn't try
to explain Mothman as much. It more lets you sit
with the fear, just like the creature itself. And it's
ongoing point pleasant now as an annual Mothman festival, a
Mothman statue, and a growing base of cryptid fans, TikTok
(28:06):
truthers and paranormal podcasters. But what is the Mothman? Is
it a harbinger of doom? The theory we heard this
theory shows up, The theory that it shows up before tragedies,
the Silver Bridge collapse, Chernobyl nine to eleven, a government
experiment gone wrong. Hence the TNT factory, the military base,
(28:28):
all the weird energy, an alien since you also have
multiple UFO sightings in the area around the same time,
a tulpa that's a thought form, basically something we believed
into existence, or just a very large misidentified bird. I
just love the bird theory. There's no satisfying answer, which
(28:50):
is exactly what makes it so scary. So maybe the
mothman wasn't there to hurt us. Maybe he was just
trying to tell us something. Maybe monster aren't always the
ones we we should fear. Maybe they're messengers, not destroyers.
Or maybe, as with all good folklore, we're just looking
into the darkness and projecting whatever we're most afraid of,
(29:11):
and sometimes what we're afraid of has wings. That's it
for today's flight into the paranormal, my winged weirdos. If
you've ever seen any encryptid, have any cryptid stories, send
them in along with your scary spooky stories. I'm off
to research our much more disturbing Deep Dive episodes and
(29:35):
I we'll be back with more for you tomorrow. Thank
you so much for listening to another one of our
thirty one days of thirty one spooky episodes. For October,
we have a BTK episode coming up, and the Poltergeist series,
which started as one episode until my script became ten
(29:56):
thousand pages and my research went into the depths of Hell.
I guess send me your scary stories for our end
of the month roundup. I have some guest episodes coming up.
What else is coming up? Just everything traumatizing and horrible
researching the BTK stuff. I'm reading his daughter's book right
(30:18):
now that she wrote and oh my gosh, she has
a Netflix documentary coming out tomorrow Friday the tenth, so
might release it to coincide with that. But the BTK
stuff is so disturbing. All the serial killer stuff I've
been doing is so disturbing. Also on the list for
(30:38):
serial killers, we have the Zodiac, we have Richard Ramirez,
Ted Bundy Dahmer. I feel like I'm missing somebody. We
already did John Wayne Gacy, we did the Manson family,
is part of Rosemary's Baby. Oh, Richard Chase, the Vampire
of Sacramento. So lots of Psycho to get through in
(31:00):
the next twenty two days. Also some more cursed films,
ghost photography, some demon houses, babysitters and those kind of stories.
If you have any supernatural or creepy babysitter stories, send
me those. I've been reading tons on Reddit, and yes,
I love you very much. I'll talk to you very soon. Goodbye,
Now member of our church parties are pamp thing to
pine and yep, that's what it is.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
No one as sure.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
And then when I came up moll in the carees,
I could say it was a mold that hungeboil.
Speaker 4 (00:13):
I forgodn't believe that we really saw this thing. Was
standing there with boys like a man. I've seen message
in the lines, there's a different and looked at each
other and then we took on.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
It's been almost fifty years as the first sighting of
the so called mothman. What was it just an urban
legend or is there really some truth in the bizarre
encounters with this bird like creature. The first recorded sighting
of it was on November twelfth, nineteen sixty six, when
five grave diggers working near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, a
small town with a very tight kning community, claimed to
have seen a manlike figure with huge back wings fly
down from nearby trees straight over their heads. Then, just
(00:44):
a few days later, on November fifteenth, Roger Scarberry, his wife,
and three other people ran terrified into the Mason County
Courthouse and reported that they had witnessed a seventh foot
creature with glowing red eyes and huge wings. At first,
they thought the red eyes were kr lights, but when
they realized it was in fact a creature, they sped
off very quick, with everyone in the car later reporting
that the creature followed them closely, but flew.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Off into the night sky as they approached the courthouse.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
The Deputy Minard house Said, who had been on duty
the night of the incident, said he was convinced that
people were not lying. Everyone knew everyone in the community,
and he knew that people had never been in any
trouble before. All five of them gave exactly the same
account of what they had seen, even though they were
interviewed in separate rooms, and the deputy said the terror
in their eyes was very real and that he was
convinced they were not lying and did see something that
followed them.
