Shadows of Appalachia

For more than sixty years, the story of the Mothman has grown. Four frightened witnesses became newspaper headlines. The headlines became a local mystery. The mystery drew investigators. Strange lights, unusual visitors, telephone calls and apparent warnings became part of the story. Then the Silver Bridge fell—and everything that had happened in Point Pleasant seemed to acquire a terrible new meaning. But what happens if we take the story apart? Remove the name. Remove the later mythology. C...

On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge was crowded with ordinary Friday evening traffic. Christmas was ten days away. People were heading home from work, shopping, visiting family, and waiting impatiently in traffic above the Ohio River. At approximately 4:58 p.m., the bridge collapsed. Forty-six people died. For thirteen months before the disaster, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, had been at the center of something strange. There were reports of a winged creature with glowing red eyes. Unexp...

By 1967, the Mothman was no longer the strangest thing being reported around Point Pleasant. Lights appeared in the sky. Telephones behaved strangely. Television sets flickered. Cars reportedly lost power. Unusual calls arrived. And some of the people at the center of the story began to wonder whether these seemingly unrelated events were forming a pattern. Among them was Mary Hyre, a respected local journalist whose telephone had become something of a clearinghouse for strange reports. But M...

The Mothman was frightening. But people could drive away from the Mothman. The visitors knew where they lived. On November 2, 1966—less than two weeks before the encounter that would make Mothman famous—West Virginia salesman Woodrow Derenberger claimed that something extraordinary happened to him on a lonely road near Parkersburg. According to Derenberger, a strange craft blocked the highway. A smiling man emerged. He communicated without appearing to speak and introduced himself by a name t...

Six miles north of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, lies a strange landscape of woods, wetlands, abandoned roads, and concrete structures slowly disappearing into the earth. Locals know it simply as the TNT Area. During World War II, thousands of acres of farmland were transformed into the West Virginia Ordnance Works, a sprawling industrial complex built to manufacture TNT for the war effort. When the war ended, the plant closed. Much of the land eventually returned to nature—but the factory l...

On the night of November 15, 1966, two young couples were driving outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when they encountered something they could not explain. Near the abandoned remains of a World War II explosives plant, they reported seeing a strange, man-shaped figure—tall, winged, and with enormous red eyes. They fled. Whatever they had seen, they said, followed them. By the next morning, their story was in the newspaper. But the encounter near the TNT Area was not happening in isolatio...

In 1966, something strange began happening in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia. There were reports of strange lights, unexplained visitors, mysterious telephone calls—and a towering winged figure with glowing red eyes that would become known around the world as the Mothman. But the creature was only the beginning. In Season One of Shadows of Appalachia, West Virginia native Tyler J. Sharp returns to the original reports, the people who lived through them, the stories that came later, ...