Once every year, thousands of people come from across the United States and from other countries to visit this little town in West Virginia with the population of around three thousand people, to check out the site of the most well documented crypted sighting of all times, the Mothman.

Hello Mothman?

Where is the Mothman?

Rogers Scarberry, Linda Scarberry and two others.

There were two young couples from Point Pleasant driving around late at night on November fifteenth, nineteen sixty six, at around round eleven thirty pm, near the T and T area, which is a large stretch of eighty three hundred acres of land north of Point Pleasant.

It had already had a reputation for being eerie with rumors of strange lights, noises, wild animals even before the Mothman stories, full of abandoned concrete igloos, underground tunnels, and overgrown forests.

The couples were driving along Round sixty two near the old T and T Plant and suddenly their headlights illuminated a large gray man shaped figure standing near the road by the old North Power Plant building.

They described it as six to seven feet tall, human leg but with wings that folded against this back like a large bird, glowing red eyes about two inches wide six inches apart, and a strange hypnotic or as morizing quality.

Frightened, they stepped away, the creature took flight, spreading its wings about ten feet wide, and chased their car down Route sixty two, reportedly keeping pace at speeds of nearly one hundred miles an hour.

It followed them all the way into Point Pleasant before veering off into the surrounding woods.

Shaken by what they had just seen, the four went directly to the sheriff's office and told Millard Halstead what they had seen.

Halstead knew them personally and said that they were not prone to making them stories.

They were pale, visibly frightened and adamant about what they had witnessed.

Sheriff George Johnson and Halstead drove out there to the teen inter area with them that same night, but found nothing unusual except for odd scratch marks in a dust cloud near the old power plant.

The story was then reported to the Point Pleasant Register the next day, November sixteenth, nineteen sixty six, under the headline couple seas man sized bird.

The article was the first time the story went public and From then on, sightings exploded all around Point Pleasant.

Over the next year, over one hundred reported sightings followed, some involving multiple witnesses.

Many came from the T and T area, which became the home of the Mothman creature.

But this small town just is in the spot of the Mothman sightings.

It's also home to a very rich history.

According to some historians, the first battle of the Revolutionary War was fought in Point Pleasant, many disasters, including floods, the deadliest bridge collapse in US history, large military bases, and is also the town where some of the first transorbitales were performed on over one hundred and fifty people.

So stay tuned.

West Virginia is no stranger to the cryptid phenomenon or the cryptid sightings they have.

The Flatwood Monster reported in flat Woods, Braxton County in nineteen fifty two, mini reports all over West Virginia of Bigfoot like creatures, dog man reports, hell hounds, wampus cats, and the Smiling Man, which is synonymous with the most famous of the bunch, the Mothmaan, which has an entire event held in its name.

The annual Mothman Festival takes over the small populated town once a year in September, and I stopped by it this year to have a look around.

The downtown area was packed with people.

It was hard to walk in some areas.

But what a lot of people don't know is that this town has a very rich history, not just with the month, but the first battle of the Revolutionary War was fought in Point Pleasant.

Now some will argue this, but if you ask any local historians, they will tell you that the Battle of Point Pleasant, which took place on October tenth, seventeen seventy four, in what is now known as Point Pleasant, West Virginia, was part of Lord Dunmore's War, a conflict between the Colonial Virginia Militia and the Shawnee Native forces led by Chief Cornstock.

And they will tell you that this battle should be considered the first battle of the American Revolutionary War.

But officially it was Lexington in Concord in Massachusetts on April nineteenth, seventeen seventy five.

But the Battle of Point Pleasant happened just a few months before the Lexington and Concord.

But hey, it would be too much to go back and rewrite all those history books, right, But This is where the story really begins with Point Pleasant is with the colonial forces and the Shawnee Native Americans led by Chief Cornstock in this Battle of Point Pleasant.