Speaker 5 (01:27):
Hello, neighbors, lovers, friends, and anyone who's ever locked eyes
with something impossible in the fog. I'm Danielliscreama, and this
is Broad's next door. Grab your binoculars and maybe don't
drive through any small towns alone at night, because today
we're getting a broader understanding of the mothman. Red eyed
(01:49):
omen government experiment were just another winged warning that we're
not alone.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
The incident was taken so seriously that the Deputy went
with Scarborough back to the site neither Mclinton Wilder Management
Area where the creature had first been spotted, and although
nothing was found, it wasn't long before this sighting and
the grave figger sighting got around and frightened the locals.
In fear that this creature was roaming nearby. The townspeople
took up arms and started coming the area to try
and track down and kill it, but their effort was
futile and nothing was found. Not long after, Marcella Bennett,
(02:17):
who was completely unaware of the sightings, was visiting a
friend who lived.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Close to the wildlife area.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
As she left the house to walk to a car,
she was confronted by a large, gray, humanlike creature that
had giant wings and glowing red eyes. Marcella was so terrified,
she said, she dropped her infant daughter and then fell
on top of her to protect her from whatever this
thing was.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I think that's going to come out.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
Hi, Hello, how is everyone? I hope you are doing well.
I hope you are doing better than me who decided
to do a deep dive into Poultery Ice that is
consuming my life. The Poulter Iace project is a much
bigger task than I thought it would be. I should
have known. There's three movies, there's a curse, there's murders,
there's child's death. It has it all. But that is
(03:00):
not what today's episode is about. Today's episode is about
a kind of cryptid, and that is the Mothman. This
is one I always just kind of believed. But let's
see how I feel about that after this episode, and
let's see how you feel about it too. So let's
get into it, the Mothman of Mount Pleasant, And if
(03:23):
you live anywhere near a large bridge or a military
munition stump, maybe be extra cautious today, because, after all,
this is basically the patron saint of a pending doom,
a cryptid with very bad pr a leathery winged prophet
of tragedy, and maybe, just maybe probably not the creepiest
(03:45):
thing to ever come out of West Virginia. So let's
go back to November twelfth, nineteen sixty six, point Pleasant,
small town, cold night. A group of grave diggers, like
real grave diggers, off to a cinematic start. They're working
late when they see a massive winged finger or soaring
low above the trees. They tell their friends, rumors start
(04:08):
to swirl. People are like those grave diggers, a little
nuts hut. But then a few days later, two young couples,
Roger and Linda Scarberry and Stephen Mary Mallett, are driving
near the TNT area, an old World War II munitions factory,
and that's when they see it, A tall, dark eyed figure,
glowing red eyes, ten foot wings. They say it followed
(04:29):
their car, keeping up at over one hundred mile per
hour speeds. They give a legit sheriff's support. The sheriff says,
there seems sincerely shaken, and the town officially begins to panic.
And thus the Mothman enters American folklore, as the Smithsonian
Center for Folk Life tells it in an ode to
(04:50):
hometown creature, The Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia by
Gwen Mallow. The town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia offers
its residents a landscape once claimed for France by seventeenth
century explorer, a namesake battle site that many swears the
first of the Revolutionary War, and a bi pedal human
(05:11):
mothlike creature with glowing eyes. The last of these locals treasures,
of course, is Extraordinary. Lovingly dubbed Mothman, the creature has
risen from local appearances to the national stage as a
leader in the cryptid revival of the last twenty years. Cryptids,
creatures whose existence is unsubstantiated, like Bigfoot and the Lockness Monster,
(05:33):
are found in folklore throughout the United States and the world.
