Mothman: The Dark Secret West Virginia Tried to Forget

Discover the hidden history of the TNT area, the abandoned military bunkers, and the unexplained sightings that terrorized locals in 1966 and 1967. Learn how this small town became the center of UFO encounters, Men in Black investigations, and government secrecy that connects to one of America’s strangest mysteries.

Raised By Giants LInkTree: https://linktr.ee/raisedbygiantspod

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Once every year, thousands of people come from across the
United States and from other countries to visit this little
town in West Virginia with the population of around three
thousand people, to check out the site of the most
well documented crypted sighting of all times, the Mothman.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Hello Mothman? Where is the Mothman?

Speaker 1 (00:46):
Rogers Scarberry, Linda Scarberry and two others. There were two
young couples from Point Pleasant driving around late at night
on November fifteenth, nineteen sixty six, at around round eleven
thirty pm, near the T and T area, which is
a large stretch of eighty three hundred acres of land

(01:10):
north of Point Pleasant. It had already had a reputation
for being eerie with rumors of strange lights, noises, wild
animals even before the Mothman stories, full of abandoned concrete igloos,
underground tunnels, and overgrown forests. The couples were driving along

(01:31):
Round sixty two near the old T and T Plant
and suddenly their headlights illuminated a large gray man shaped
figure standing near the road by the old North Power
Plant building. They described it as six to seven feet tall,
human leg but with wings that folded against this back

(01:52):
like a large bird, glowing red eyes about two inches
wide six inches apart, and a strange hypnotic or as
morizing quality. Frightened, they stepped away, the creature took flight,
spreading its wings about ten feet wide, and chased their
car down Route sixty two, reportedly keeping pace at speeds

(02:14):
of nearly one hundred miles an hour. It followed them
all the way into Point Pleasant before veering off into
the surrounding woods. Shaken by what they had just seen,
the four went directly to the sheriff's office and told
Millard Halstead what they had seen. Halstead knew them personally
and said that they were not prone to making them stories.

(02:37):
They were pale, visibly frightened and adamant about what they
had witnessed. Sheriff George Johnson and Halstead drove out there
to the teen inter area with them that same night,
but found nothing unusual except for odd scratch marks in
a dust cloud near the old power plant. The story
was then reported to the Point Pleasant Register the next day,

(02:59):
November sixteenth, nineteen sixty six, under the headline couple seas
man sized bird. The article was the first time the
story went public and From then on, sightings exploded all
around Point Pleasant. Over the next year, over one hundred
reported sightings followed, some involving multiple witnesses. Many came from

(03:21):
the T and T area, which became the home of
the Mothman creature. But this small town just is in
the spot of the Mothman sightings. It's also home to
a very rich history. According to some historians, the first

(03:44):
battle of the Revolutionary War was fought in Point Pleasant,
many disasters, including floods, the deadliest bridge collapse in US history,
large military bases, and is also the town where some
of the first transorbitales were performed on over one hundred
and fifty people. So stay tuned. West Virginia is no

(04:12):
stranger to the cryptid phenomenon or the cryptid sightings they have.
The Flatwood Monster reported in flat Woods, Braxton County in
nineteen fifty two, mini reports all over West Virginia of
Bigfoot like creatures, dog man reports, hell hounds, wampus cats,
and the Smiling Man, which is synonymous with the most

(04:33):
famous of the bunch, the Mothmaan, which has an entire
event held in its name. The annual Mothman Festival takes
over the small populated town once a year in September,
and I stopped by it this year to have a
look around. The downtown area was packed with people. It

(04:54):
was hard to walk in some areas. But what a
lot of people don't know is that this town has
a very rich history, not just with the month, but
the first battle of the Revolutionary War was fought in
Point Pleasant. Now some will argue this, but if you
ask any local historians, they will tell you that the

(05:15):
Battle of Point Pleasant, which took place on October tenth,
seventeen seventy four, in what is now known as Point Pleasant,
West Virginia, was part of Lord Dunmore's War, a conflict
between the Colonial Virginia Militia and the Shawnee Native forces
led by Chief Cornstock. And they will tell you that

(05:36):
this battle should be considered the first battle of the
American Revolutionary War. But officially it was Lexington in Concord
in Massachusetts on April nineteenth, seventeen seventy five. But the
Battle of Point Pleasant happened just a few months before
the Lexington and Concord. But hey, it would be too

