Something Was Watching

On the night of November 15, 1966, two young couples were driving outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when they encountered something they could not explain.

Near the abandoned remains of a World War II explosives plant, they reported seeing a strange, man-shaped figure—tall, winged, and with enormous red eyes. They fled. Whatever they had seen, they said, followed them.

By the next morning, their story was in the newspaper.

But the encounter near the TNT Area was not happening in isolation. Strange lights had already been reported over the Ohio Valley. Other witnesses would soon come forward. And over the next thirteen months, the story surrounding Point Pleasant would become stranger, darker, and ultimately inseparable from tragedy.

In the first episode of The Mothman Files, we return to where the story began: the original witnesses, the landscape surrounding Point Pleasant, and the night something appeared to be watching from the darkness.

Shadows of Appalachia
Season One: The Mothman Files

Hosted by Tyler J. Sharp
 An Infinitus Production

Real places. Strange stories. Lasting questions.

Transcript

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In nineteen sixty six, something happened in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. And actually that's not quite right. A lot of things happened. People reported strange lights moving across the night sky. Televisions and radios allegedly behaved strangely. Dogs became agitated. People reported seeing unidentified aircraft. And some residents claimed they were visited by strange men. Men who asked questions, men who seemed particularly interested in what people had seen. And then there was the thing with the wings. A human-shaped figure, six, maybe seven feet tall, gray, winged, with two enormous red eyes. On November fifteenth, nineteen sixty-six, four young people said they encountered this creature near an abandoned military explosives complex outside Point Pleasant. They fled. They said it followed them. They reported it to the police. And then other people began seeing things too. Over the next thirteen months, Point Pleasant became the center of something that is difficult to categorize even now. Was it mass hysteria? A misidentified animal? Cold War paranoia? A UFO? An elaborate collection of unrelated coincidences that later became fused into a single legend? Or did something genuinely extraordinary happen here? Because there is something else you should know. The place where those first witnesses encountered the creature wasn't simply an abandoned factory. It had belonged to the United States government. During the Second World War, thousands of acres north of Point Pleasant were transformed into the West Virginia Ordnance Works, a sprawling federal explosives facility built to manufacture TNT for the American war effort. By 1966, much of it had been abandoned. Concrete bunkers remained scattered throughout the woods. Old roads disappeared into wetlands. Industrial structures sat empty. And according to witnesses, something else was out there. But the reports wouldn't remain confined to those woods. They would become entangled with UFO sightings, men in black, a mysterious figure named Inred Cold, strange telephone calls, warnings, prophecies, and eventually death. On December fifteenth, nineteen sixty-seven, at approximately five o'clock in the evening, the silver bridge connecting Point Pleasant to Ohio collapsed into the freezing water of the Ohio River. Thirty-one vehicles went down. Forty-six people lost their lives. And afterward, the most famous period of Mothman sightings came to an end. A coincidence? Certainly possible, but there's a problem. There are a lot of coincidences in this story. My name is Tyler James Sharp. I grew up near Point Pleasant. These aren't places I've only read about. I've driven these very roads. I've walked through this town. And for most of my life I've heard some version of this story. But I realized something. The version we tell now isn't quite the story that unfolded here in nineteen sixty six. It's cleaner, safer, sterilized, almost charming. The real story is considerably stranger and considerably darker. This is Shadows of Appalachia, Season One, The Mothman Files. If you visit Point Pleasant today, you won't have any trouble finding Mothman. He's everywhere. There's a twelve foot metallic statue of him downtown. There's a museum devoted to him. There's an annual festival that brings thousands of visitors into this little town at the confluence of the Ohio and Canal Rivers. You can buy Mothman shirts, Mothman coffee, Mothman Christmas ornaments, Mothman stuffed animals. You can take pictures with him. Mothman has become a mascot, a celebrity, even, strangely enough, kind of lovable. But I want you to forget all of that. Because none of it existed in 1966. There was no festival, no statue, no mythology, and most importantly, there was no expectation that something strange was supposed to be living in those woods. So let's go back. Tuesday, november fifteenth, nineteen sixty six. Point Pleasant was a small Appalachian River town. Lyndon Johnson was president. The Vietnam War was escalating. The U.S. and Soviet Union were locked into the Cold War. And Americans were living through an extraordinary period of fascination and anxiety about unidentified objects in American skies. But north of Point Pleasant was something else. Something very real. Something left behind by another war. The old West Virginia Ordinance Works, locally known as the TNT Area. During World War II, the federal government acquired thousands of acres of land north of Point Pleasant. The West Virginia Ordinance Works manufactured explosives, TNT. The landscape was transformed. Industrial buildings were raised, rail lines installed, roads built, storage facilities, and enormous reinforced concrete bunkers built to contain the explosives. Then the war ended. Production stopped. Nature began reclaiming the land. By the 1960s, the place had become a strange mixture of abandoned military infrastructure, woods, ponds, wetlands. And that's important. Because before we talk about anything supernatural, you need to understand the setting. Imagine driving there at night. I have. No streetlights, trees on either side, your headlights catching concrete structures for a few seconds before they disappear behind you. Roads built for a wartime installation that no longer exists. Buildings nobody uses anymore. Bunkers disappearing beneath the vegetation. It's November. It's dark. There aren't many reasons to be out there. But on november fifteenth, four people were Roger and Linda Scarberry, Steve and Mary Millette. Two young married couples. They were riding together in Roger Scarberry's nineteen fifty seven Chevlet. They approached an abandoned power plant, and somewhere near that building they noticed something. Two red lights. No, not lights eyes. Whatever was standing near the buildings was large. According to the witnesses, roughly six or seven feet tall, grey, broad, human like, but not human, and folded behind it were wings. The four watched it, and it watched them. Then Roger Scarberry hit the accelerator. The Chevrolet tore away from the abandoned plant, and for a moment, perhaps that was it. Something strange in the darkness, a