The cryptid comeback not only brings exciting mysteries into the
lives of outsiders, but promotes pride of place to the
residents of towns like Point Pleasant. According to competing theories,
it was here on November fifteenth, nineteen sixty six, that
the Mothman emerged, either from the depths of Hell or
(05:54):
the upper echelons of space. Roger and Linda Scarberry and
Stephen Mary Mallet were driving together. They're on State Route
sixty two near the abandoned National Guard Armory building and
power plant, when they saw a menacing figure standing six
to seven feet tall. In the headlights, giant eyes shone
bright red. Panic set in Roger. The cars driver sped
(06:15):
away toward town, but the creature followed. According to the
eyewitness accounts, the thing rose up like a helicopter. Though
a clumsy runner as they saw the power plant, it
excelled in gliding easily keeping pace even as the car
reached one hundred miles per hour. The creature's debut ruffled
the town's feathers, making an unsure headline. The next day
(06:35):
in the Point Pleasant Registry, couple sees man like birdsides
creature something The stereotypical inclination for small town to form
an angry mob heightened. Rather than raising pitchforks and torches
for several nights, curious townspeople made hunting rifles their preferred weapon.
With this initial contact, and according to written reports, Mothman
(06:57):
would be responsible for a host of strange tightings events
in Point Pleasant and the surrounding areas, lurking out to
hide homes, chasing cars, and even stealing pet dogs. Stealing dogs.
The day before Mothman stretched its leathery wings above the
couple's car, It's possible he made a stop at Newell
Partridge's home in Salem, West Virginia. This account, chronicled in
(07:19):
Ken Keell's book The Mothman Prophecies nineteen ten seventy five,
tells of a German shepherd named bandit who bolted into
the woods after two glowing red circles. Partri says he
looked for bandit but found nothing but pop prints going
in circles and then vanishing. Oh no, I hope Christy
Nome was an import Pleasant like she's in Portland right now.
(07:40):
We'll never know if this was true or the true
birth of Mothman's story. Two glowing circles may not a
mothman make. The bandit's story would never have surfaced without
the frightening tale of the Scarbury's close encounter. Mary Hire,
a journalist with the Athens, Ohio Messenger, the local news
force for the northern neighbors of Point Pleasant, found herself
(08:01):
covering these strange sightings and encounters. Her first article, entitled Winged,
Red Eyed Thing Chase's Point Pleasant Couples across the Countryside,
appeared without delay on November sixteenth, nineteen sixty six. Good
for her girl, she knew when something was going to
go viral. She joined forces with big shot New York
paranormal journalist John Keel for his previously mentioned work The
(08:23):
Mothman Prophecies. This nonfiction record of the odd occurrences and
the subsequent two thousand and two film, which starred Richard Gear,
would launch Mothman in the West Virginia Town onto the
national stage, but by the time of the movie's premiere,
Point Pleasant itself had lost direct side of Mothman. The
creature had laid low since the deadly collapse of the
(08:43):
Silver Bridge in December nineteen sixty seven. Many saw no
connection in alleged sighting just before the collapse, while some
viewed Mothman as a sinister harbinger of doom. Since then,
Mothman seems to have kept to himself until recently. In
twenty nineteen, accounts of the flying moth creature in Chicago
stoked the paranormal creature craze, but he met as he
(09:05):
makes national news once again. An NPR inquiry was entitled
to the case of the Chicago math Man. Lovers of
the unknown and unsubstantiated to remember exactly where his roots
lie and wear a twelve foot statue of his likeness
by Bob Branch stands Point Pleasant. From the story of
the Mothman, one can learn the importance of hometown, homegrown
(09:28):
heroes of the dark Woods and the roads less traveled.
In two thousand and six, Jeff Wamsley, a Point Pleasant
native who grew up listening to the stories his father
worked at the National Guard Armory, opened the Mothman Museum
to showcase all archival material he had assembled. The collection
featured police reports and witness accounts from various sightings. Though
he was just six years old when the Mothman bewildered
(09:50):
the people of Point Pleasant the first time, Whamsley released
two books on the subject through the Mothman Press, Mothman
Facts Behind the Legend and Mothman Behind the Red Eyes.
