The other three members of the group, however, did not share her pity for the creature, feeling instead the sharp bite of fear. One of them yelled, “Let’s get out of here!” and the group sped away in a panic. But only a couple of moments later, as the frightened riders topped a hill, they saw the same creature; or one like it, a second time standing near the road. As they passed the thing it spread its wings, rocketed up into the air and began chasing the car at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour! The monster was making high-pitched squeaking sounds as it flew above the car, like a “record played at high speed or the squeaking of a mouse.”
Thankfully, after a few minutes the entity broke off the chase, allowing the witnesses to drive straight to the Point Pleasant Police Dept. where they told their incredible story. Deputy Sheriff, Millard Halstead believed them. He’d known them all their lives and they were not the sort to get into trouble of any kind. And one look at their faces told him they were being perfectly sincere.
Halstead drove out to the TNT area and later claimed that his police band radio malfunctioned while there, victim of some kind of peculiar interference. The only sound it would make was a noise that sounded “like a record playing at high speed.” After a press conference was held the next day the story hit the papers and the enigmatic entity was quickly dubbed, ‘Mothman’ after a villain in the popular Batman television show.
Roger Scarberry, Linda’s husband, later told fortean investigator John Keel, author of the groundbreaking ‘The Mothman Prophecies,’ “That bird kept right up with us. It wasn’t even flapping its wings.” They also noted that, while en route to the authorities, they’d passed a large dead dog lying beside the road but, strangely, the carcass was no longer there on the return trip. They’d all wondered where the unfortunate animal had come from and whether or not the creature was somehow involved. They didn’t know that just an hour or so before on the same evening their own experiences took place, a building contractor 90 miles to the northeast in Salem was about to have his own mysterious encounter.
At 10:30 p.m., Nov. 15th, Mr. Newell Partridge was relaxing in his living room watching the television; when, suddenly, the screen went blank. “A fine herringbone pattern appeared on the tube,” he later said, “and at the same time the set started a loud whining noise, winding up to a high pitch, peaking and breaking off, as if you were on a musical scale and you went as high as you could and came back down and repeated it. It sounded like a generator winding up.” Outside on the front porch Newell’s dog, Bandit, began to bark furiously.
Mr. Partridge got up and turned off the T.V. thinking that was what was bothering the dog, but the barking continued unabated so he grabbed a flashlight and stepped outside. Bandit was facing an old barn about 450 yards away, and raising hell. “I shined the light in that direction,” Partridge later told writer Gray Barker, “and it picked up two red circles, or eyes, which looked like bicycle reflectors, but much larger.”
Something about those glowing orbs deeply frightened him, he admitted. He was certain they were no ordinary animal’s eyes. Then, with a snarl, Bandit lit out toward the barn, ignoring his master’s commands to stop. Fighting the wave of intense fear that had swept over him, Partridge went back inside and grabbed his shotgun but something stopped him from going back outside. The fear was just too strong and he slept that night with the weapon beside him.
Bandit was never seen again unless, of couse, it was his carcass that was lying on the roadside as the Scarberry’s sped past. The next morning Partridge went out to the barn to look for his dog, but found only footprints “...going in a circle, as if that dog had been chasing his tail; though he never did that. There were no other tracks of any kind.”
Later that evening, the 16th, three adults were returning to their cars after visiting with friends in the TNT area when, suddenly, a big, gray figure rose up from behind the car, as if it had been lying down on the ground. One witness, a young mother named Marcella Bennett, was so frightened by the sight of the beast that she actually dropped her baby. “It rose up slowly from the ground,” she later said, “a big gray thing. Bigger than a man, with terrible glowing red eyes.” It had no discernable head and two glowing red circles near the top of its chest. The child’s father, Raymond Wamsley, quickly grabbed the baby as huge wings unfolded from the creature’s back.
Marcella stood there, horrified yet transfixed. “It was as if the thing had her in some kind of trance,” her husband said. “She couldn’t move.” Panic had set in and the three managed to hasten back inside their friend’s house and lock the door. Outside they could hear the creature as it followed them, shuffling across the porch and looking in one of the windows. The creature disappeared shortly before state police arrived.