shadow. Get back to town, tell somebody, laugh about it eventually. Except the thing didn't stay behind. It rose into the air, and followed them. They would later say they reached extraordinary speeds on the road toward Point Pleasant. The figure remained with them. No obvious flapping of wings, no apparent difficulty keeping pace, just following. Imagine looking through that windshield, the road appearing a few hundred feet at a time, your headlights racing across the pavement, and somewhere above you something you cannot identify is keeping up. They finally reached town, and here's one of the details I find most compelling. They didn't wait. They didn't tell the story twenty years later. They didn't write a book. They didn't post it online, there was no internet. They went straight to the police that night. Deputy Millard Halstead listened to their story, and whatever he thought about a giant winged creature with glowing red eyes, he apparently believed that these four people were genuinely frightened. Authorities went back toward the area. They found no creature. But the four witnesses had put something into motion, because by morning Point Pleasant knew. The Point Pleasant Register ran the story. The headline has become legendary. Couple see man sized bird Creature something. Creature something. They didn't have a name for it, not yet. But soon they would. There are perfectly ordinary explanations worth considering. An owl, a large crane, some other birds seen under darkness and unusual conditions. The darkness, fear, suggestion, memory. And as this series continues, we're going to take those explanations very seriously. But there's a reason the Point Pleasant story has become something much bigger. Because the creature wasn't the only thing people were reporting. There were lights, objects in the sky, UFO reports. And these reports were not occurring in a cultural vacuum. Across America, the 1960s were an extraordinary period for UFO sightings. The U.S. Air Force was actively investigating reports through Project Blue Book. Think about that. The official position wasn't simply that Americans were imagining everything. The U.S. military had an actual program collecting and evaluating reports of unidentified flying objects. That does not mean extraterrestrial spacecraft were visiting America. It means that amid the Cold War, unidentified objects in American airspace were considered worthy of military attention. And in 1966, the Ohio Valley had its own strange reports. Lights in the sky, unusual objects, and eventually accounts that would blur the boundaries between the creature people were seeing on the ground and whatever people believed they were seeing in the skies. Then came the visitors. Some witnesses and investigators associated with the Point Pleasant events would later describe encounters with strange men, men who seemed interested in UFO witnesses, men whose behavior didn't seem quite right. Their clothing, their mannerisms, their questions, in UFO folklore, they would become known as the men in black. And here we have to be very careful, because this is the point where history, testimony, folklore, and mythology begin bleeding into one another. There is no document sitting in a government archive that says send the men in black to Point Pleasant. If there would were, this would be a very different podcast. But there were claims, and one man became obsessed with them. His name was John Keel. Keel was a journalist and investigator from New York, and as reports accumulated around Point Pleasant, he began spending time here, interviewing witnesses, following UFO reports, looking for patterns, and becoming increasingly convinced that whatever was happening wasn't simply about a flying creature. Keel would eventually write about bizarre telephone calls, apparent predictions, strange visitors, UFO phenomena, electrical disturbances, and entities that seemed capable of presenting themselves in different forms. And then there was Indrid Cold. We're not going there yet, because once we open that door, this story gets considerably darker. For roughly thirteen months, strange reports continued around Point Pleasant, and hanging over everything that happened afterward is one fact we cannot escape. This story has an ending. December fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven, Friday evening. Christmas was a mere ten days away. Traffic was crossing the Silver Bridge between Point Pleasant, West Virginia and Kanauga, Ohio. Around five o'clock, the bridge failed. Thirty-one vehicles plunged toward the Ohio River. Forty-six people died. Some were never recovered. The engineering explanation for the disaster is real. It is documented. The bridge suffered a catastrophic structural failure involving one of its eyebars. There is no engineering mystery requiring Mothman, and I want to make that absolutely clear. But folklore isn't engineering. And almost immediately another question began attaching itself to the tragedy. What if the sightings had been a warning? What if people hadn't been seeing something that came to cause disaster? But something that appeared before it. A harbinger. It's an unsettling idea, but there's something even more unsettling. After the bridge collapsed, the great wave of Mothman reports was essentially over. Thirteen months from the encounter near the abandoned government explosives facility through UFO reports, strange visitors, warnings, and other stories that became increasingly difficult to explain, to December fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven, and then silence. So here's what we're going to do. We're going back, not to the Mothman of festivals and movies and souvenir shops, back to Point Pleasant, before anyone knew how the story ended. We're going to separate what we know from what people said, and what people said from what came later. We're going to look at government records, newspaper reports, witness testimony, UFO investigations, the old ordinance works, John Keel, The Men in Black, Injured Cold, The Silver Bridge. And one question that will follow us through every episode. What actually happened here? Maybe nothing supernatural happened at all. Maybe four frightened people saw an owl. Maybe the UFO reports were Cold War nerves. Maybe the strange men were ordinary men who became stranger with every retelling. Maybe John Keel connected dots that were never connected in the first place. Maybe the bridge collapse was exactly what investigators concluded it was, a terrible structural failure, preceded by thirteen months of completely unrelated folklore. Maybe so. But before you decide, you should hear the rest of the story. Because there are things we haven't talked about yet, things witnesses claimed happened inside their homes, telephone calls that supposedly came from people who couldn't have made them. A smiling stranger who called himself cold. Warnings that seemed meaningless until something happened. And people who believed someone or something was watching them. Next time, we're going back into the TNT area. And there's something you need to understand about that place. Long before anyone reported seeing a monster there, the U.S. government had already decided it was a good place to keep secrets. I'm Tyler Sharp. This is The Shadows of Appalachia, and this is the Mothman Files.