Wamsley's museum offers Mothman history and produces an annual festival,
which grows in attendance each year. Had it not been
for the pandemic in twenty twenty, Wamsley estimates that Point
(10:11):
Pleasant would have again welcomed crowds totally over fifteen thousand,
a staggering influx for a town with fewer than five
thousand residents. Mothman finds his way onto t shirts, local cafe, cookies,
and etsy shops. I think the Mothman's story is timeless,
Wamsley says. It's never been fully solved or proven as
to what these people were seeing. People come here to
(10:32):
see for themselves and to investigate on their own, to
make up their own minds. Everyone has their own theory.
It's part of the town's history. Rosemary Hathaway, an associate
professor of English at West Virginia University, defines the revival
of cryptid Mania as a renaissance at the heart of
the comeback of the Mothman and as West Virginia cryptid
contemporaries like the sheep Squatch and the Flatwoods Monster, is
(10:56):
a bubbling sense of pride and resurgence of traditional storytelling
by and for small town residents. Historically, West Virginia's identity
had been defined by outsiders by its extraction industry. If
they do know about West Virginia, they tend to have
stereotypes Cletus, the slack jawed yokel and a miner, says Hathaway,
the daughter of two West Virginia natives. By introducing their
(11:19):
legends to outsiders, they've made an advantage, an advantageous grab
for financial gain, and invented a new way to educate
and engage tourists. Thank you Smithsonian for keeping such good
track of cryptids. But the December fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven
bridge collapse, So that killed forty six people. It's one
of the deadliest bridge disasters in American history. After that,
(11:42):
like they said, the Mothman wasn't really seen again, but
locals did start to wonder was the Mothman a warning?
There were reports of people seeing a cringed creature near
the bridge before it fell, so could the Mothman actually
be a good guy. In nineteen seventy five, journalist and
UFO researcher John Keel publishes The Mothman Prophecy, connecting the
(12:05):
sightings not just to the bridge collapse, but to UFOs,
men in black and a series of paranormal events, dreams, prophecies,
unexplained lights, and mysterious strangers. Keel claimed the town of
Point Present was under siege, not by tourists, not just
by flying creature, but by something deeper, darker, and more organized.
(12:27):
Phone calls from nowhere, time slips, people going into fugue states,
government agents showing up with blank stares and questions that
didn't make sense. And whether you believe Keel was uncovering
something real or just writing the ultimate paranoid paranormal paranoid thriller,
Something Strange did happen in Point Pleasant. This is from
(12:47):
Search for the Mothman two thousand and two with John A. Keel.
The following is based on true events Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
This fu half man, half monster arc. I guess you
call it.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
You never seen anything w I got to open every
new mum lad.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
But the very sight of this messenger filled.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
You with terror.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Those guys, that's all she'd ever say, was those eyes.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
What if it showed you a disaster was about to occur,
but no one would believe you.
Speaker 5 (13:20):
People were screaming.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
You could hear them hollering for help. It's already happened,
not just here, but all over the world, and it's
happening right now wherever this messenger appears. Tragedy follows What
went on in Point Pleasant? What did they witness? Where
will it go next?
Speaker 4 (13:36):
What if?
Speaker 1 (13:38):
And it's a big question. It's a story most of
us have never heard. Now they're making a movie about it,
called The Mouffman Prophecies. But this is no Hollywood fantasy.
The events and the people are real. You are about
to hear eyewitness accounts from the past and profound lessons
for the future. This is a search for me hidden
on the edges of accepted reality. This is the search
(13:59):
for the Muffman. Throughout history, stories have circulated of enormous
flying creatures, dark winged beings that prophesize death and destruction,
but generate such fear that eyewitnesses can't face or understand
their meaning. Author Lauren and Coleman has been researching these
creatures for over thirty years.
Speaker 6 (14:16):
Mouthman really fits right in with a long history that
we have of seeing ringed creatures, flying humanoids, big birds.
They've had many different monstrous names down through history, and
it really starts from the times of the ancient Babylonians
up until co lonth Ago.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Writer John Keel was in Point Pleasant, West Virginia when
the events there took place. His book The Mothman Prophecies
is the definitive account of those sightings.
