Mothman

Mothman is the name attached to reports of a large, winged, red-eyed figure around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, beginning in November 1966. The earliest widely circulated account followed an encounter near a former wartime ordnance area. Reports continued for roughly thirteen months, becoming one of the best-known modern American legends.

The Silver Bridge collapsed on December 15, 1967, killing 46 people. Later retellings linked the disaster to Mothman as warning or omen, but that association is folklore built around a documented tragedy, not evidence of causation. Bird misidentification and social reinforcement are among proposed explanations.

John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies and its film adaptation connect the figure to prediction and disaster more tightly than the earliest reports did. Festival culture has since made it a local mascot as well as a frightening omen.

• Point Pleasant Register, “Couples See Man-Sized Bird…Creature…Something,” November 16, 1966.
• Jack Daly, “Mothman, the Silver Bridge Collapse, and the Folklorization and Commemoration of Actual Events,” Journal of Scientific Exploration, March 31, 2023.