Mothman Musings

When I was a teenager, I used to listen to Jean Shepherd late at night on WOR radio in New York. After Shepherd, around midnight, Long John Nebel would come on and interview alien abductees and the like. Nebel´s show first caught my attention because of its opening music, "Theme from the Forbidden Planet." It was the first synthesizer music I´d heard and I found it enchanting. Sometimes, after the music was over, I´d listen for a few minutes in awe at the kooks who would come on and describe their encounters with UFOs and creatures from out of space.

A frequent guest on the show was a guy named John A. Keel, an investigator of paranormal activities. I may or may not have heard Keel on the radio back then. I don´t remember. It would have been around 1960 or 61. I first learned of Keel from the credits to the 2002 movie "The Mothman Prophecies," directed by Mark Pellington, when I watched it for the first time on DVD a few years ago. Keel wrote the book of the same name, upon which the movie was based. It is a work of creative nonfiction written in the mid 1970s that made the New York Times bestseller list.

The movie, which is set in the present, is about sightings of a giant birdlike creature that foretells a disaster in the small Ohio River city of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Despite finding it a bit disjointed and the plot hard to follow, I liked the movie enough to rent it a second time. I guess I wanted to know why I liked it. After my second viewing, I came to the conclusion that it was because the director managed to elevate the level of suspense by never actually letting you see the monster, something that is rare after the onslaught of Freddy Krueger and other monsters that you just can´t escape nowadays. Another thing I liked was that the book was based on events that were supposed to have actually occurred along the Ohio River in the mid 60s.

After seeing the movie for the second time, I got out my map and discovered that Point Pleasant is only a few hours´ drive from where I live in Yellow Springs, Ohio (cue the organ). That was a couple years ago and it got me started talking about a road trip with my friend, the writer Jerry Holt. Among other things, Holt writes place oriented historical fiction, especially about Ohio. He had lived for a time in a small city along the Ohio River that was very much like Point Pleasant. He had also seen the movie and, as soon as I brought it up, he was hooked on the idea. Unfortunately, Holt moved away before it ever came about. It was going to be hard to find anyone else with the same enthusiasm for such a whimsical journey - certainly not my wife.

I edit a local blog called "A Yellow Springs Blog," dedicated to news, gossip and opinion. It has become a community forum for ideas of local interest. This summer, one of my readers suggested occasional posts on interesting daytrips. Shortly after we started the feature, and much to my surprise, someone alerted us to the annual Mothman Festival that was going to take place in Point Pleasant on the third weekend in September. I had originally envisioned a drive into a creepy town where suspicious locals would deny knowing anything about a mothman and that I would find myself investigating some kind of cover up. Now, it turns out, the townsfolk have figured out a way to make a buck off the legend. I should have known. However, there was an upside to this unforeseen turn of events. It wouldn´t be too hard to get my wife to go to the festival. She loves festivals.

The visit to the Mothman´s turf was about as hokey as I had come to imagine it would be. The festival was tiny and the rainy weather didn´t help. The high points were two museums, the Point Pleasant River Museum and the World´s Only Mothman Museum, and standing in a drizzling rain looking out over the river to where the Silver Bridge once stood. These attractions were almost enough to keep my wife from griping. However, whenever I bring the trip up in conversation with friends, she adds that she is never going back again.

There are four aspects to the Mothman myth: Mothman sightings, UFOs, men-in-black, and a tragic bridge collapse. It started one night in 1966 with the sighting of a large birdlike creature at an abandoned WWII munitions storage facility near Point Pleasant, WV. This was followed by a number of other sightings, all by credible witnesses. Around the same period there were numerous UFO sightings in and around the town. Soon there were odd looking men in black suits combing the town, trying to dissuade the UFO witnesses. 13 months after the first Mothman sighting, the Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio River from Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed killing 46 people. In the minds of many residents the events were connected. Before the bridge tragedy, there were phone calls from an eerie voice warning some people that there was going to be a disaster on the Ohio River. One woman dreamt of seeing Christmas presents floating in the water. The day before the collapse, witnesses claim to have seen men-in-black climbing around the bridge, as if they were looking for something. As rescuers were pulling people from the water, they noticed gaily wrapped presents bobbing on the surface. It was ten days before Christmas. There were no further Mothman sightings after the disaster.

As with all movies that are based on a book, whether it be fiction or nonfiction, much has to be left out or compressed and characters combined to fit the story into a two-hour time frame. That was certainly the case with the movie version of "The Mothman Prophecies" and it surely suffers from that. Keel´s book is as much about UFO sightings and other paranormal events from all over the world as it is about the events in Point Pleasant in 1966 and 67. If you haven´t read the book before seeing the movie, you are not likely to realize that the Mothman is not the same entity that is making the mysterious phone calls (presumably the poltergeist like men in black). Sadly, but understandably, there are no men in black and there are no UFOs in the movie.

What the movie does well is maintain an aura of suspense and irony. In the book, the telephone callers predict events, but with inaccuracies in an apparent attempt to discredit UFO witnesses when they try to warn people. Hence the confusion about the prediction of a disaster on the Ohio River, which was first thought by the movie´s protagonist (played by Richard Gere) to be a chemical factory explosion. Well done. The dream about the Christmas presents was also handled well, with an added twist. "Wake up number 37," a voice tells the police woman who is dreaming it. In the movie, she ends up in the river when the bridge collapses, but is saved. Later she learns that 36 people died. A nice touch, I thought.

As I read the marker at the site in Point Pleasant where the Sliver Bridge once stood, I couldn´t help but wonder what the townsfolk think about the connection that has been drawn to the Mothman sightings. Forty-plus years later, many of them are still suffering from the loss of loved ones on that cold December night. The bridge memorial makes no mention of the Mothman. And the plaque at the Mothman monument a few blocks away makes no mention of the bridge. Good taste and a sense of reverence dictate that. There are many theories connecting the two events. One is that for a year-and-a-half the residents of Point Pleasant suffered from a mass hysteria that came to an end when a terrible tragedy brought them all to their senses. My theory is that we all love a scary story. That´s why I read the book for the first time, and then watched the movie for a third time on Halloween night.