Speaker 7 (14:41):
There's things I've always been here. The Indians in America
here called it the thunderbird, a huge bird. In the
Orient they called it the Garuda.
Speaker 6 (14:50):
You can go all the way back to eighteen eighty
when a strange flying man was seen over Coney Island,
New York, the Houston Batman.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
The nineteen fifties, Real Grand ninety in seventy six is
one case.
Speaker 6 (15:01):
Right now, you've got a wave of thunderbird sightings in Pennsylvania,
and so mothman, if you look at it in context,
is not that unusual. But what makes mothmans are interesting
and really exciting is that you have over one hundred
witnesses saying they saw it in one concentrated area in
thirteen month periods.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
It started with an incredible story that John Keel ran
across in a small town newspaper.
Speaker 7 (15:23):
I was driving around the south where they had a
lot of few post signs, and I was mathat.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
And taking broke.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
It came over the wires four.
Speaker 7 (15:31):
Young couples who have seen something in Point Pleasant Loss, Virginia.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
It was November fifteenth, nineteen sixty six, late in the evening.
Two young couples drove to a remote hangout on the
outskirts of town.
Speaker 6 (15:42):
Two couples riding around joy riding around the TNT area,
which is a munition dump from World War Two, and
all of a sudden they see these giant red eyes,
very apparent that they aren't supposed to be there, and
all of a sudden they see a form to it.
The form takes shape, they see there's huge wings for him.
Speaker 4 (16:01):
We just didn't We couldn't believe what we really saw.
And this thing was standing there but had body, just
like a man seeing muscles in his legs. Of course,
sit dif ferment and looked at each other, and then
we took off and they.
Speaker 6 (16:10):
Get scared and they want to get out of there,
and all of a sudden, they're taking off. They're going
anywhere from one hundred, one hundred and twenty miles an hour,
and they noticed that this creature is following them, and
they didn't see it through the back end of the shadow.
You know, he's going across the car once a while,
and they can't get away from it.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
We didn't really talk about it or anything, but we
saw it all the way down the road into town,
all of us.
Speaker 6 (16:31):
They couldn't get away from it until they almost got
to the edge point pleasant.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
The creature vanished as they entered town, and the couples
headed straight for the sheriff's office. He went out that
night to investigate their story, but found no sign of
the creature. We didn't do finally got home. Family friend
Doris Deuis was there to meet her. When they got home,
she got in the house she collapsed. Of course they
had to call a doctor and have him come out.
They were something. I mean, she was hysterical, That's all
(16:55):
it was to it. The following day, the sheriff held
a press conference at the county.
Speaker 5 (16:58):
Courthouse to discuss do you think this was just like
a POI for pills back in the day, Because I
could see myself doing something like that when I was
in my twenties. Not to call I mean believe women.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
But that's the sightings. The local press jumped on the
story and dubbed the mysterious Flying Preacher the Muffman, after
a character from a Batman television show. Doris remembers vividly.
Howl Linda described him.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
The head looked like a man, and it had fory
red eyes.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
Half man, half monster.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Ark I get you call it. Something unnatural was stalking
the hills of West Virginia, and John Keele decided to
go and see it for himself. But this was only
the beginning. Others would encounter it and tragedy would soon
follow at its wake. All I could see with these
two red eyes, I kept looking from the movie. I
(17:45):
couldn't stop, And then I guess it just ook. When
writer John Keel arrived in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, he
could tell something had the community on edge.
Speaker 7 (17:57):
Yeah, you could feel something was happening. And so I
lingered there and I started getting into all of this stuff.
I found many strange things going on in the homes,
and I found it.
Speaker 5 (18:09):
It's very Stephen King and like his towns in Maine.
Like a writer shows up and it's like, there's more
to this place than it seems.
Speaker 7 (18:17):
Many many people have seen things but never reported it
to anybody.