Now, the story goes that right before Chief Cornstock's brutal death, being tied to wagons and ripped apart limb by a limb, he put a curse on the town of Point Pleasant and doomed the town to tragedy for as long as people live there, which led the locals to believe that this story had some sort of backing during the Great Flood of nineteen thirty seven, in January of nineteen thirty seven, the Ohio River overflowed its banks after weeks of heavy rain water.

The levels crusted at over fifty five feet over Point Pleasant.

Thousands were displays, businesses were destroyed, and the entire town was nearly underwater.

It was so bad that the people Point Pleasant decided in nineteen thirty eight to get funding from Congress to construct a permanent floodwall along the Ohio River under the Flood Control Act of nineteen thirty eight.

The actual construction of the Point Pleasant Floodwall began in the late nineteen forties and was completed in the fifties.

The system included concrete walls, levees, and pumping stations designed to protect the town from a repeat of the nineteen thirty seven disaster, barricading the entire town with huge floodwalls that still stand to this very day.

But it wasn't the only disaster, along with many other floods that subsequently happened after that flood that wreaked havoc on the town, the Great Bridge collapse on December fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven, at approximately five pm during rush hour.

The incident resulted in the deaths of forty six individuals, with two bodies never recovered, known as the deadliest bridge collapse in US history.

Now, many people blame the Mothman for the collapse of the Silver Bridge, saying that it was an omen or a warning to the town, because after the Silver Bridge collapse, the Mothman was never cited again in Point Pleasant Now.

The official explanation of the Silver Bridge collapse was that the bridge was a chain suspension bridge made of eyebars, which means that there's flat steel bars with holes in the ends that connected all the bars with pins, and one of the eyebars failed in the suspension chain that calls the bridge to collapse in less than twenty seconds during rush hour, plunging vehicles into the Ohio River and killing forty six people.

Was a very tragic event, so close to Christmas as well, and I don't really believe that the town ever really recovered after that.

Now the lore goes, this is just lore.

It's rumor that the state sent in scuba divers to try and locate the missing bodies, and when they got in, they came up very quickly and looked very shocked and startled by what they had just seen.

And the rumor was that what they witnessed got them to their core.

The men instead that they had seen fish the size of school buses down there, and that they refused to search anymore.

Hey, that's just the rumor.

Don't quote me on it, just from what I've heard.

But it's not the only time Point Pleasant has been subjected to these kind of mega animals weird mutations.

It's long been rumored about the teen the area and the large forested area outside the outskirts of town where the mothman was first spotted had weird discolored wildlife.

Three and four eyed frogs glow in the dark fish and this was due to contamination and pollution of the lakes and ponds in the T and T area.

So in nineteen forty two, the army began construction and operation to produce T and T munitions and storage of sub munitions and explosives such as bombs for the war effort.

They also used the eighty three hundred acres for military training as well.

And then they would dump all of that radioactive material and waste and undesirable materials into the ponds and the lakes of the T and T area, polluting the eighty three hundred acre site.

This area is huge.

You could quite literally get lost out there.

Some parts of the TNT area is still heavily polluted and is under surveillance.

They would store their ammunition in these large underground igloos so that enemy forces can see it from above.

These iglu like structures are all over the place in the TNT area.

I don't think that there is even an accurate account of how many there actually are.

Some of them have sunken into the lakes and into the ponds, and some are still locked can't get into them, but others are open for the tourists and the locals, and you can go inside them and look around.

The walls are around two feet thick, very echo in them.

You can hear the slightest bit of movement inside them.

I couldn't imagine this being the most practical way to store AMMO and explosive.

You could drop a box of anything.

Heck, you can even drop a pin or a pencil and your ears would be ringing, let alone a stick of dynamite going off in there.

That's precisely what actually happened around ten years ago.

One of the igloes blew up.

It launched a huge fireball into the sky, and it blew the whole top of the igloo off.

And it was never really said how or why it happened or who did it, but it was rumored that someone was storing explosives inside the bunker, or some leftover explosives from the army that was still inside that exploded.

It's really strange, but this is what's left of it.

The entire top has been completely blown off.

I would not recommend trying to get into one of these locked iglues.

