Mothman and Other Curious Encounters

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction:

The News Coming In

The wire service ticker was spitting out the bulletin…

Location: Point Pleasant, West Virginia

Dateline: November 15, 1966

Two young couples reported to Mason County sheriff’s department tonight they have had a curious encounter with a monster.

It was shaped like a man, but bigger. Maybe six and a half or seven feet tall. And it had big wings folded on its back, eyewitness Roger Scarberry told Deputy Millard Halstead.

Roger’s wife, Linda finished his thought: But it was those eyes that got us. It had two big red eyes, like automobile reflectors.

The Scarberrys and another couple, Steve and Mary Mallette, had seen something strange at the abandoned World War II ammunition dump, known locally as the TNT area.

For a minute we could only stare at it. Then it just turned and sort of shuffled towards the open door of the old power plant. We didn’t wait around. Roger continued.

Thus began America’s first notice of a series of sightings of a strange something that would be quickly named Mothman. A month after the publicity began, a journalist innocently showed up in town to live among the locals, hoping to understand what was happening. During the next thirteen months, he would make five trips to Point Pleasant, staying for many weeks scrutinizing the case. The investigator’s name is John A. Keel. His experiences appeared in a series of articles and in his book on the subject, The Mothman Prophecies.

Keel has been linked forever with Mothman, and he even told me recently that people can’t think of him without thinking of Mothman, although his life is much more diverse than this single group of reports. This typecasting will continue, as a fictional contemporary version of John Keel appears as reporter John Klein, played by Richard Gere, in the new major motion picture from Screen Gems, also starring Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing, and directed by Mark Pellington.

The impact and timing of Mothman-related events continues to amaze. Take for example, David Grabias’ plans to interview John Keel in Point Pleasant for his 2002 documentary on Mothman. They were to fly Keel from his Manhattan home to West Virginia, to do the taping. But Keel never made it. His flight was cancelled. The date he was to fly to Mothman country—September 11, 2001.

Keel’s book and Pellington’s movie help us move these events into context. But how can we understand them? How can we fit this entity into human consciousness, let alone Homo sapiens⁹ history and experience? Perhaps we should merely throw aside this weird wonder as a hoax, a lover’s lane illusion, a misidentification, and go on with our lives. But we can’t. The incidents in West Virginia, we begin to discover, do not live in a vacuum. As you will learn in this book, Mothman may have more to tell us than we could have ever imagined.

More about Mothman later, but first let’s put some of this weirdness in perspective and examine some of Mothman’s precursors.

The Fortean Milieu

Charles Fort, the early 20th century author and intellectual, skeptically viewed the final answers that modern Science had given for odd bits of data he found in its own official journals as only an indication of the silliness of blind faith. Today, to scrutinize the world the way Fort did is rather common, as questioning authority, critically looking at experts and governments, is in vogue. But being Fortean, in many ways, seems like a recent human development. Do not, however, confuse the Fortean view with an exercise in gullibility or believing in anything that comes along, as some debunkers who call themselves skeptics would have you feel. Indeed, Forteans, as real skeptics, do not accept as true, uncritically, anything. Instead, sensing that belief is the realm of religion, Forteans remain open-minded to all evidence, pro or con, in an effort at a deeper understanding. This book’s exploration of Mothman and related curious encounters will examine the underlying patterns, the oneness that shines through many weird moments along the way. They, nevertheless, are enigmas enmeshed in mysteries, and our minds have a hard time wrapping themselves around them.

At what seems like the edge of the fringe, with the most bizarre of the strange, one such story illustrates a couple points. In April 1966, sixteen-year-old Kathy Reeves of Newport, Oregon saw three tiny tree stumps walking across a meadow near her home. Well, now, that would seem unusual, in and of itself. She noted these walking stumps were orange, blue, white, yellow, and watermelon-colored. Soon a torrent of oddities broke loose around her hometown. UFOs were sighted. Newport residents started talking about how nearby Pioneer Mountain had always been weird. A local couple told officials they had seen a group of staring Cyclops. The Reeves family, who actually lived on the side of Pioneer Mountain, started experiencing waves of poltergeist activity. Objects in their home danced about and globes of bluish light bounced along their roof. Finally, the Reeves family did what most sane people have done in such situations; they moved.

