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 'Mothman' invades Pittsburgh Sunday, January 21, 2001 By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor
"Visitations from the dead and mysterious beings from other worlds are not that uncommon at all in any part of West Virginia. Virtually the whole state of West Virginia has been classified by investigators of paranormal events and bizarre beings as a 'window,' meaning an area in which incomprehensible creatures and events tend to visit and recur time after time, year to year, even century to century ..."
West Virginia writer Chuck Kinder's fondness for his state is inspired in part by the strangeness of the place, the legends that hang over the remote hollows and hillsides like the early morning mist.
"All my life I've heard ghost stories, nothing but ghost stories," he said. "My aunts and cousins would sit around the kitchen table stringing beans and tell those stories over and over again."
Sitting under that table, the young Kinder grew to know the stories by heart and used them in his unpublished collection "The Last Mountain Dancer." Kinder, who teaches fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh, will have his novel "The Honeymooners" published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May.
But the bizarre legend that inspired Hollywood film producers to make "The Mothman Prophecies," which begins filming in Western Pennsylvania this week, is not an original Kinder tale, although there is a connection. And this story comes not from the dark forests of the West Virginia hills and hollows, but the scruffy little Ohio River town of Point Pleasant, about 30 miles north of Huntington.
Point Pleasant is a typical "window" area, marked by continuous UFO activity over long periods of time, bizarre monster sightings, and the mysterious comings and goings of unusual persons.
In the most accepted version of the tale, the sightings of a manlike creature with burning red eyes and wings around the town began in 1966, then ended a year later with the collapse of the Silver Bridge between Point Pleasant and Kanauga, Ohio.
It's the old bridge that Kinder knows well. "My mom grew up in Point Pleasant, and when she was a little girl, she'd play on the bridge when it was under construction back in 1928," he said. His mother has this perhaps prophetic memory of the bridge:
Passages in italics are reprinted from "The Last Mountain Dancer" by permission of author Chuck Kinder.
"One evening, Mom had found a little yellow and black butterfly flopping about in the grass at the base of the bridge. One of its lovely wings seemed bent, and it kept fluttering up trying to fly. My tenderhearted mother had picked the butterfly up very gently, and she had carried it onto the Silver Bridge, thinking that up high it might get a good enough takeoff to sail away. But when Mom had gently nudged it, the little butterfly had simply fluttered around and around downward like a frail leaf falling, until she lost sight of it over the river."
Thirty-nine years later, 46 human souls followed that butterfly into the river when the bridge suddenly broke apart just after 5 p.m. Friday, Dec. 15. One of the few bridges between Parkersburg, W.Va., and Huntington, the span was heavily traveled, largely by trucks from the chemical plants along the river.
Traffic was bumper-to-bumper on the suspension bridge as it swayed and bounced in the chill of the winter evening, but these were motions the locals had come to expect from the two-lane span, which took its name from its many coats of aluminum paint.
Without warning, one of steel links in the suspension chain on the upriver side failed. Witnesses said the bridge swayed violently to one side, then the other, and broke apart.
It was a disaster with widespread after-effects, from international news coverage to the development of a revamped federal bridge inspection program. To allay the public's fears, the bridge's sister span at St. Marys, W.Va., was replaced. Both were built by the American Bridge Division of the U.S. Steel Corp. of Pittsburgh.
As promised by President Lyndon Johnson, a new bridge was quickly built south of Point Pleasant. It's an oversized structure, a massive bulk to reassure a traumatized region.
It took four years to find the source of the failure -- metal fatigue in a steel link called an eyebar because it had holes on both ends for connecting pins.
That's the official version.
"In the haunted hills of West Virginia there are demons and dark angels, fallen and horny, freakish forces and dream denizens of unseen worlds or dimensions unguided that are at work in West Virginia, shaping the very lives of West Virginians, perhaps even controlling West Virginians by molding their beliefs and manipulating their emotions until more than a few lift up serpents to pray for salvation and relief and deliverance into a new spiritual geography."
Before the collapse, the "big" story around Point Pleasant was the winged creature, dubbed "Mothman" by an Associated Press news service story, that supposedly had terrorized and stalked two Point Pleasant couples.
Identified as Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette, the four told police they were driving around the deserted World War II ammunition dump called the TNT Area six miles north of town. It was around 11:30 p.m. Nov. 15, 1966.
The 8,000-acre site is so desolate that nearly a quarter of it is a wildlife preserve, and what two married couples were doing out there in the middle of the night is, well, pure conjecture. The place, though, was a popular one for parkers and drinkers.
While enjoying the view of a collection of abandoned concrete bunkers, the carload was jolted by a terrifying vision peering in the windows of the 1957 Chevrolet.
"It was shaped like a man, but bigger," Roger Scarberry told reporters. "Maybe 6 and a half or 7 feet tall. And it had big wings folded against its back."
Said Linda: "It was those eyes that got us. It had two big eyes like automobile reflectors."
Roger Scarberry headed his car back to Point Pleasant in a panic, but even though he claimed to be hitting 100 mph, the birdman kept pace until the car reached the city limits.