There might still be dynamite and TNT stored in them.

It's also been rumored that there's miles and miles of underground tunnels beneath the t and the area that's been sealed off and concreted over so that no one can get in.

There's been people that's claimed to know how to get in through a sewer system leading to a creek from the Ohio River.

But if there is, it would be damn near impossible to find.

No one could tell you where the entrance is.

But I have seen pictures of an above ground hatch entrance that's been sealed off, So something has to be under there.

Whether it's an extensive underground system, who knows at this point, but I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that there is something underground in the TNT area.

Now for the human experimentations that was going on in Mason County, Lake and State Hospital was established in nineteen twenty six right outside of Point Pleasant but still in Mason County and housed in African American population.

It was one of the only two known psychiatric institutions in the United States that was entirely rammed by black staff and served an all black patient population.

Doctor Walter Freeman, the father of the transorbital lobotomies, performed some of his first procedures at Laken State Hospital during the early nineteen fifties.

This was a part of a state sponsored lobotomy initiative.

The programs, sometimes referred to as Operation ice Pick, involved Freedman conducting two hundred and twenty eight procedures over a two week period in West Virginia in nineteen fifty two.

These surgeries were performed using the transorbital method, where an instrument resembling an ice pick was inserted through the eye socket to sever connections in the frontal lobes of the brain.

Over one hundred and fifty people received these lobotomies from doctor Walter Friedman at Lake and State Hospital.

The hospital ultimately closed this door in nineteen seventy nine and was repurposed as an utterly care facility, and now it's a state run minimum security women's prison called Lake in Correctional Facility.

Now, the reason that I bring that up is the human experimentation aspect and the lobotomy aspect of this that people would rather not talk about and pretend like it didn't exist and didn't happen in this town and definitely not experimentation on black people, right, Let's keep that hush hush.

Let's forget that we had that facility with nothing but an African American staff and African American patients and a psychiatric facility where we would stick them with a damn eye, spick through their tear duct of their eye, and scramble their brain.

And that we had a black school just across the road from this psychiatric facility that was eventually tore down so no one could ask any questions, and replace the hospital with a woman's prison.

This is all historical fact, and no one wants to talk about it.

But that's okay.

I'd still I'll still speak for those people that were experimented on by the state, turned into zombies, had their damn brains scrambled and tortured on a daily basis.

Fuck you, fuck you, you sick fucks.

Anyway, the experimental aspect on human beings lead people to believe that the mockman was an escaped government experiment, which would make sense if there really are underground facilities beneath the T and T area.

Okay, let's steal it up.

Whatever kind of screwed up chimera hybrid shit we got going on down there.

They'll just die because they can't escape.

What a lot of people don't know is that from the very beginning until nineteen seventy five, the Mothman wasn't called the mothmam.

It was called the Birdman.

It wasn't until popular ufologist John Keel wrote the book The Mothman Prophecies that the name started to catch on.

It was named Birdman up until that point.

John Keel's book The Mothman Prophecies even inspired the Hollywood movie of the same name.

The Mothman Prophecies in two thousand and two started Richard Geer, this isn't just a message that it's a prediction.

I can stop this.

For a long time after the Silver Bridge collapse, no one spoke about the Mothmaan.

They were scared to talk about the golf Man.

They had been threatened not to talk about the Mothman, formerly known as the Birdman.

They had to change the name because Birdman wasn't as popular of a name as the Mothman.

Right, Everyone was really scared to talk about the Mothman.

They had been threatened not to talk about the Mothman by the men in Black that appeared in Point Pleasant shortly after the first sighting and warned witnesses to not talk about what they had seen and if they did, tragedy would befall them.

This reminds me of the Murray Island incident, where a man and his son claimed that while out on their boat on Murray Island near Tacoma, Washington in nineteen forty seven, along with two crewmen, in the sun and the other men saw six large doughnut shaped flying objects hovering over the water.

One of them appeared damaged and spewed out molten flag like material down onto the boat.

