Once They Fixed On Me: Encounters with the Mothman of Point Pleasant

Today’s story is all about one of the big names of the monster world: the man, the myth, the Mothman!

From 1966-1967, multiple residents of the West Virginia town of Point Pleasant claimed to have encountered the creature. Although I won’t be covering all of them today, (or any of the other strange events of that year, for now), here are some of the Mothman’s greatest hits.

November 15th, 1966 was a night like any other for Merle Partridge. At around 10:30, he was hanging out in his living room, watching TV. Suddenly, the display first went blank, then shifted to a herringbone pattern. At the same time, his dog Bandit went berserk on the front porch.

Merle first switched off the TV, thinking that Bandit was somehow reacting to the disruption. But when that didn’t calm the dog, he went outside to see what was happening. Bandit was facing an old barn halfway across the yard.

When Mr. Partridge shone his flashlight in that direction, he spotted a pair of glowing red eyes, which terrified him so much he was sure that this was no ordinary animal. This aura of unearthly fear occurs again and again in tales of the Mothman.

As Merle was retreating inside the house, Bandit took off towards the barn, ignoring his owner’s commands to stop. Partridge grabbed his shotgun, but something told him not to go outside again. He managed to get to sleep that night, doing so with the gun in reach.

The next morning, when Merle went looking around the barn for Bandit, he found only the dog’s tracks. According to him, it was as if Bandit had being going around in circles, chasing his tail, in a way he never had before. Merle Partridge would never see his beloved dog again, and could only conclude whatever those eyes belonged to was responsible.

The night that Bandit vanished, at around midnight, Linda and Roger Scarberry, and their friends Steve and Mary Mallette were cruising through the TNT area (so named because the US government had manufactured munitions there during World War 2, and abandoned bunkers dotted the area). As they drove past one of those bunkers, they got the first good look at the Mothman.

Like Merle, Linda at first saw the Mothman’s glowing red eyes, then realized they were coming towards the car. She described it as a man about seven feet tall, with ash grey wings. As soon as the group saw what she had, one of them yelled that they needed to leave, and the group sped away.

But as they did so, the Mothman began to chase their car, even as the frightened driver eventually hit the speed of a hundred miles an hour. As the creature chased them, the group could hear the noises it made, high pitched squeaks like a mouse or a record played at high speed.

After a few minutes, their pursuer broke off, and the terrified witnesses drove straight to the police department. On the way, the group claimed to have passed the body of a dog, but as it wasn’t there on the way back, we will never know whether or not that was poor Bandit.

They reported their story to Deputy Sheriff Millard Halstead, who would later vouch for them to the press, as he had known them since they were children and weren’t the type to make something like that up. And the fear on their faces could not be faked.

Halstead and the group drove back out to the TNT area, but found no direct evidence of the Mothman. However, Halstead’s radio began giving off some sort of interference, which once again sounded like a record playing at a high speed. The next day, the story hit the papers, and an unknown editor or journalist riffing on the then popular Batman series dubbed the creature the Mothman. Linda Scarberry would suffer severe side effects from the encounter, claiming to see the Mothman for weeks after the event.

The next day, as hordes of hunters tore through the woods looking for the Mothman, Marcella Bennett, her daughter Tina and brother Raymond Wamsley, as well as his wife, went to visit Ralph Thomas at his home in the TNT area. As they drove, Raymond spotted some weird lights in the sky he initially thought were a plane.

Upon their arrival to the Thomas house, three of Ralph’s children greeted their visitors, and informed them that their parents weren’t at home. Upon hearing this, the Bennett-Wamsley group went back to their car.

Raymond decided to ask Marcella to look at the lights still hanging overhead, and see if she could identify them. At that point, Marcella just wanted to take Tina home, so she ignored her brother, and reached for the car handle. Looking down to find it, she spotted a pair of funny looking feet on the ground by the car.

Trying to make sense of what she was seeing, Mrs. Bennett first thought it was just a worker in a jumpsuit. But as her eyes tracked up his body, she saw the Mothman’s wings, and knew this was no ordinary man. Raymond and his wife sprinted for the house when they saw it, calling for Marcella to run as well.

But as she did so, her legs gave out, and she collapsed directly on top of Tina. Marcella said later it was as if she was in some sort of trance. Even as she was fully aware she was killing her daughter, she couldn’t get up to save Tina from suffocating. Mercifully, as the Mothman took off with a flap of wings, Marcella found she could move again, and bolted to the house with Tina.

But that relief was only temporary. As the frightened group called the police, one of the Thomas children glanced outside, and froze in terror, catching the others’ attention. To the horror of everyone inside, the Mothman had returned, and was on the porch, peering in the windows. But by the time the cops showed up, he was long gone, vanishing once again to wherever he hid.

Like Linda, Marcella was also traumatized by her experience, requiring hospitalization after her encounter, and dealt with paranoia and nightmares for the rest of her life. She also claimed that she could feel the Mothman’s terrifying presence around her as well, and hear its eerie cries.

And then’s there the encounter of poor Connie Jo Carpenter. On Sunday, November 27, she was driving home from church. As Connie passed the Mason County Golf Course, something caught her eye. In a now familiar description, she claimed to see a seven foot tall grey figure on the road side.

As Connie stared at the Mothman, he suddenly unfurled he wings, and took off straight up in the air, coming directly for her car. In Connie’s own words, as she stared at him through the windshield, ““Those eyes! They were very red and once they were fixed on me I couldn’t take my own eyes off them.”” By some miracle, Connie managed to avoid a wreck while unable to look away, and the Mothman soon flew out of sight.

Connie was traumatized by her encounter as well, and missed several weeks of school as a result. In a particularly bizarre twist, she developed a case of the eye disease conjunctivitis immediately afterward. This gave her eyes a red appearance, not unlike the Mothman’s infamous pair.

In the end, there were over a hundred reported run-ins with the Mothman, as well as accounts of other bizarre events I’ll definitely be covering in the future. Although many of the original witnesses have passed on, the Mothman still casts a long shadow across the town.

There is now a statue of him in Point Pleasant’s downtown and a museum right next door. Local restaurants offer menu items based on him, such as the Village Pizza Inn’s Mothman special. And every September, the town has a festival dedicated to the creature. Maybe one day, the Mothman will decide to drop in as the guest of honor. Or perhaps he’s still lurking in the TNT area, waiting to scare some unsuspecting soul who stumbles across his lair.

Sources:

Encounters with Flying Humanoids

The Inhumanoids