The incident reportedly traumatized Bennett for weeks afterward and she eventually received medical treatment for her anxiety. She suffered frequent nightmares for months and came to believe that the creature paid several visits to her home.
“I know it’s been here,” she said. “I can feel it when it’s around. And I’ve heard it. It makes a terrible sound that goes right through your bones. It sounds like a woman screaming.” In fact, all the witnesses to the Mothman entity, save for one, reported this same feeling of intense, almost unnatural fear.
Having felt a similar fear myself, I can state that it is not something which can easily be overcome. In any event, Mothman wasn’t done with the town of Point Pleasant and neighboring towns. That November sightings were reported from Mason, Lincoln, Logan, Kanawha, and Nicholas Counties as well.
At around 10:00 p.m. on the 21st, authorities in the city of Charleston received a call from one Richard West, claiming that he had the creature in sight. In fact, it was sitting on a roof next to his home. “It looks like a man,” West claimed. “It’s about six feet tall and has a wingspread of six or eight feet. It has great big red eyes.” When asked if the being flew, West said, “Straight up, just like a helicopter.”
Four people saw the frightening entity on Nov. 24th as it soared through the skies of the now famous TNT area. Motorist, Thomas Ury, saw the thing standing in a field on the morning of the 25th. It then spread its wings and, just as in the Scarberry incident, took off straight up like a helicopter and flew alongside the car giving chase “...without flapping its wings,” as Ury sped down Route 62 heading straight for the police station. “It veered over my convertible and began going in circles three telephone poles high. It kept flying right over my car even though I was doing about seventy-five. I never saw anything like it. I was so scared that I just couldn’t go to work that day. This thing had a wingspan every bit of ten feet. It could be a bird, but I certainly never saw one like it. I was afraid it was going to come down right on top of me.”
A St. Albans woman claimed to have seen it standing in her front yard the next day, the 25th, but it was gone by the time help could arrive.
“It was standing on the lawn next to the porch,” she later told reporters. “It was tall, with big red eyes that popped out of its face. My husband is six feet one and the ‘Bird’ looked about the same height, or a little shorter, maybe. It had a funny little face. I didn’t see any beak. All I saw were those big, red poppy eyes. I screamed and ran back into the house. My brother-in-law went out to look, but it was gone.”
On the 27th another female witness from Mason claimed that she was pursued by the creature, and later that night it was allegedly seen by two children in St. Albans. Connie Carpenter, eighteen, from New Haven, West Virginia, had her encounter at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday the 27th. She was driving home from church when she saw what she first took to be a large man dressed in gray standing on the Mason County Golf Course. Then a pair of large wings unfolded from the entity’s back. It took off straight up and headed for her car. “Those eyes! They were very red and once they were fixed on me I couldn’t take my own eyes off them,” She stated. “It’s a wonder I didn’t have a wreck.”
The creature flew directly at her windshield, she said, a
nd got quite close before it veered off and disappeared into the darkness. Carpenter was one of the very few who got a good look at the creature’s face. “It was horrible,” she said of it. “Like something out of a science-fiction movie.” The witness was so upset by the encounter that she missed several days of school and sought treatment by a physician. She reportedly suffered “eye burn” for two weeks after the sighting.
A few weeks later, Carpenter was walking down the street when she was approached by a big black car. A suntanned man then got out and attempted to kidnap her (see MIB). She struggled free and fled back to the safety of her house. A short time later she moved in with relatives whose house soon became plagued with poltergeists.
On January 11th, 1967, Mrs. Mabel McDanial, the mother of Linda Scarberry, one of the original Mothman witnesses, witnessed a large “bird” in flight while driving down Route 62 near Tiny’s restaurant on the outskirts of Point Pleasant. “I thought it was an airplane,” she said, “then I realized it was flying much too low. It was brown and had a wingspread of at least ten feet. I thought I could see two legs, like a man’s legs, hanging down from it. It circled over Tiny’s and then flew off.” She didn’t see any head or neck on the thing. There was no sound and the creature did not move its wings.
