THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Late on November 15, 1966, two young couples driving past the abandoned World War II munitions works north of Point Pleasant — the "TNT area" — saw a gray, man-shaped figure about two meters tall with huge folded wings and eyes that glowed red like bicycle reflectors. As they fled, the thing spread a three-meter wingspan and, without flapping, paced their car for miles at speeds near a hundred miles an hour. The Point Pleasant Register ran the story the next day, and "Mothman," a nickname a newspaper copy editor coined after the then-popular Batman TV series, went national.
Over the following thirteen months, more than a hundred sightings clustered around the old ammunition bunkers. Then, at rush hour on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge linking West Virginia and Ohio collapsed into the river, killing forty-six people. Investigators traced the failure to a corroded eyebar, but the sightings stopped almost at once, and the creature became fixed in legend as a herald of catastrophe.
John Keel's 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies wove the sightings, UFO rumors, and the bridge disaster into a single narrative, filmed in 2002 with Richard Gere. Point Pleasant now has a stainless-steel Mothman statue erected in 2003, a Mothman Museum, and an annual September festival that draws tens of thousands of visitors.