Speaker 6 (18:22):
The past few months, people have been coming up to
me and reporting that they've been saying strange things.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And I'm not talking about the town's speedfreak. I'm talking
about good, honest, church going people.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
I've known these folks my entire life, and they seem
downright embarrassed to be bringing it up.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
I mean, the churchgoers, when have they ever done anything?
Like just because they're Protestant doesn't mean they're a step
above an exorcism anywhere.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
It's hard to explain the capital of Mason County now,
Point Pleasant is a tight knit community of five thousand,
where everyone knows their neighbors, where life moves at the
simple and welcoming pace found in the rural South.
Speaker 7 (18:55):
Everybody thinks of hillbillies when they think of West Virginia.
They were not hillbillied, and they were not the kind
of people that would make these things up.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Since the eighteenth century, farmers have made a good living
from this fertile land along the banks of the Ohio
and Kanawa Rivers. Researcher Dan Dreysen visited Point Pleasant in
nineteen sixty six to investigate the strained sightings.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
People seem like ordinary people, very friendly, matter of fact, folks.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
What you see is what you get. I felt very
welcome in the town. Just north of town is a
densely overgrown wildlife preserve, much of it almost inaccessible, but
hidden beneath the thick brush is evidence of a grim history.
Part of the area had been used during World War
II as a place to covertly manufacture and storrem munitions.
Remnants of a factory still stand, along with almost one
hundred large concrete domes that were built into the ground
(19:39):
to house the high explosives. Because of its past, locals
dubbed it the TNT Area. That's where Marcella Bennett was
headed on the night of November sixteenth, nineteen sixty six.
She and her brother were bringing her three year old
daughter to visit relatives who lived in the outskirts of
the TNT area. As they pulled up near the house,
they spotted some strange lights in the sky that hovered
above the trees. Marcella's brother was miss.
Speaker 8 (20:01):
I tryed I didn't want to see any lights, and
he says, no, stop. He says, you got to look
at this. This isn't a plane. And I said, oh, sure,
you know, And I just kept on walking.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Towards the car she was carrying her daughter, when suddenly
a figure stirred nearby.
Speaker 8 (20:15):
I had to just to approach the car, and out
of the corner of my eyes, I saw this creature
which was over six foot tall with feathers. It just
looked like a giant bird, but yet a man, and
it was standing with his shoulders and then it was
next down like this. I just couldn't imagine what I
(20:35):
was seeing and panicked. And when I tried to run,
I couldn't run.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
It was stayed a shock. Marcella fell to the ground
directly on top of her little girl.
Speaker 8 (20:43):
I couldn't get off to get off of her, and
I thought, well, you know she's dead, you know I'm
killing her. But I couldn't move, you know, it was
just I was in a transfer.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Finally pulling herself together, and she picked up her child
and ran towards the house.
Speaker 8 (20:55):
And I finally did get up to my feet and
get my feet working. I realized that my knees were
all torn up, and my hands and my face had
been buried in the sand. I couldn't see, and I
thought I heard the creature fly off with these real
loud flopping wings. You know, I believed her, a real
loud sound.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
The family locked themselves inside the house. What hysteria gripped
them as the creature reappeared, shuffling onto the porch and
peering into the windows. It's the strange phenomena. As the
product of wild imaginations, sightings continued to be reported, Everett
Wedge was one of the community's most upstanding and respected citizens.
He was one of five pilots who were standing on
a local airstrip when they saw what they described as
(21:35):
an enormous, dark colored bird flying above them.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
And it was big enough that they could I'd say,
it could take the mirror you up, probably carry us away.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
That's how maybe it was.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
I never I've been around lots of my time, and
I never ever.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Saw heard that big. But I didn't see it.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
And like I say, I might not have quite twenty
twenty eyes now, but I did.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Then at seven fifteen am on November twenty fifth, a
shoe salesman named Tom Yuri was driving just north of
the TNT area.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
I noticed something out of corner of my eye from
the river.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
I am going to need these people to tell me
more about the TNT area. I feel like that should
just be a place you probably avoid.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
No right over here.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
And it came up over the trees. And when I
first saw it looked like a helicopter coming. And then
when it came up over the trees, I could see
it was a bird, a huge bird. Estimating the wingspan
I would say ten to twelve feet give or take
on eight ran up to fifteen.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
I've never seen anything that.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
Large before in a lot.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
I was scared, but I wasn't terrified. It's just strange feeling.