An Ohio man claimed that the creature pursued his vehicle down Route 33 in March 1967, and two women swore they’d seen “Mothman” fly up to meet a waiting UFO on May 19th of that same year. According to one witness, Mrs. Brenda Stone, “We were driving past the TNT area on Route 62 around 10:30 p.m. when we saw two bright red lights on a shadowy form high in a tree just off the road. Suddenly this big red light appeared and approached the tree, and the form rose up towards it and disappeared. Then the big light took off to the north.”
On November 2nd, 1967. Mrs. Ralph Thomas heard a strange sound “like a squeaky fan-belt” outside her home in the TNT area. When she stepped out onto her porch to investigate she saw “a tall gray figure, bigger than a man” moving swiftly among the abandoned munitions bunkers. It didn’t appear to be walking, she stated, but rather sliding or gliding along the ground. She was certain that the figure she observed was neither a bear nor a man.
John Keel claims that over one hundred people saw Mothman during the course of the next year. Moreover, all manner of strange reports began to trickle in from the Point Pleasant area concerning a variety of strange phenomena, and it is a curious note that the Mothman events occurred during a period of heightened UFO activity including the mysterious appearances of the unsettling Men In Black (MIB).
According to Keel, over one thousand credible UFO sightings occurred in the area by the end of 1967. Numerous animal, and even human, deaths were attributed to this avian horror. Even Bigfoot and poltergeist reports were surfacing. A veritable whirlwind of Forteana. Hordes of journalists, ‘monster hunters’ and the just plain curious descended upon the area, adding fuel to the weird chaos that had engulfed this once peaceful community and electrified the entire nation.
Everyone could feel the tension. Everyone knew that something bad was happening. The creature was encountered several more times that year and then on December 15th, 1967, about a month after the last sighting took place, the Silver Bridge, a 700-foot-long suspension bridge connecting the cities of Point Pleasant, West Virginia and Kanauga Ohio, collapsed into the muddy Ohio River. Because the event happened at the worst possible time, during rush hour traffic, 76 people fell that day. 46 of them were taken down to their deaths beneath the icy water. Two of the unfortunate victims were never found.
So, what was the Mothman? So-called ‘experts’ have suggested everything from sandhill cranes to over-sized owls (both of which must flap their wings to fly), but it seems obvious that the creature dubbed ‘Mothman’ should’ve been named ‘Mothmen’ as two types of beings were described. One with ‘bat-like’ wings, no head and ‘wider than a man’ with glowing eyes in its chest; and the other a more humanoid entity with feathered, angelic-looking wings and glowing eyes on a human-shaped head.
Both of these types were described as dark-skinned, with glowing red eyes and the ability to ascend “straight up, like a helicopter.” Two witnesses claimed that they heard a strange, mechanical humming sound as the thing flew above them. To complicate matters even further, there seems to be a third type of ‘Mothman’ reported from the area as well. In his book, ‘Monsters! The A-Z of Zooform Phenomena,’ Neil Arnold cites a report by author Mark A. Hall:
“In the early 1900’s at Point Pleasant, a large bird with the head of a man and a wingspan of at least 12 feet was seen. It happened just prior to or immediately after the occurrence of a tragic event. It was also seen by rural farm families in Mason, Jackson, Roane, Clay and Kanawha counties. By World War I, birdman was observed flying over Looneyville, up Johnson Creek, down Gabe in Roane County thence down Elk Valley into the Kawanwha. Its monstrous size and dark reddish feathers which glistened in the sunlight cast fear in all who saw it. After World War II people said they were chased by a huge bird while traveling on the highways of Mason, Jackson and Wood counties near the Ohio River.”
Although the preceding cases from West Virginia remain the most famous involving UFIs, as we have seen, they were by no means the first of their kind. Nor the last. When the events of West Virginia eventually died down in December 1967, sightings of flying humanoids continued on in other parts of North America and the world, even though these reports are often overlooked by many fortean researchers, or considered ‘unconnected’ to the Mothman phenomenon.