(05:57):
much to go back and rewrite all those history books, right,
But This is where the story really begins with Point
Pleasant is with the colonial forces and the Shawnee Native
Americans led by Chief Cornstock in this Battle of Point Pleasant. Now,
the story goes that right before Chief Cornstock's brutal death,

(06:20):
being tied to wagons and ripped apart limb by a limb,
he put a curse on the town of Point Pleasant
and doomed the town to tragedy for as long as
people live there, which led the locals to believe that
this story had some sort of backing during the Great
Flood of nineteen thirty seven, in January of nineteen thirty seven,

(06:42):
the Ohio River overflowed its banks after weeks of heavy
rain water. The levels crusted at over fifty five feet
over Point Pleasant. Thousands were displays, businesses were destroyed, and
the entire town was nearly underwater. It was so bad
that the people Point Pleasant decided in nineteen thirty eight

(07:03):
to get funding from Congress to construct a permanent floodwall
along the Ohio River under the Flood Control Act of
nineteen thirty eight. The actual construction of the Point Pleasant
Floodwall began in the late nineteen forties and was completed
in the fifties. The system included concrete walls, levees, and

(07:24):
pumping stations designed to protect the town from a repeat
of the nineteen thirty seven disaster, barricading the entire town
with huge floodwalls that still stand to this very day.
But it wasn't the only disaster, along with many other
floods that subsequently happened after that flood that wreaked havoc

(07:47):
on the town, the Great Bridge collapse on December fifteenth,
nineteen sixty seven, at approximately five pm during rush hour.
The incident resulted in the deaths of forty six individuals,
with two bodies never recovered, known as the deadliest bridge
collapse in US history. Now, many people blame the Mothman

(08:11):
for the collapse of the Silver Bridge, saying that it
was an omen or a warning to the town, because
after the Silver Bridge collapse, the Mothman was never cited
again in Point Pleasant Now. The official explanation of the
Silver Bridge collapse was that the bridge was a chain

(08:33):
suspension bridge made of eyebars, which means that there's flat
steel bars with holes in the ends that connected all
the bars with pins, and one of the eyebars failed
in the suspension chain that calls the bridge to collapse
in less than twenty seconds during rush hour, plunging vehicles
into the Ohio River and killing forty six people. Was

(08:54):
a very tragic event, so close to Christmas as well,
and I don't really believe that the town ever really
recovered after that. Now the lore goes, this is just lore.
It's rumor that the state sent in scuba divers to
try and locate the missing bodies, and when they got in,

(09:17):
they came up very quickly and looked very shocked and
startled by what they had just seen. And the rumor
was that what they witnessed got them to their core.
The men instead that they had seen fish the size
of school buses down there, and that they refused to

(09:39):
search anymore. Hey, that's just the rumor. Don't quote me
on it, just from what I've heard. But it's not
the only time Point Pleasant has been subjected to these
kind of mega animals weird mutations. It's long been rumored
about the teen the area and the large forested area

(10:01):
outside the outskirts of town where the mothman was first
spotted had weird discolored wildlife. Three and four eyed frogs
glow in the dark fish and this was due to
contamination and pollution of the lakes and ponds in the
T and T area. So in nineteen forty two, the
army began construction and operation to produce T and T

(10:24):
munitions and storage of sub munitions and explosives such as
bombs for the war effort. They also used the eighty
three hundred acres for military training as well. And then
they would dump all of that radioactive material and waste
and undesirable materials into the ponds and the lakes of

(10:46):
the T and T area, polluting the eighty three hundred
acre site. This area is huge. You could quite literally
get lost out there. Some parts of the TNT area
is still heavily polluted and is under surveillance. They would
store their ammunition in these large underground igloos so that

(11:09):
enemy forces can see it from above. These iglu like
structures are all over the place in the TNT area.
I don't think that there is even an accurate account
of how many there actually are. Some of them have
sunken into the lakes and into the ponds, and some
are still locked can't get into them, but others are

(11:30):
open for the tourists and the locals, and you can
go inside them and look around. The walls are around
two feet thick, very echo in them. You can hear
the slightest bit of movement inside them. I couldn't imagine
this being the most practical way to store AMMO and explosive.