I mean, I've never seen anything.
Speaker 7 (22:44):
I got to hope and never do again.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
You know, It's it's just unbelievable. And a few months
later the local Red Cross bloodmobile was chased by the creature.
Speaker 7 (22:52):
And this thing over the bloodmobile. They could first they
sused it, and then they looked out the windows and
looked up and whatever it was, it was a huge thing,
and they thought that some claw like things were descending
and going to grab the bloodmobile.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
And he drove out of there.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Then there were a number of other cases that tied
it in with blood.
Speaker 7 (23:11):
What's interesting for me was in talking to female witnesses,
I would ask him about their menstrual period, and a
lot of these women who claim to have been chased
in automobiles, we're having their menstrual period at the time,
and that seemed to me to be a major clue.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
Of some sort.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Reports of missing dogs and mutilated kevin only served to
heighten fears.
Speaker 7 (23:31):
Usually the animal has been drained of blood. But there's
another clue to these animal mutilations. But very often the
anus of the cow is removed, and we know that
radioactivity settles in the anus, and whoever's doing it is
checking the radioactivity influencing these animals.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Obviously, something was happening here, something unexplainable and terrible, but
no one at the time had the foresight to understand
exactly how horrific it would eventually turn out to be.
Dozens of innocent people would die before the truth was known.
How many people have seen it.
Speaker 8 (24:08):
Wasn't to be something terrible is going to happen.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
And quint go back happens. Do you mean anythink cost disasters?
Why would they need to? I didn't. I think I
think they're trying to warn me.
Speaker 5 (24:19):
Maybe their angels, their motivations humans.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
After the collapse of the Silver Bridge, the Muffman vanished
from point Pleasant. No more sightings were reported, no UFOs,
no strange man dressed in black. Their sudden disappearance lent
credence to the notion that it had all been somehow
connected to the bridge disaster.
Speaker 7 (24:40):
And it was almost continuous that these things were being
seen and got it just stopped.
Speaker 8 (24:44):
For you know, we tried to figure out what why
you all this? But there's no nothing explained that we
can explain.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
First of flying saucers, then the math man, and here
the bridge fell.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
I mean it was it was scary.
Speaker 7 (25:00):
Genobi in a new camp I'm dat Dallas in nineteen
sixty nine, just before the artyca they saw it.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Some tried to come up with scientific explanations for the mothman.
Skeptics claimed that it was a mass hallucination that had
been cleared up by the shock of the bridge tragedy.
Speaker 5 (25:14):
Also the barn owl theory, which is the camp I'm in.
It's either the government and the TNT plant or a
barn owl.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Others blamed it on a curse placed in the town
by a Shawnee chieftain over two hundred years before. I
like that, and a local ornithologists claim that it had
really been just a big bird all along a sand
hill crane, and this species superficially matches descriptions of the preacher,
but eyewitnesses disagree. Wrong color to your scamming.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
I've seen pictures of sandyal Crane's on TV, and in
my opinion, Professor Smith and West.
Speaker 5 (25:44):
Virginian, I've seen pictures of lots of birds on TV, too,
but when you see birds in person, they can be
really terrifying.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
First, he was one hundred percent wrong.
Speaker 7 (25:54):
Various college professors tried to say that it was a
historic or something done like that, and some people said
it was a giant owl.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
I've seen large jobs.
Speaker 7 (26:05):
But I've never seen an owl that as big as
a man.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
It was also later revealed that the TNT.
Speaker 5 (26:10):
Area Have you Ever Seen an Owl? Stand Up where many.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Of the sightings took place, had been horribly polluted. Many
of the ingredients that had gone into making the munitions
had been dumped and left to seep into the local ponds.
In the nineteen seventies, scientists declared the area an environmental disaster.
