The Urban Legend of MOTHMAN:
The first Mothman sightings occurred near the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966. On November 12 of that year, five men in the nearby town of Clendenin were digging a grave when they reported seeing a man-like shadowy figure fly over their heads from a nearby tree. Three days later on November 15, two young couples—Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette—told police they were chased in their car by a black figure with a 10-foot wingspan and glowing red eyes. This also happened near Point Pleasant, and by a former World War II munitions site called “TNT Area."
More and more reported sightings rolled in over the course of the next year. The first mention of him in a newspaper came in the Point Pleasant Register on November 16, 1966, with the headline: “Couples See Man-Sized Bird… Creature… Something.” Later an anonymous Ohio newspaper copy editor dubbed him “Moth Man,” likely to sound similar to Batman.
Many locals believed the Mothman lived in a vacant nuclear power plant on the outskirts of town, in an area once home to a top-secret government facility where nuclear weapons were tested. Some tales even tell of a witches son, who killed her at birth. Was the Mothman some product of government tampering? A winged manifestation borne from weapons testing? Imaginations ran wild and created a legend!