"I could hear it making a sound. It squeaked like a big mouse," said Mary Mallette.
They persuaded Mason County Deputy Sheriff Millard Halstead to join them in returning to the TNT Area, but no creature showed up. Halstead felt something was amiss, however, because he claimed he could get only garble on his car radio when he tried to call his Point Pleasant office.
Perhaps tired of slow news days in Mason County, Sheriff George Johnson called a news conference the following day. It was staffed by Mary Hyre, Point Pleasant correspondent for the Athens, Ohio, Messenger.
She produced a story for the Messenger, and it was picked up by The Associated Press. Thus was born Mothman.
The old Pittsburgh Press ran a United Press International version on Page 1 of its Nov. 16 edition, headlined "Red-Eyed 7-Footer: 'Bird' Flaps Scare Into W.Va. Couples."
Afterward, the sightings multiplied. Birdmen were reported as far away as Beaver Falls, Pa., and New Jersey. Around Point Pleasant, Mothman was becoming a regular, visiting a golf course and porches; and even buzzing the Gallipolis, Ohio, airport across the river.
His visitations caused various problems -- blown-out TV sets, static on radios, random phone calls by heavy breathers, missing dogs.
Hyre stayed busy writing her stories, but not all of them made the paper.
"Well, she wrote a lot of stuff about UFOs, but we didn't print all of them," recalled Roy Cross, her boss in the bureau. "It was pretty obvious that some of them were just neighbors pulling some stunts on each other."
Cross, 74, is now a senior writer with the Messenger. Hyre died Feb. 15, 1970, after a short illness that Cross believes resulted in heart failure. He was one of her pallbearers along with several West Virginia state troopers, the Mason County sheriff and the Messenger's publisher
"Everybody in Point Pleasant knew Mary," he said. "She ran that town." He added, "She was a hell of a reporter but couldn't write worth a diddly."
Cross could not remember spotting any Mothmen. "Nope, never saw a one." But he did send a photographer and reporter one night to the TNT Area in search of the "Mason Monster."
They turned up nothing.
Mothman wasn't the only visitor to Point Pleasant during that period. John A. Keel, who made a career writing about UFOs, mysterious creatures and other marginalia of American life, came to town to see for himself.
He and Hyre became friends, Cross said. They accompanied each other checking out the unearthly incidents. Later, she visited Keel in New York to participate in a radio talk show.
In 1975, Keel's first edition of "The Mothman Prophecies" was published by Saturday Review Press. The book, rereleased by the small Georgia publisher IllumiNet Press in 1991, is a collection of "encounters" with UFOs, men in black, mysterious dwarfs and various monsters like Mothman. It's also marked with misspellings and various factual errors.
As for the "prophecies" of the title, there aren't any. Despite Mothman's ability to "squeak like a big mouse," he was never quoted uttering anything comprehensible. In an afterword to the 1991 edition, Keel said his original publisher came up with the title, dumping his at the last minute.
The book focuses on Keel's visits to West Virginia in 1966-67. Along with the flying red-eyed apparition, residents reported seeing Asian-looking midgets and visits by an odd man in black asking strange questions in a stilted manner.
As we know, that year ended with the Silver Bridge collapse.
It is probably erroneous to blame the collapse of the rickety old Silver Bridge on the sudden appearance of a mystery dwarf in town on the day of the disaster, or the frequent traffic of flying saucers or those Mothmen who infested the area, but the intense paranormal, psychic activity around Point Pleasant, especially in the old TNT storage area, on the night of the collapse does suggest some tangible relationship between the calamity and strange, invisible forces that would seem to go far beyond the curse of an ancient Indian, the other favorite explanation for the catastrophe.
Mary Hyre was near the bridge when it collapsed. She, Cross and other reporters would work most of the night reporting the event. They were too busy to deal with one anonymous report that an "Oriental-looking dwarf" was seen running off the bridge and jumping into a big black car right before the fall.
Another unnamed source claimed to have seen several Mothmen beneath the bridge before it fell. Another said the town was full of men in black in the days leading up to the disaster.
Cross saw nothing of the sort. "Well, I heard the stories, but I never saw anything like that"
Strange men in black?
"Nope."
Asian dwarfs?
"Nope."
Keel claims the sightings and visions stopped around Point Pleasant shortly after the collapse. The fact that the residents now had something more tangible to occupy their minds seems to have eluded him.
There is another legend at work here as well: "the curse of Chief Cornstalk." The leader of the Shawnees, Cornstalk and his son were lured to their death by duplicitous white men after the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774.
It is said that as he died, he cursed the land for 200 years. Subsequent floods, other natural disasters, the visits by Mothman and the Silver Bridge collapse have all been laid at Cornstalk's feet. Presumably, nothing bad has happened in Point Pleasant since 1994, the last year of the curse.
Now, Hollywood will resurrect the 35-year-old events -- or rumors of events -- that briefly put the long-ignored Ohio River community on the map. Point Pleasant, however, will not appear in the film. It will be replaced by the Armstrong County community of Kittanning, a town free of both Mothmen and collapsing bridges.
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