The Mothman: Appalachian Monster or Guardian Angel?

Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat

This episode explores the intersection of cryptid legend and historical tragedy in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It traces the timeline fro

Key takeaways

• The Silver Bridge collapse killed 46 people due to a tiny, undetectable crack in an I-bar chain link.
• Dr. Robert L. Smith proposed that sightings were actually misidentified sandhill cranes with reflective eye patches.

Main topics

• Mothman sightings
• Silver Bridge collapse

Notable quotes

Couples see man-sized bird, creature, something.

Conclusion

The episode provides a compelling look at how communities transform tr

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linklater. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's a feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Rewind. Speaker 2 (0:43) Just after midnight on November 15th, 1966, two young married couples were driving the back roads outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when they encountered something they couldn't explain. Their route took them past an abandoned munitions plant, hundreds of acres of concrete bunkers left over from World War II. That's where they saw the eyes. Two red points of light in the headlights about six feet off the ground. They belonged to a winged figure six or seven feet tall. They ran, and they said it followed them all the way to the city limits. The next morning, it was on the front page of the local paper. Within a week, it was on the National Wire, and it had a name, the Mothman. Thirteen months later, to the day, the bridge at the end of Point Pleasant's main street collapsed into the Ohio River during rush hour. 10 days before Christmas. 46 people died in that disaster. And some people believed the Mothman had been trying to warn them about it. I'm Dr. Karini Bhatt, and this is Hidden History, a Rewind original powered by Pave Studios. On the show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained and examining all the different theories from science to the supernatural and everything in between. From vanished civilizations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena, I'm looking at it all and I want you to join me. Before we begin, I'd love it if you could rate, review, and follow Hidden History. Your support allows our community to grow and for other people to discover the show. We're also on YouTube with full video that brings each episode to life. Just search at Hidden History Pod and subscribe. Today's episode is all about a cryptid known as the Mothman. In November of 1966, people in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, started reporting something they couldn't name. A winged figure roughly the size of a man out by an abandoned TNT plant. The reports went on for about a year, and then 13 months to the day after the first one made the papers. the town's bridge collapsed into the ohio river and killed 46 people so what were people seeing out there was it a bird nobody in west virginia recognized was it a story that two writers built after the fact on top of a real disaster or did something in those woods know what was coming Speaker 2 (3:26) Seven miles north of downtown Point Pleasant, West Virginia, there are about 100 concrete domes sitting in the woods. They're half buried, built down low into the earth, so they'd be hard to spot from the air. Today, there are trees growing over the top of them. But in 1966, the roads out there were still paved, the buildings were still standing, and there's practically nobody around. Here's how a place like that comes to exist. In March of 1942, the federal government started building a TNT factory on this land, the West Virginia Ordnance Works. It covered over 8,000 acres, cost over $45 million, and at its peak, employed about 3,500 people making explosives for the war. Those domes were where they stored the finished product. Then the war ended and the whole operation was shut down. But the government didn't tear it down. Instead, it deeded the industrial land to the state of West Virginia on the condition that it be used for wildlife management. So on paper, it became the Clinton F. McClintick Wildlife Management Area. Locals kept calling it what they'd always called it, the TNT area. But whatever people were calling it, all of a sudden, this place went from a military complex to a bird sanctuary. So picture the whole thing. Hundreds of acres of second-growth woods and swampy ponds threaded with cracked concrete roads, bunkers going green under the vines, an abandoned power plant, and an enormous amount of wildlife moving around in there in the dark. If you were going to design a location where human beings would see something they couldn't identify, it fits the bill to a T. And one more thing, because Point Pleasant already had a reputation. Not for monsters, but for bad luck. And the town had a story it told to explain that. In October of 1774, this was the site of the Battle of Point Pleasant, where a colonial militia fought a Shawnee force led by a man the settlers called Cornstalk. His Shawnee name was Hokulesqua. He lost. But it's what he did afterward that got him killed. When the revolution broke out, Hocalesco argued that the Shawnee should stay neutral. But that didn't mean he stayed completely out of it. In the fall of 1777, he learned that other nations were preparing to side with the British. He took that information to Fort Randolph, the American fort where Point Pleasant is today, and warned them. The Americans held him captive anyway. The fort's commander had decided to detain any Shawnee who came in as insurance. against them joining the war. And while Jocalesco was in their custody, a group of militiamen walked in and murdered him, along with his son and two other men. Local legend says that before he died, Jocalesco laid a curse on this land. And for 200 years, whenever something terrible happened around Point Pleasant, a mine disaster, a flood, a barge explosion, people said the same Thing. The Curse of Chief Cornstalk. And as for the Mothman, the sightings actually started three days before the night everyone remembers and almost nobody noticed. On November 12th, 1966, in Clendon Inn, West Virginia, five men were digging a grave. They looked up and saw something come out of the trees above them. Something they later described as a brown human being gliding over their heads from tree to tree. And 10 days before that, An appliance salesman named Woodrow Derenberger had held a press conference in the region to describe a roadside encounter with a being who told him his name was Indrid Cold. That's a lot to unpack from that. But for now, the important thing to know is that this part of the Ohio Valley was already primed for something paranormal. Now let's get to November 15th, 1966. Roger and Linda Scarberry, Steve and Mary Millett. They were two young married couples from Point Pleasant. Just after midnight, they drove out into the TNT area in a black 1957 Chevrolet past the abandoned North Power Plant. Steve saw it first. Two red points of light throwing the headlights back at them. And then the sickening realization that the lights were eyes. and they were about six feet off the ground. Linda described a slender, muscular figure, roughly seven feet tall with wings. And here's the detail from the original reports that I can't shake. The witnesses said the eyes were set high, near the top of the shoulders, as though the thing didn't have a head at all. Roger threw the car around and floored it for Route 62, and all four of them said the same thing afterward. the creature came after them, that it made a screeching sound, that it kept pace with the car, and they were not driving slowly, and it stayed with them until they hit the Point Pleasant city limits. They also said it never flapped, it glided. When they made it back to town, the group went straight to the authorities. Deputy Sheriff Millard Halstead took the report, and he said later that he'd rarely seen people that frightened in his life. He drove back out there with them to take a look. There was nothing there. And I think the most human detail in this entire story is what Roger told the newspaper the next day. He said if he'd been out there alone, he never would have mentioned it to anybody. But there were four of them, so he had to. The next morning, November 16th, the Point Pleasant Register put it on the front page. And I love this headline because it's the most honest sentence anybody wrote. about this whole affair. Couples see man-sized bird, creature, something. Three tries at describing it because nobody had the faintest idea what to call it. Within days, somebody in the press found something that stuck. Inspired by the show everyone was watching in 1966, Batman. But this creature was something else. They called it the Mothman. And once the Mothman was out in the world, a lot more people started seeing him. On November 16th, the same day that first article ran, a woman named Marcella Bennett was visiting a house near the TNT area with her infant daughter when she saw a figure rise up off the ground behind her car. She was so frightened that she dropped the baby. Thankfully, the little girl was okay. But when Bennett ran inside, she said she saw eyes peering at her through the window. And when she described the sound the thing made, she said it was like a woman screaming. That same night, about 90 miles away in Salem, West Virginia, a contractor named Newell Partridge said his TV started buzzing and filled up with a strange pattern. Then he heard a whining noise outside. He compared it to a generator winding up. His German Shepherd Bandit started howling. Partridge went out with a flashlight and shined it toward his hay barn. about 150 yards off.