Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (32 page)

While people tend to focus on the creature itself, Mothman, there was a lot more going on at Point Pleasant. The book is more centered on what Keel felt was behind the activity:
ultraterrestrials
, a term he coined. Despite popular belief, he felt that paranormal events might have nothing to do with aliens, ghosts, or demons. Instead he postulated an advanced species living on earth, visible to us only under certain circumstances, or through a chain of coincidences. His main concern was whether they were here to observe or harm us. You can see where that might be difficult to get across in a mainstream movie, but I thought they did a pretty good job.

John Keel passed away as I was working on this book, on July 3, 2009, but I was very pleased to have been able to speak with him on a few occasions. The first time I was just one of the millions of people wanting to talk to him about Mothman. “Now that it’s all done . . .” I began.

“It’s
not
done,” he quickly corrected. “I’m still investigating.”

He came across to me as a bit of a stern professor. If you were wrong, he’d be quick to call you on it, slam you a bit, and then teach you something new. At the time, he was following some events he felt were typical of ultraterrestrial phenomena, a huge flock of birds that suddenly dropped dead, that sort of thing. I don’t believe he intended to publish a new book. He was in his late seventies, and sadly had it rough in terms of health. He’d agreed to come to UNIV-CON, but he had a stroke and couldn’t make it.

Sometime afterward, I had an interesting conversation with Curt Sutherly, an author/investigator, who was somewhat mentored by Keel. We discussed some similarities between the concept of a demon and an ultraterrestrial. Both worked invisibly, often through coincidences. Both communicated in hidden ways, influencing lives.

That gave me a new perspective. Demonic activity is malevolent from a human point of view, but was it possible it
wasn’t
a battle between good and evil, just another unknown form of nature? Animals devour one another, but in the end it completes a circle. Maybe what we perceive as demons are a form of ultraterrestrial that doesn’t have our best interest at heart.

I’m not saying I buy that concept completely. How would the energy of Jesus Christ figure in? Why would an ultraterrestrial flee when you invoke his name?

As for our Mothman episode, everyone was willing to take more chances with this one, have some fun, and put some wit into it. It begins with a shot of the warm beaches at Cancun, and then slam cuts to the snowstorm back at Penn State, where your humble narrator and his intrepid team of paranormal investigators were huddled against the cold. Despite the snow, the time was spring break, so we’d again gathered while school was out.

The briefings were always an homage to
The X Files
, but here we went all out. It was snowing, so I showed up wearing what many called my Mulder-style trench coat and actually did a slide show for the team.

We found a great place to shoot, with a nice roaring fire and a huge projection screen. There I was, flipping through photos of Bigfoot, the Yeti, Nessie—all the
classics
, and talking about Mothman.

In the episode, my phrasing was a little off so it was interpreted that I was saying they were all debunked. I don’t personally view
any
of those as debunked, even if certain evidence about them was. The 16mm Patterson film of Bigfoot was likely debunked when the guy who designed the suit and the guy who wore it came out and admitted it was faked. Likewise, the 1934 Loch Ness monster photo was debunked when one of the people involved admitted it was a hoax. Neither of which means Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster have been debunked.

I remember watching a scientific investigation of Loch Ness that had nothing to do with the monster. As they took sonar readings, they got some strange images of a large living object about the size of a prehistoric plesiosaur.

Those stories are far from over.

During the slide-show/briefing I went through the Mothman basics. The first sightings, written about dozens of times, took place November 16, 1966. Two married couples, Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette, were traveling late at night. As they passed an abandoned government factory, they saw two red lights by an old generator plant near the gate. Stopping to investigate, they realized the lights were actually the eyes of a large animal.

Roger Scarberry was quoted as saying it was “shaped like a man, but bigger, maybe six and a half or seven feet tall, with big wings folded against its back.” Terrified, they drove away as the creature chased them at incredible speeds. They passed a dead dog on the side of the road, which was later identified by the dog tags. It was from another town. The rumor was that it’d been killed, and the body looked as if something with talons had grabbed and flown off with it.

Over the next year, the creature was seen by dozens of witnesses. The area also had a ton of other paranormal activity, which Keel felt was related: UFOs, men in black, poltergeists, Bigfoot, and black panther sightings. There were even animal and human mutilations. Things culminated December 15, 1967, when the Silver Bridge, a major route into town that crossed the Ohio River, collapsed during rush hour, killing forty-six people. Mothman and other activity tapered off, leading to theories that the creature either caused the collapse, or had appeared as a warning. Since then, Mothman’s been sighted before tragedies such as Chernobyl and 9/11.

When we arrived for my first look at Point Pleasant, it reminded me of the town I was born in: Corry, Pennsylvania. Corry has always been a small town. There is a McDonald’s, a Walmart, and that’s about it. Most people commuted to a larger town for work. Point Pleasant was way smaller, and with a distinctly darker atmosphere. Of course, I was there because of Mothman, seeing things through that prism, but it was more than subjective.

I already talked about producer Alan LaGarde, who’d gotten his start in hard news. He’d gone undercover with street gangs and done some really wild news pieces. After scouting Point Pleasant, he came back and said, “This town is absolutely the most creepy place I’ve ever been to.”

The Mothman Museum was our first stop. The impressive collection included the original handwritten police reports and witness depositions. I read for myself how all four eyewitness accounts matched up perfectly. The owner, Jeff Wamsley, said he received e-mails from all over the globe, nearly every day. Mothman was very much alive, at least in people’s minds.

I was particularly excited to be able to interview two eyewitnesses, Linda Scarberry and Faye Dewitt. Linda was one of the original witnesses, while Faye and her brother claim they saw the creature a short while later, but didn’t go public about it until years later.

Sadly, Linda was pretty much known around town as not being all there. She was cared for by her family, who didn’t have a lot of money.

