B — partly documented

Mothman

the United States
Point Pleasant, Mason County, West Virginia (central Appalachia)

Mothman — humanoid figure about two metres tall, winged, with glowing red eyes set on the shoulders or at chest height, which flies without beating its wings and chases cars at very high speed.

In the TNT Area of Point Pleasant, among the disused munitions bunkers and a stationary car, a winged humanoid figure rises above the ground: the red eyes are at the height of the shoulders and chest, not in a face.

Variants and names: Mothman, a journalistic coinage modelled on Batman; the witnesses of November 1966 said «the Bird»
What is told: Humanoid figure about two metres tall, winged, with glowing red eyes set on the shoulders or at chest height, which flies without beating its wings and chases cars at very high speed. The sightings are concentrated in the TNT Area, a former Second World War munitions depot north of the town. In the later corpus the prophetic trait is added, by which it is said to appear before catastrophes.
What it was forthe author’s reading: A textbook case of contemporary legend and of its mechanisms of ostension, with over a thousand people going to the TNT Area in a mass practice of legend tripping. After the collapse of the Silver Bridge, on 15 December 1967 with 46 dead, the legend absorbs the disaster and reconfigures itself as an omen of death, entering very ancient folkloric categories. Today it has an explicit economic function in a post-industrial town.
Where it is attested: First sighting reported on 15 November 1966, with a report by deputy sheriff Millard Halstead; first newspaper coverage on 17 November 1966 by Mary Hyre in the Athens Messenger; John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies, 1975. Standard academic study: David Clarke, The Mothman of West Virginia: A Case Study in Legendary Storytelling, Sheffield Hallam University. Entry in the e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia.
Caution: It is a genuinely existing and extraordinarily well documented legend, but it is contemporary, from 1966, not traditional, and its canonical form is largely the work of a single author, Keel, in 1975: anyone who presents it as ancient Appalachian folklore is wrong. The collapse of the Silver Bridge has an established engineering cause, the failure of an eyebar, and the connection with the creature is narrative and later. Grade B is justified by the existence of serious academic studies of the legend as a legend, not of the creature.

Reality checkprevailing hypothesis

What has been established today.

The ornithological hypothesis is the most solid: the barred owl (Strix varia) and the barn owl (Tyto alba) are common in the Point Pleasant area, have a silent flight, perch on poles along the roads and fly in front of cars, and their eyes return an intense red eyeshine to headlights. Overestimation of size is a known perceptual error: a bird of prey 40-50 centimetres long, seen at night, without reference points for scale and at an indeterminate distance, is remembered as being as tall as a man. The proposal of a sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis), put forward at the time by the biologist Robert L. Smith of West Virginia University, is weaker because the species does not nest in West Virginia.

Audubon Magazine, investigation of the barred owl hypothesis; J. Nickell, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry; statements by R. L. Smith, West Virginia University, 1966

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.

Entries that share the motif, the phenomenon behind it or the history of their collection — not the geography.

Mothman

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