This Oregon case fits the Fortean (which is often incorrectly labeled paranormal by debunkers, bookstores, and libraries) milieu, and somewhat also the UFO world, for a number of reasons. The series of events are called a flap, an old Air Force term that has been applied to flying saucer and related accounts where there is a defined series of incidents in a limited period of time. The location is a special spooky site—a window area with a specific haunted history. The area, Newport, Oregon, serves, if you will, as a new port for the phenomena. Once the manifestations began, it was as if the floodgates had opened. We see this again and again in such window areas as Pioneer Mountain. So many people shared the sightings that the events have drifted nicely into the lore of weird places.

Furthermore, the witnesses’ name, Reeves, is among those special family titles that have been pinpointed as playing a magnetic role in the name game. John Keel once told me that people named Reeve/Reeves have a lot of strange experiences. Many monster witnesses have been named Reeves. A glance at the indexes of Fortean Times will show a sprinkling of Reeves and Reeve, as witnesses and contributors. A man named Reeves was the primary witness in a now famous Brooksville, Florida UFO case. As Jerome Clark has written: A man so obscure as to be barely known to most other residents of the rural area where he lived, John F. Reeves, 66, became the focus of international attention in 1965, when he reported an encounter with a UFO and its occupant. Contactées Bryant and Helen Reeve reached celebrity status in the 1950s after writing their book, Flying Saucer Pilgrimage. Much has been written of the tragic coincidences whirling around the lives of the actors (George Reeves and Christopher Reeve) who played the television and movie Superman (a fictional character who was an alien come to Earth to assist humans) and the superman (Keanu Reeves) in The Matrix. There is a reason it’s called the Name Game.

The Damned and the Undamned

By naming various aspects of the phenomena like this, the question arises: Has the field of the unexplained become a series of conventionalizations itself? Frankly, we have to come to grips with the concept that it’s really weird out there. And it’s a lot weirder than it was yesterday. By now almost everyone has heard of UFOs, poltergeists, Nessie, Bigfoot, Champ, and even the Jersey Devil. But is there an exclusion of the most bizarre even from the likes of ufology (the study of UFOs) and cryptozoology (the study of hidden or unknown animals)? Has there been a discrimination against taking Mothman seriously? There seems to be an elaborately strange slew of entities and locations haunting the countryside. Even researchers into matters cryptozoological, psychic, or otherwise strange, have been taken aback by the vast waves of critters, experiences, and places that just do not fit into the usual world of the explained.

One old story serves as a quick illustration. Scientists did not accept meteorites, literally stones from the skies, as real for centuries. As Charles Fort, the modern founder of unexplained phenomena investigations, points out in his The Book of the Damned, it hasn’t been long since experts were trying to convince people that the stones from the skies were either the result of volcanic activity or whirlwinds. Falling stones were very simply damned, i.e. not accepted by science. Now, of course, they are undamned and found in museums and textbooks. Earthquake lights, once a strictly Fortean phenomena—one that Fort chronicled and championed in his books, are creeping into some geological textbooks. Cryptozoologically speaking, sea serpents have attained a sort of quasi-acceptance among some biologists and zoologists; they are well on their way to becoming meteorites. In the following pages are creatures which appear to border on myth, but which may one day be proven to be more than folklore. Mostly what we are hearing from eyewitnesses and then tracking down is that there are things and sites more bizarre than even an investigator of the unknown can possibly imagine.