At the beginning of the interview, she says she saw Mothman “hundreds” of times: outside her apartment, outside her bedroom, in the yard. My sense was that the original sighting was so traumatic that afterward she thought she saw him everywhere.

I do believe she witnessed something that night four decades ago. After all, three other witnesses corroborated it. “It got its wings caught in the cables and couldn’t get loose and when it finally got loose it took off for the powerhouse. We took off down Route 62 and it was waiting on us at a curve,” Linda said.

She still seemed a little shocked about it, to the point where I was moved. That was after she’s told this story how many times?

Faye Dewitt was very much the opposite of Linda. She definitely had her wits about her, and man, that woman talked. She was one of the few interview subjects I had to keep reeling back into the conversation. According to her, back in 1966 her brother thought the original sighting was a hoax. He was set on driving to the power generator with her to prove everyone wrong, but then he ran into the creature himself.

“All I can remember is turning off the main road,” Faye said. “It was running alongside the car, looking in my side of the car window. All I caught were those red eyes.”

Some claim Faye isn’t a particularly trustworthy witness, that she wasn’t there at all at the time of the early sightings and came on the scene much later, but I never found any evidence of that. As Jeff Wamsley said in the episode, there were just too many different people seeing basically the same thing for it to be a hoax.

There was some variation in the descriptions, though. Some witnesses said the eyes were in the creature’s chest. Jeff also told us the sightings didn’t instantly stop after the bridge collapse. It was more like they’d tapered off as the bridge tragedy seized the town’s attention instead. At the time, his father collected newspapers and film footage about the collapse, all of which were on display at the museum.

In a town as small as Point Pleasant, the tragedy was extremely personal. Jeff remembered hearing a boom that rattled his house. Denny Bellamy, the gentleman in charge of the Visitor’s Bureau, remembered that a girl in his class at school was on the bridge and her body was never found. Heather managed to interview a number of people who were there and still lived in town, including a woman who’d lost her first husband and son on the bridge.

The team regrouped to compare notes. Having done some research, Katrina related how witnesses arriving at the scene of the bridge collapse said the victims in the water sounded like cows. They were so cold they couldn’t scream properly. The bridge itself was an eyebar chain suspension bridge. Built in 1928, it wasn’t made to handle the weight of modern rush hour traffic. Investigators said the entire collapse was caused by a tiny defect a tenth of an inch deep in one eyebar. It’s amazing how little it took to bring the whole thing down.

That night, we conducted Dead Time at the site of the collapse. Chip, who’d come along with us, sensed that at the time of the accident, the people involved knew they were going to die as soon as they went into the water.

“It’s quick,” he said. “I understand what’s happening. I’m cold. I’m scared. Boom, it’s over. If I die, I hope it’s that way.”

Strange phrasing,
if
I die—maybe he knows something the rest of us don’t?

A weird bird cry filled the air. We also saw a red light in the distance, but never thought it was Mothman. It was certainly a sad, somber spot.

Chip also sensed a Native American component, but it was no secret that the story of the Shawnee chief, Cornstalk, was a big part of Point Pleasant’s history. It was something everyone studied in school. He was buried in town, near the floodwall, and there’s a monument to him there. Some of the townspeople were actually more open to believing in the legendary “Cornstalk Curse” than they were in Mothman.

Heather interviewed a resident, Robert Lander, who gave us some of the background. Back in colonial days, many of the Shawnee tribe fought against the settlers, but not Chief Cornstalk. For years he abided by a treaty with them. In 1777, during the American Revolution, the British urged the Shawnee to attack the colonists. When Chief Cornstalk heard about this, he, his son, Elinipsico, and other friendly Shawnee went to the fort at Point Pleasant to warn them. For their kindness, they were arrested. When a colonial soldier was killed elsewhere by the Shawnee, some settlers broke into the jail and, seeking revenge, killed Cornstalk, his son, and the others. Legend has it that as he died, Cornstalk placed a curse on the land.

Historically, Point Pleasant has had more than its share of misfortune. Some of that is because the river nearly overflows regularly. In 1913 and 1937, flooding nearly destroyed the city. But there were other tragedies. A barge explosion killed six townsmen in 1953. The Silver Bridge collapsed in 1967. Then, in 1978 a freight train derailed, spilling toxic chemicals that poisoned the town’s water supply.

The Shawnee considered any spot where two rivers met sacred. Point Pleasant was at the intersection of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers, which is why so many natives fought to push the colonists out. This was also where they put their burial grounds. In West Virginia, Indian mounds were pretty common. Throughout the flat farmland there are dramatic hills, like bumps or pimples on the land, which turned out to be centuries-old burial mounds.

Shortly before WWII, the U.S. government built a secret explosives factory over an area that contained not one, but three vast burial grounds. This is where the original Mothman sightings occurred.

For the final part of our investigation, I took my team to this area. John Frick, a Mothman enthusiast, was our guide. He’d appeared on several shows dealing with Mothman and had extensive knowledge of the area and the subject. He was an invaluable person to have with us as we journeyed to this dark, overgrown area.

If the town felt foreboding, this was completely grim. We went at night, so it was hard to see clearly, but on the outskirts of the site, there was a warning sign saying the land was surrounded on all four sides by contaminated, polluted, poisoned aquifers. The sacred territory wasn’t only invaded; it was completely defiled. Just being there made me nervous, especially knowing the burial site alone could contain thousands of angry spirits.

As part of the secret base, the government had built a series of concrete igloos. They sat beyond some dense growth, so we made our way slowly. As we walked, Chip felt as if something knew we were there. There were feathers on the ground. Heather and Katrina saw some geese, and we heard rustling in the brush. Geese can get pretty loud while defending their territory.