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Mystery of the Mothman

20 Jun

Perhaps the most widely known and talked about modern American myth is that of the Mothman, a creature first documented in the late 1960s. Since then, the Mothman has been spotted countless times in the United States. Some say it’s a harbinger of cataclysmic events. Others say it’s an alien life form with connections to UFOs and Men in Black. Many thing it has a more practical explanation, is a hoax, or is the product of mass hysteria. Whatever the case, the Mothman continues to pop up in real life and pop culture and is one of the more intriguing examples of modern American folklore – something where a quick Google search can’t dissuage its origins; something that permeates the minds of the people inflicted and the communities that branch off of them; a thing that lingers and re-manifests, jostling memories of the first time it crept from the depths of nowhere and made itself known. As legend has it, on November 12, 1966, in Clendenin, West Virginia, a group of gravediggers working in a cemetery spotted something strange. They glanced up from their work as something huge soared over their heads. It was a massive figure that was moving rapidly from tree to tree. The gravediggers would later describe this figure as a “brown human being.” This was the first reported sighting of what would come to be known as the Mothman, an elusive creature that remains as mysterious as it was on the night that a few frightened witnesses first laid eyes on it. The Point Pleasant Mothman is a local legend that over the years has gained worldwide fame. Author John Keel popularized local folklore about the creature with his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies. The book was later adapted into a 2002 feature film with the same title, starring Richard Gere. Some believe The Mothman is a bad omen , only appearing when catastrophe is about to strike. Whether the pictures are real or not, the benefits the legend of the Mothman brings to the town of Point Pleasant, it would seem, are very real.

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