Take Bigfoot. These hairy, eight-foot, man-like beasts were little heard of outside the Pacific Northwest before the work of John Green, Rene Dahinden, and Ivan Sanderson brought them to the attention of the reading public in the 1950s. By now, however, people have pigeonholed Bigfoot into a nice comfortable category, monsterwise, and have been less than enthusiastic about recognizing other large hairy beasts that happened to turn up here and there. But they are popping up, in and out of places once neglected in studies of hairy hominids. In Pennsylvania, folks are seeing upright hairy things that look like werewolves. A few years ago, near York, Nebraska, a local resident saw a satyr, a living, breathing Pan-like, goat-footed beastie. People around a village in Georgia recently saw a peg-legged Bigfoot. And around the Great Lakes, researchers like Mark A. Hall have gathered together an interesting bunch of reports of three-toed anthropoids; Ken Coon had gathered similar accounts from southern California. Even the Loch Ness Monster seems tame by comparison nowadays. Off Virginia in the Potomac, a huge snake-like monster, Chessie, has been routinely seen most summers since over thirty people saw it in 1978. And some of these witnesses are, we are told, Central Intelligence Agency employees. Down along the Swanee River in Florida, a long-necked, gill-mouthed creature nicknamed Pinkie became all the rage a few years ago.

Throughout the book, I will introduce you to the truly bizarre. Encounters with giant winged Mothman of Appalachia and strange reptilian Lizardmen of the swampy Ohio River Valley. Researchers may sense they have to go to the Congo to hunt cryptids (unknown animals) that seem to resemble dinosaurs, but from my trekking around the back-roads and woods, interviewing hundreds of witnesses, and reading the cases investigated by other dedicated researchers, some pretty strange stuff is to be found right in our own backyards.

More Curious Encounters On the Road Again

In Mysterious America, I examined the phantasmagoria of black panthers, kangaroos, phantom clowns, alligators-in-the-sewers, mad gassers, and other anomalies a bit beyond the experiences of your everyday trek to the corner store. I continue that journey in this book. Along the way, you’ll learn of extraordinary encounters by ordinary people at some of the spookiest spots on the horizon. The world is mighty weird, and together we will experience some of its wonders.

Charles Fort once noted that the excluded and damned data arrange themselves in mass-formations that pass and pass and keep on passing. We shall see that this Forteana, as it is now called in his honor (or his humorous dishonor, he might think), is not easy to place into neat little boxes. It’s like trying to pour water in a bucket full of holes; you pour it in and before you know it, it’s someplace else. Forteana is like that.

Don’t be frustrated by the usual lack of nice, neat explanations for this collection of sightings, stories, reports, and tales. Forteans are often happy to gather the information together and present the data for data’s sake. But looking at the patterns is enjoyable too, for in deciphering the underlying oneness, perhaps we can get a hint of the deeper process. Or at least as humans, that is the fiction we carry around in our heads.

Lifting the Curtain

One thing that gets in the way of any openness to the earnest insights available from this damned data is the foggy curtain of ridicule that obscures the view. Many observers who have unique encounters often experience ridicule when they tell their stories. In 1953, J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer-turned-UFO-researcher, noted that ridicule is not part of the scientific method, and the public should not be taught that it is. Nevertheless, despite calls for critical thinking, scientists and others ignore Mothman by simply making fun of it without looking at it. This ridicule curtain—as Hynek first called it in reference to UFO sightings and which I appropriate and apply more broadly here—exists to deter witnesses from coming forth, as the societal status quo calls for normalcy, not out-of-the-ordinary encounters.

Nevertheless, what often happens is that as such sightings start to come in, the ridicule curtain begins to lift, ever so carefully. Often, as the encounters of prior witnesses are revealed, the ridicule curtain may not be a major limiting factor for a few days or months. But for the equilibrium of the establishment, various methods are used (e.g. the dismissing explanation, the seven day wonder put down, the silly season rationale, the escaped animal explanation) to regain the non-threatening environment in which Mothman and monsters do not exist. In some ways, without dwelling on this social situation but on the data, our Fortean task is to deal with the chronicles and look for patterns.

As you will soon discover, I have tried to point out some interesting archetypes that seem to be at the nucleus of these stories. It’s an amusing game, harmless, and done in good humor. Maybe a member of officialdom will come up with a nice lateral thinking explanation that shall satisfactorily quiet the questions raised by these nasty bits of data. Nonetheless, the reports will remain, just the same. The Fortean procession of the damned will continue. The circle, which one can start measuring anywhere, remains unbroken.

