The Mothman
Created | Updated Mar 24, 2002
The Mothman was a weird phenomena, quite possibly supernatural, that appeared in the sixties in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
Quite a large number of people in the general region reported seeing a larger than man sized winged creaure, humanoid but with no head but
huge glowing red eyes. The mothmn was reported once as being able to fly at speeds of over 100 miles per hour, and disrupted electroinc
devices in the general area, presumably by some electromagnetic field it created. Radios and televisions ould give only squeals and static when it appeared.
The mothman first appeared and was often sited around an abandoned military dynamite storage facility, where various
chemicals were said to have been dumped and quite possibly have mutated local wildlife. Other explanations involve UFOs, ancient Indian curses
(the typical Indian burial ground story), visitors from another dimension, CIA mind control experiments, and a huge barrage of similar theories.
During the time of the sightings, other weird phenomena appeared in the general area as well. Strange light and UFOs ere reported, and
the infamous "Men in Black" appeared, apparently involved with the mothman in some way. Stranger still, people who had seen the
mothman began reporting prophetic dreams, wih varying degrees of accuracy. One person dreamed of Christman presents floating in a river, and another
predicted a disaster, a power failure, when the Christmas tree in Times Square, NY, was lit. At the same time the tree was lit, the Silver Bridge,
going from Point Pleasant across the Ohio River, collapsed, killing many and spilling presents into the river. Many witneses later reported seeing the mothman
near the bridge at the time of its collapse, and many people blamed its collapse on th mothman. After the collapse of the Silver Bridge, mothman sightings dwindled
and now are fairly uncommon.
There's plenty of information about the mothman available elsewhere on the internet, if you're really interested. www.mothman.com is a band's homepage, but has links to many pages about the mothman and similar unexplained phenomena.
Douglas TenNapel, the guy who created the fairly popular Earthwom Jim video games (among other things) has been making a movie
about the mothman, but it doesn't look like it ill be released in most places. It has also appeared on the X-Files and, if I remember right,
on Doctor Who, and probably other places. A rather odd variation of the story, called the Moss Man, was a popular campfire story a few years ago
in the general region, but probably has no basis in fact.