The Flatwoods Monster Museum in Sutton, West Virginia holds what's left of one night in September 1952, when seven Braxton County residents said a ten-foot figure with a blood-red face hissed and glided at them on a dark hilltop.
Behind the costumes and the newspaper clippings at the Flatwoods Monster Museum in Sutton, West Virginia, there is a section of the tree the monster was standing beside.
The night in question is September 12, 1952, up in Flatwoods, the village north on Route 19. Boys were playing football at the school when a bright object crossed the sky and looked like it came down on a nearby farm. They went for Kathleen May, a local beautician with two sons in the group, and the party climbed the hill onto G. Bailey Fisher's land: seven people and a dog named Rickie, around 7:15 in the evening.
Gene Lemon, 17 and in the National Guard, carried the flashlight. He put the beam up the slope and it found a face, round and blood red, set inside a pointed hood that witnesses said resembled the ace of spades. Eye-like features threw a greenish-orange light. The hands were small and claw-like. Below the waist hung folds, like clothing. Nobody agreed on how tall it was. Most accounts settled on 10 feet. The 1952 estimates ran 7, 10, 13, 17.
It made no footstep sound. The West Virginia Encyclopedia records "an almost sickening metallic odor emanating from its body." In the museum's telling, the thing hissed and glided at them, Lemon screamed and dropped the light, and the whole group ran.
They were sick into the next day: nausea, throat irritation, vomiting. May found an oily film on the boys' faces and their throats swollen. A doctor examined them and recorded no apparent cause for their condition. Sheriff Robert Carr searched the hilltop and found trampled grass, two long marks pressed into the field, and an odor that didn't belong on a farm.
At 208 Main Street, the museum has been the keeper of the leftovers since 2018, free to walk into. An artist in New York drew the creature days after the sighting, working from Kathleen May's description. By the museum's own account that drawing ran for decades in newspapers and books, went missing, and is now back here, rediscovered. The ceramic lanterns are here too, the ones a Jaycees chapter sold as a fundraiser in the 1960s, the first novelty ever made of the creature; the museum's lantern page has them still hand-molded, fired and painted at Darlene's Ceramics in Marietta, Ohio.
The museum publishes the explanation, too. On its own folklore page it reproduces Joe Nickell's reconstruction of the night: a meteor for the streak in the sky, three red beacons nearby for the pulsing light, and a startled barn owl on a tree limb for the rest of it. The Air Force had logged the case the same way through Project Blue Book: a meteor, then beacons, then most likely an owl.
The May brothers, who were 12 and 13 on that hill, went on telling it anyway. HISTORY reports they were in their late seventies when they finally stopped giving interviews, after an estimated 100,000 of them.