So now, let’s get out on the road again.

CHAPTER 1

Fiatwoods

It looked worse than Frankenstein.

It couldn ‘t have been human.—KATHLEEN MAY

The smell was like oil on hot metal. You know, that greasy, sweet, slippery odor, slightly burnt and perhaps even appealing. But then more and more of it seemed to be saturating the molecules all around. It filled your nose. It permeated your pores. It made you sick to your stomach. It wouldn’t go away. The creepy feeling was close, something beyond the knowing, beyond understanding.

The dog was sick; the boys ran down the hill and vomited. In two days, the dog was dead, and no one thereabouts would ever be the same.

It all began innocently enough. The autumn air clued in the kids to what they might want to do that day. How about a friendly pickup game of football, they asked each other? The date was September 12, 1952. The place, Flatwoods, West Virginia.

Weird West Virginia

West Virginia has always had an aura about it, even before it was a state. Colonists mumbled that American Indians avoided the area because the devil haunted the region. Certainly if any myth-making existed in such a statement, it was helped along by the fact that Lewis Wetzel who was born in what is today West Virginia killed every Indian he could and drove others westward from the countryside. Having a very dark complexion, wild black eyes, extremely broad shoulders, an expansive chest, and muscular arms and legs, Wetzel was a striking man, even if only five feet ten inches tall. His hair was raven and lavish, reaching below his knees. It is said he grew his hair so long so as to be a superior scalp for any Indian. Perhaps it is fitting that he is buried at the spooky spot that is Mounds ville. Today his ethnic cleansing would not be tolerated, and modern analysts would classify him as a serial killer. But few think of that as they travel through today’s Wetzel County on their way to our first stop in weird West Virginia.

Centered in the middle of the state, with Wetzel County north, Mason to the West, Fayette to the south, and Webster next door to the East, the 513 square miles of Braxton County are some of the most rural of the state. The county has been a focal area of strange incidents, and there are even signposts to acknowledge it nowadays. A sign at the town limits reads Flatwoods, Home of the Green Monster. A few local people remain who remember the night a Monster landed.

The Thing on the Hill

On the evening of that September 12th, as it grew dark, lights began flashing across the sky. Around the same time, four local boys were playing football, when they saw what they said was a shooting star fall to earth on the top of the hill adjacent to the playground, on the ole Bailey Fisher property. Actually, they said it had just gone around the corner of the hill. With the curiosity that kids had during the 1950s, they decided to check it out. On the way up the hill, they yelled out their excitement at the Kathleen May home. One of the boys, Ronald Shaver shouted: A flying saucer has landed on the hill and we are going to look at it. Mrs. May, along with her two sons, accompanied the group up the hill, with Tommy Hyer joining them along the way.

Here in the foothills of Appalachia, going up the incline, over 850 yards to the crest of the ridge, was no easy task. When the group, Eugene Lemon, 17, Neal Nunley, 14, Mrs. May, her sons Eddie, 13, and Teddie, 14, Ronald Shaver, 10, Teddie Neal, 10, and Tommy Hyer, 10, reached the top, they immediately noticed the smell, sighted the rolling unnatural fog, and saw a strange bright light ahead. Their eyes began to water. Lemon’s big old dog had run ahead, barking out a racket. The thing on the hill was glowing and hissing, ten feet long, and appeared to have a solid enough form, from their vantage point about 100 yards away. Following the path on the Bailey Fisher property that lead to the light, the group proceeded slowly but steadily. All of a sudden, Lemon’s dog streaked back by, tongue out and tail between its legs. British zoologist/reporter Ivan T. Sanderson, who went on assignment to Flatwoods immediately after the incident, picks up the story from there:

As they rounded the last bend, Mrs. May called out to Eugene Lemon that she saw a pair of eyes in an oak tree to the left ahead, saying there was either an opossum or a raccoon in the tree. She asked Neal Nunley, who said that he was carrying the torch, to flash it in