Mothman At 50

A new article from me, which focuses on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Mothman encounters in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

Here's how it starts:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the wave of Mothman encounters that hit Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It all culminated, in December 1967, in the disastrous collapse of the town’s Silver Bridge and the tragic deaths of dozens of people who, very unfortunately, were on the bridge at the time. But, what was the Mothman of Point Pleasant? And how did the legend begin? To answer those questions we have to go back to the night of November 12, 1966, when five grave-diggers working in a cemetery in the nearby town of Clendenin were shocked to see what they described as a “brown human shape with wings” rise out of the thick, surrounding trees and soar off into the distance.

Three days later, the unearthly beast surfaced once again. It was late at night when Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette – two young, married couples from the area – were passing the time away by cruising around town in the Scarberrys’ car. The four were puzzled to see in the shadows of an old TNT factory what looked like two red lights pointing in their direction. These were no normal lights, however. Rather, all four were shocked and horrified to discover that, in reality, the ‘lights’ were the bright red eyes of a huge animal that, as Roger Scarberry would later recall, was “…shaped like a Mothman, but bigger, maybe six and a half or seven feet tall, with big wings folded against its back.”