On the contrary, such data would seem to suggest a possible inter-connectedness of all Birdman reports. The volume of reported encounters alone; taking into consideration that the number of unreported sightings must far exceed the reported ones; is simply staggering.
A teenaged boy was badly shaken up by a gray, man-shaped inhumanoid with red eyes and a ten-foot wingspan as it pursued his vehicle on the evening of November 17th, 1966, while he was driving along Route 7 near Cheshire, Ohio. On March 12th, 1967, a Letart Falls, Ohio woman witnessed a large, white flying creature with long hair and a ten foot wingspan as it passed directly in front of her car.
Over the course of an eleven-year period from 1964 to 1975, residents of a small town nestled amid the foothills of the Appalachians, were terrorized by a bird-like creature that ran like a man. Mark Boring, editor of the Monroe County Buzz recalled the ‘Birdman of Madisonville, Tennessee’ during an interview by Brent Raynes for Alternate Perceptions Magazine. It happened at a place called the Hiwassee Knob, and he’d witnessed the thing himself, he claimed.
“As I remember, the first time there were maybe 10 or 12 kids who reported after one weekend that there was a bird-like creature in the knobs; they didn’t say a whole lot more about it, but then it got my interest and a couple of my buddies, and so we started going to the bonfires and traveling around, and then one day a buddy of mine and I were driving in the knob area and actually caught a glimpse of something, you know, a huge bird that was actually too big to be a regular bird. Its wings were outstretched, and it was soaring into the woods.”
According to Boring, other people spotted the thing on the ground and chased it. They claimed that it ran like a man.
“These were buddies that I went to school with, and then I saw it again actually flying over the knob. There were several more sightings, and another buddy of mine actually took a picture of it on top of the town water tower, but he has since disappeared somewhere in the wilds of Utah and I guess taken the picture with him.”
Two or three reports would surface per year up until around 1975, Boring claimed. Then nobody talked about the creature anymore. “One of the guys actually claimed to have shot part of the foot off of the ‘birdman’ with a bow. Either a piece of a toe or foot.” He claimed that the Smithsonian came down and asked to take it and investigate, and he never heard from them again.
When asked about the size of the creature, Boring replied, “...six or seven feet. It was
as tall as a man. Like a tall man. I know some of the people said he was at least seven feet. I don’t know. It could have been. You don’t really get a chance to stand there and measure the ‘birdman.’ You see it and it just looks like a huge creature.”
Boring also confirmed during the interview that ‘strange lights’ had also been seen many times in the area. His mention of the Smithsonian Institution appearing and whisking away the evidence, never to be seen again, is also quite interesting. Evidently, that organization is well-practiced in the confiscation of not only the remains of mysterious American ‘giants,’ but of Mothman as well.
As it turned out, Birdman didn’t disappear entirely back in 1975. He just went elsewhere. In August of that year in Davenport Iowa, two young boys were out playing one night in the trailer park where they lived when they heard a noise coming from the darkness. Being young and being boys the two naturally went off to investigate. When they got to the area where the noise was coming from they were surprised to see a fully-grown Doberman squirming and writhing on the ground as if it had been attacked by something.
That ‘something,’ they soon discovered, was still in the area. In fact, it was standing atop a nearby trailer. Many years later one witness, Robert Anderson, now 41, described the creature that he and his little brother had seen that night as a huge, gray-colored, bird-like ‘thing’ over six-feet tall. It had a monkey-like face, he claimed, with a beaked nose and glowing eyes. On being observed by the youths the thing spread its wings and flew into the air, circled once, then disappeared into the darkness.
Also from 1975, multiple witnesses claimed they saw a large, ‘gargoyle’ type creature perched in a tree, and later on the roof of a house, in Walnut Creek, California in October. It was described as being humanoid, with gray, wrinkled or ‘leathery’ looking skin; with an estimated wingspan of over 15 feet! “It was so big it made the tree; which was about 100 feet high; look like a bush,” claimed Lloyd King, of Oakland.
The Inhumanoids Page 18