It is still one of the top EPA Super Fun
clean Up sights. So some wondered if perhaps the creature
was some sort of mutant bird and abomination caused by
the horrible effects of toxic waste. But that didn't explain
(26:37):
the strange lights in the sky, the abject terror felt
by eyewitnesses weeks and even years after their encounter. Even today,
you know what you saw, you know you saw it?
Speaker 4 (26:46):
Of what was it?
Speaker 8 (26:47):
Where did you come from? These are questions you asked yourself, Off,
is there something after that?
Speaker 1 (26:52):
You know, stalking?
Speaker 8 (26:53):
Yes, I mean you can't deny what you saw. It's
just a very.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Hardly explain, you know, very hard. I mean, that's something strange.
They're here one minute, go on the next.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
Why did they come to here the first place?
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Too many page squad. My favorite was for it not
to be something, and it has been seen again. Sightings
have been reported around the world since then, always just
before a major disaster.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
Some people even say now they saw it before nine
to eleven, which I had never heard before. But I
am not a large owl, so it is hard to
say that documentary came out right before the Mothman prophecy
film starring Richard gear in two thousand and two, which
dropped like a moody ambient brick onto our collective subconscious.
(27:45):
It's dark, slow, brooding, and weirdly effective. It doesn't try
to explain Mothman as much. It more lets you sit
with the fear, just like the creature itself. And it's
ongoing point pleasant now as an annual Mothman festival, a
Mothman statue, and a growing base of cryptid fans, TikTok
(28:06):
truthers and paranormal podcasters. But what is the Mothman? Is
it a harbinger of doom? The theory we heard this
theory shows up, The theory that it shows up before tragedies,
the Silver Bridge collapse, Chernobyl nine to eleven, a government
experiment gone wrong. Hence the TNT factory, the military base,
(28:28):
all the weird energy, an alien since you also have
multiple UFO sightings in the area around the same time,
a tulpa that's a thought form, basically something we believed
into existence, or just a very large misidentified bird. I
just love the bird theory. There's no satisfying answer, which
(28:50):
is exactly what makes it so scary. So maybe the
mothman wasn't there to hurt us. Maybe he was just
trying to tell us something. Maybe monster aren't always the
ones we we should fear. Maybe they're messengers, not destroyers.
Or maybe, as with all good folklore, we're just looking
into the darkness and projecting whatever we're most afraid of,
(29:11):
and sometimes what we're afraid of has wings. That's it
for today's flight into the paranormal, my winged weirdos. If
you've ever seen any encryptid, have any cryptid stories, send
them in along with your scary spooky stories. I'm off
to research our much more disturbing Deep Dive episodes and
(29:35):
I we'll be back with more for you tomorrow. Thank
you so much for listening to another one of our
thirty one days of thirty one spooky episodes. For October,
we have a BTK episode coming up, and the Poltergeist series,
which started as one episode until my script became ten
(29:56):
thousand pages and my research went into the depths of Hell.
I guess send me your scary stories for our end
of the month roundup. I have some guest episodes coming up.
What else is coming up? Just everything traumatizing and horrible
researching the BTK stuff. I'm reading his daughter's book right
(30:18):
now that she wrote and oh my gosh, she has
a Netflix documentary coming out tomorrow Friday the tenth, so
might release it to coincide with that. But the BTK
stuff is so disturbing. All the serial killer stuff I've
been doing is so disturbing. Also on the list for
(30:38):
serial killers, we have the Zodiac, we have Richard Ramirez,
Ted Bundy Dahmer. I feel like I'm missing somebody. We
already did John Wayne Gacy, we did the Manson family,
is part of Rosemary's Baby. Oh, Richard Chase, the Vampire
of Sacramento. So lots of Psycho to get through in
(31:00):
the next twenty two days. Also some more cursed films,
ghost photography, some demon houses, babysitters and those kind of stories.
If you have any supernatural or creepy babysitter stories, send
me those. I've been reading tons on Reddit, and yes,
I love you very much. I'll talk to you very soon. Goodbye,
Popular Podcasts
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.