(11:53):
You could drop a box of anything. Heck, you can
even drop a pin or a pencil and your ears
would be ringing, let alone a stick of dynamite going
off in there. That's precisely what actually happened around ten
years ago. One of the igloes blew up. It launched

(12:15):
a huge fireball into the sky, and it blew the
whole top of the igloo off. And it was never
really said how or why it happened or who did it,
but it was rumored that someone was storing explosives inside
the bunker, or some leftover explosives from the army that
was still inside that exploded. It's really strange, but this

(12:39):
is what's left of it. The entire top has been
completely blown off. I would not recommend trying to get
into one of these locked iglues. There might still be
dynamite and TNT stored in them. It's also been rumored
that there's miles and miles of underground tunnels beneath the
t and the area that's been sealed off and concreted
over so that no one can get in. There's been

(13:02):
people that's claimed to know how to get in through
a sewer system leading to a creek from the Ohio River.
But if there is, it would be damn near impossible
to find. No one could tell you where the entrance is.
But I have seen pictures of an above ground hatch

(13:23):
entrance that's been sealed off, So something has to be
under there. Whether it's an extensive underground system, who knows
at this point, but I'm pretty sure it's safe to
say that there is something underground in the TNT area.
Now for the human experimentations that was going on in
Mason County, Lake and State Hospital was established in nineteen

(13:46):
twenty six right outside of Point Pleasant but still in
Mason County and housed in African American population. It was
one of the only two known psychiatric institutions in the
United States that was entirely rammed by black staff and
served an all black patient population. Doctor Walter Freeman, the

(14:09):
father of the transorbital lobotomies, performed some of his first
procedures at Laken State Hospital during the early nineteen fifties.
This was a part of a state sponsored lobotomy initiative.
The programs, sometimes referred to as Operation ice Pick, involved
Freedman conducting two hundred and twenty eight procedures over a

(14:33):
two week period in West Virginia in nineteen fifty two.
These surgeries were performed using the transorbital method, where an
instrument resembling an ice pick was inserted through the eye
socket to sever connections in the frontal lobes of the brain.
Over one hundred and fifty people received these lobotomies from

(14:53):
doctor Walter Friedman at Lake and State Hospital. The hospital
ultimately closed this door in nineteen seventy nine and was
repurposed as an utterly care facility, and now it's a
state run minimum security women's prison called Lake in Correctional Facility. Now,
the reason that I bring that up is the human

(15:14):
experimentation aspect and the lobotomy aspect of this that people
would rather not talk about and pretend like it didn't
exist and didn't happen in this town and definitely not
experimentation on black people, right, Let's keep that hush hush.
Let's forget that we had that facility with nothing but

(15:35):
an African American staff and African American patients and a
psychiatric facility where we would stick them with a damn eye,
spick through their tear duct of their eye, and scramble
their brain. And that we had a black school just
across the road from this psychiatric facility that was eventually

(15:55):
tore down so no one could ask any questions, and
replace the hospital with a woman's prison. This is all
historical fact, and no one wants to talk about it.
But that's okay. I'd still I'll still speak for those
people that were experimented on by the state, turned into zombies,

(16:17):
had their damn brains scrambled and tortured on a daily basis.
Fuck you, fuck you, you sick fucks. Anyway, the experimental
aspect on human beings lead people to believe that the

(16:37):
mockman was an escaped government experiment, which would make sense
if there really are underground facilities beneath the T and
T area. Okay, let's steal it up. Whatever kind of
screwed up chimera hybrid shit we got going on down there.
They'll just die because they can't escape. What a lot

(17:00):
of people don't know is that from the very beginning
until nineteen seventy five, the Mothman wasn't called the mothmam.
It was called the Birdman. It wasn't until popular ufologist
John Keel wrote the book The Mothman Prophecies that the

(17:21):
name started to catch on. It was named Birdman up
until that point. John Keel's book The Mothman Prophecies even
inspired the Hollywood movie of the same name. The Mothman
Prophecies in two thousand and two started Richard Geer, this
isn't just a message that it's a prediction.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
I can stop this.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
For a long time after the Silver Bridge collapse, no
one spoke about the Mothmaan. They were scared to talk
about the golf Man. They had been threatened not to
talk about the Mothman, formerly known as the Birdman. They

(18:08):
had to change the name because Birdman wasn't as popular
of a name as the Mothman. Right, Everyone was really
scared to talk about the Mothman. They had been threatened
not to talk about the Mothman by the men in
Black that appeared in Point Pleasant shortly after the first
sighting and warned witnesses to not talk about what they

(18:28):
had seen and if they did, tragedy would befall them.
This reminds me of the Murray Island incident, where a
man and his son claimed that while out on their
boat on Murray Island near Tacoma, Washington in nineteen forty seven,

