Mothman, the Scourge of the World?

You can’t be into the “weird stuff” in the world for long before you come across mention of the Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

It’s a standard cryptid if you’re in those circles. It’s part of a vast conspiracy if you lean that way. It’s connected with UFOs if space if your thing.

Pretty much no matter what angle you come at the paranormal from, Mothman is eventually part of it.

And if you start watching shows about these things, every one of them will eventually have an episode about it. Maybe more than one.

So how does one weird thing from a small West Virginia town end up so important to everyone?

Two Main Schools of Thought

A friend of mine pointed me toward a Mothman episode of the National Geographic series Atlas of Cursed Places. It was pretty clear right off the top the angle they were going for with their coverage of it.

(I’ll note that I wasn’t actually able to finish watching this, as the NatGeo web player just kind of… stopped… about halfway through. If I didn’t work in website development, I’d be tempted to make the case that there’s some sort of conspiracy at play. But, well, I know crappy technology when I see it.)

Mothman as the Villain

This show had decided to go with one of the two main schools of thought about telling the Mothman story: Make Mothman the main character. Everything that goes on, it’s connected to Mothman. Mothman is the boogey man. Mothman gets all up in your house and stares at you when you sleep. Mothman stole your dog. Old Native American curse? That’s how you got Mothman bothering you.

It’s not hard to pull that narrative together. Really, it’s the first one I was introduced to decades ago, so it’s got staying power, too.

This Mothman-centric view of things makes for some good stories. You can still pull interviews with people who say amazing things that will terrify and titillate the audience. It makes everything make a bit of sense, too. Because even if it doesn’t explain anything about the Mothman itself, it certainly explains why so much weird stuff happens in rural areas.

Right?

Well… yes and no.

A Good Story Isn’t Always True

The thing is that a lot of the connections drawn kind of fall apart if you actually poke at them with any force of sensibility.

West Virginia, in general, has long been a coal mining state. Coal mining is, historically, really kind of dangerous. So if you’re trying to tie Mothman to a decades-long series of mining disasters and tragic accidents… you’re probably wasting your time.

Because there are dozens of much more practical explanations for what’s gone on. Key among them is basic human greed. The mine owners often put profit above the lives and well-being of their workers. There’s no need for anything paranormal to be involved.

Some of the other stories can be explained easily by things like night terrors (in the NatGeo show, there was an interview with a guy who very clearly described what anyone with a passing knowledge of night terrors could tell was just that… except, because it was big news at the time, instead of the standard shadowy figure staring threateningly at you, this one was overlayed with the image of Mothman that was popular at the time).

The biggest disaster Mothman is connected with is the collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant. You’ll hear it told that people spotted Mothman on the bridge right before it collapsed.

Thing is… those stories all started circulating long after the bridge collapse. At the time, no one–even the people who’d been chasing Mothman and other sightings for months–had any reports of sightings on the Silver Bridge. It would seem that the direct connection happened either through imaginative memories or by completely mis-reading John Keel’s book, The Mothman Prophecies (more on that in a minute).

So, while it may make for a good story to connect Mothman to some sort of curse or as some sort of harbinger of ill tidings, it seems to be just that: a story. The idea falls apart when you pull all the known facts together.

Still, as dark as it may be, it’s a bit more comforting than the other option.

Mothman as Part of the Cosmic Gestalt

While the papers in West Virginia and surrounding areas were running stories about the Mothman and the other strange lights in the sky around Point Pleasant back in 1967, John Keel was running back and forth between New York and West Virginia (and elsewhere) chasing down a string of weirdness.

He wrote about all of it in his 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies.

If Mothman hadn’t already been part of a couple of sub-cultures at that point, the book certainly ensured that it would be from that point forward.

But Keel didn’t tell a story that revolved around Mothman so much as he pieced together a larger, much more strange and disturbing picture of things afoot, of which the Mothman of Point Pleasant was only one small piece of strangeness among many.

We’ll talk about that more next time around…