The hot debris injured his son's arm.

His dog was killed by falling debris.

The boat sustained heavy damage.

She took photographs of the object and collected debris samples.

The next day he got a mysterious visit by a man in black.

The man described the incident in detail, though the man had not told anyone yet, and warned him not to talk about it or tragedy would befall him.

Okay.

This encounter of the Murray Island incident is considered one of the first reported men in black sightings in Ufo lore.

Now here's the Strange Part.

Two Air Force officers William Davison and First Lieutenant Frank Brown were sent to Tacoma, Washington to investigate the Murray Island UFO incident after they had claimed that debris had fallen from a saucer onto their boat and injured their son's arm and killed their dogs.

They interviewed the two men and examined the slaglike debris and collected samples to bring it back to California, but on their way back, on the evening of August first, nineteen forty seven, they boarded a B twenty five bomber with a crew of four in total, including the pilot and the crewmen.

They were carrying the evidence from the UFO, the debris, and shortly after takeoff, the B twenty five inexplicably caught fire in the air.

Okay, Davison and Brown.

The two Air Force officers were unable to escape and were killed in the crash, but the pilot and the crewmen survived by a parachuting to safety.

Okay, So you're telling me that there wasn't more than two parachutes in the craft and the two people that had evidence of the UFO to be examined just happened to die because of an inexplicable freak accident.

It almost sounds like another inexplicable freak accident of an I beam breaking and a bridge collapsing, right, kind of sounds familiar to me.

That story of Murray Island incident and Washington sounds erily similar to the Mothman story.

Some people see something very strange, they see something they probably shouldn't see.

They contact law enforcement men in black up tell them not to talk about it.

Death follows with the moth Man it was a silver bridge collapse, but the Murray Island incident, it was the two Air Force officers perishing in a plane crash after they went to get the evidence to confirm the story of the two gentlemen that saw the UFOs, which would be a perfect distraction if something really was going on out in the TNT area, right, because you got to take yourself back to that time.

The people of Point Pleasant was really pissed off at this thing.

They were Once Linda Scarberry and her husband went to the police department and filed this report, and people found out about it, and it was printed in the newspaper.

People were in an uproar about this.

They were going on into the TNT area with pitchforks guns to try and find this thing and kill it.

Okay, So if it was a government experiment, just like people have concluded that some of these cryptids are indeed government experiments, the best way to get people to shut up about it, which the men in black basically warned all the witnesses to shut up about it, stop talking about it, and if you continue to keep talking about it, something bad is going to happen.

Well, the bad thing that happened was the Silver Bridge collapse.

Hey, the public of Point Pleasant wouldn't ever talk about the Mothman for years and years after.

Okay, they were scared after the Silver Bridge collapse.

So if you create this distraction right of this tragedy, the forty six people dying and perishing in the most deadly bridge collapse in US history, it's going to do a lot of things.

One is going to get people to shut up about the Mothman, if that's really what your intention was to do.

Two, it's going to give you enough time to go out into the T and T area and take the military or some black ops team to go out there and take care of whatever governmental experiment was on the loose for years, and it's just a coincidence that no one ever seen the Mothman after that.

So it wasn't until the Mothman statue was erected in two thousand and three in the center of downtown that people started to open up about it again, and of course when the Mothman Festival started the year prior in two thousand and two.

For years this wasn't a huge event.

It was just a local event, but it has grown into something really special over the years that attracts thousands of people every year and brings good business to the small town with vendors and local shops, food trucks and guest speakers, paranormal investigators alike every year, with people dressing up ready to believe you and we will be patiently awaiting the return of the Mothman.

Maybe next year he'll show up to his own festival.

But a side note, the Chief Cornstock putting a curse on the town before his death by the Virginia Militia turns out was a part of a local school play.

The curse never really happened, that it was drummed up to make the school play more dramatic, so hope you guys enjoyed it.

Thank you all very much.

Please like and subscribe Hit the Ball like Corn as well for notifications, and we'll see you guys next time.