(18:49):
along with two crewmen, in the sun and the other
men saw six large doughnut shaped flying objects hovering over
the water. One of them appeared damaged and spewed out
molten flag like material down onto the boat. The hot
debris injured his son's arm. His dog was killed by

(19:13):
falling debris. The boat sustained heavy damage. She took photographs
of the object and collected debris samples. The next day
he got a mysterious visit by a man in black.
The man described the incident in detail, though the man
had not told anyone yet, and warned him not to

(19:35):
talk about it or tragedy would befall him.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
This encounter of the Murray Island incident is considered one
of the first reported men in black sightings in Ufo lore.
Now here's the Strange Part. Two Air Force officers William
Davison and First Lieutenant Frank Brown were sent to Tacoma,

(20:03):
Washington to investigate the Murray Island UFO incident after they
had claimed that debris had fallen from a saucer onto
their boat and injured their son's arm and killed their dogs.
They interviewed the two men and examined the slaglike debris
and collected samples to bring it back to California, but

(20:26):
on their way back, on the evening of August first,
nineteen forty seven, they boarded a B twenty five bomber
with a crew of four in total, including the pilot
and the crewmen. They were carrying the evidence from the UFO,
the debris, and shortly after takeoff, the B twenty five

(20:53):
inexplicably caught fire in the air. Okay, Davison and Brown.
The two Air Force officers were unable to escape and
were killed in the crash, but the pilot and the
crewmen survived by a parachuting to safety. Okay, So you're
telling me that there wasn't more than two parachutes in

(21:16):
the craft and the two people that had evidence of
the UFO to be examined just happened to die because
of an inexplicable freak accident. It almost sounds like another
inexplicable freak accident of an I beam breaking and a

(21:38):
bridge collapsing, right, kind of sounds familiar to me. That
story of Murray Island incident and Washington sounds erily similar
to the Mothman story. Some people see something very strange,
they see something they probably shouldn't see. They contact law
enforcement men in black up tell them not to talk

(22:01):
about it. Death follows with the moth Man it was
a silver bridge collapse, but the Murray Island incident, it
was the two Air Force officers perishing in a plane
crash after they went to get the evidence to confirm
the story of the two gentlemen that saw the UFOs,

(22:21):
which would be a perfect distraction if something really was
going on out in the TNT area, right, because you
got to take yourself back to that time. The people
of Point Pleasant was really pissed off at this thing.
They were Once Linda Scarberry and her husband went to

(22:44):
the police department and filed this report, and people found
out about it, and it was printed in the newspaper.
People were in an uproar about this. They were going
on into the TNT area with pitchforks guns to try
and find this thing and kill it. Okay, So if

(23:06):
it was a government experiment, just like people have concluded
that some of these cryptids are indeed government experiments, the
best way to get people to shut up about it,
which the men in black basically warned all the witnesses

(23:27):
to shut up about it, stop talking about it, and
if you continue to keep talking about it, something bad
is going to happen. Well, the bad thing that happened
was the Silver Bridge collapse. Hey, the public of Point
Pleasant wouldn't ever talk about the Mothman for years and
years after. Okay, they were scared after the Silver Bridge collapse.

(23:55):
So if you create this distraction right of this tragedy,
the forty six people dying and perishing in the most
deadly bridge collapse in US history, it's going to do
a lot of things. One is going to get people
to shut up about the Mothman, if that's really what

(24:18):
your intention was to do. Two, it's going to give
you enough time to go out into the T and
T area and take the military or some black ops
team to go out there and take care of whatever
governmental experiment was on the loose for years, and it's
just a coincidence that no one ever seen the Mothman

(24:40):
after that. So it wasn't until the Mothman statue was
erected in two thousand and three in the center of
downtown that people started to open up about it again,
and of course when the Mothman Festival started the year
prior in two thousand and two. For years this wasn't

(25:02):
a huge event. It was just a local event, but
it has grown into something really special over the years
that attracts thousands of people every year and brings good
business to the small town with vendors and local shops,
food trucks and guest speakers, paranormal investigators alike every year,

(25:26):
with people dressing up ready to believe you and we
will be patiently awaiting the return of the Mothman. Maybe
next year he'll show up to his own festival. But
a side note, the Chief Cornstock putting a curse on

(25:46):
the town before his death by the Virginia Militia turns
out was a part of a local school play. The
curse never really happened, that it was drummed up to
make the school play more dramatic, so hope you guys

(26:10):
enjoyed it. Thank you all very much. Please like and
subscribe Hit the Ball like Corn as well for notifications,
and we'll see you guys next time.