Charles Johnson, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Point Pleasant, Home of the Mothman

added29 August 2026

Between November 1966 and December 1967, people in this town at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha reported a winged figure some two metres tall with glowing red eyes — dozens of sightings. The first came from two couples driving past a disused explosives plant at night: the thing, they said, kept pace with their car at a hundred miles an hour. The reports stopped on 15 December 1967, when the Silver Bridge collapsed and forty-six people died — a coincidence that tied the Mothman to premonition for good. A steel statue of it stands downtown.

Getting thereDirections Flights Where to stay Tours

Suggest a correction

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first.

On the map

A legend about the whole city — the pin is approximate

38.85750, -82.12861

Point Pleasant Open in maps

Getting there

Booking links may be affiliate links: if you book something, the site earns a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

Sources

Nearest on the map

FictionalWhite

Candle Cove

Kris Straub's 2009 story, written entirely as a forum thread: several people reminisce about a children's puppet show a local station ran in the late sixties. The memories agree on the details, then get worse, and in the last post one participant's mother says there was no programme — the television showed static in those hours, and the child sat watching it. The form matters more than the plot: the text does not pretend to be a story, it pretends to be somebody else's conversation.

60 km away

CryptidOrange

Flatwoods and the Braxton County Monster

On 12 September 1952 three boys watched something bright come down on the hill behind the Fisher farm. Going up with one boy's mother and a few neighbours, the group made out a figure some ten feet tall in a torchbeam: a dark pleated body like a skirt, and a red face shaped like the ace of spades, lit from within. It smelled, they said, of metal and burning, and half the party was vomiting by morning. The Air Force put it down to a meteor and an owl. The locals never did.

129 km away

DebunkedWhite

The Newark Holy Stones

In 1860 the surveyor David Wyrick, digging in the ancient earthworks near Newark, Ohio, brought up a stone wedge with a Hebrew inscription, and a few months later a black stone case carrying a figure of Moses and the full text of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew. For those who held that the mounds were built by the lost tribes of Israel this was decisive. Hebraists pointed at once to the difficulty: the letters are not palaeo-Hebrew but the square script, which came into use a thousand years after the mounds, and they follow the shapes of a common Hebrew Bible then being printed in Ohio. A stone bowl found with them was later identified as a modern whetstone.

136 km away

More: Cryptid

CryptidYellow

The Kyshtym dwarf, Alyoshenka

In May 1996 Tamara Prosvirina, a resident of the village of Kaolinovy near Kyshtym in the Urals, brought home a creature about twenty-five centimetres long with an elongated skull and large eyes. She called it Alyoshenka, fed it, and told neighbours a son had come to live with her. She was taken to a psychiatric hospital; the body was filmed and photographed in the meantime, and that autumn it vanished without trace. What makes the case unusual is the sheer volume of material: video, photographs, dozens of interviews. Later genetic work points to human remains — most likely a premature infant with severe developmental defects.

CryptidYellow

The Goatman of Maryland

A half-goat, half-man with an axe, told of in Prince George's County outside Washington. The legend took shape in 1971, when a local paper ran a piece about a missing dog and rumours of a creature near Fletchertown Road; the article was picked up, and within a couple of years the story had acquired an escaped experiment from the agricultural research centre next door. The centre is real and still operating, which has helped the legend considerably — it has a building you can point at.

CryptidYellow

The Melon Heads

Creatures with disproportionately large heads living in the woods — a legend told in three American states at once, Ohio, Michigan and Connecticut, each with its own backstory. The Ohio version is the most widespread: supposedly children from a closed institution for hydrocephalus patients who escaped after a fire. No such institution and no such fire appear in the records. What is interesting is the rest: three unconnected regions invented almost the same image, and in all three it explains the same thing — that there is someone in the woods who was once hidden there.