About This Location
A museum dedicated to the Flatwoods Monster, a cryptid reportedly seen on September 12, 1952, when seven local residents witnessed what they described as a ten-foot-tall creature with a glowing red face and green body near a crashed UFO on a hill outside Flatwoods, Braxton County.
The Ghost Story
On the evening of September 12, 1952, near dusk in the small town of Flatwoods in Braxton County, West Virginia, something descended from the sky and changed the community forever. Brothers Edward and Fred May, along with their friend Tommy Hyer, watched a bright fireball streak across the darkening sky and appear to land on the hillside property of local farmer G. Bailey Fisher. The boys ran to tell their mother, Kathleen May, a local beautician, and what happened next would make national headlines and transform a quiet Appalachian hamlet into one of the most famous UFO encounter sites in American history.
Kathleen May gathered a search party: her two sons, Tommy Hyer, neighborhood boys Neil Nunley and Ronnie Shaver, and her cousin Eugene Lemon, a seventeen-year-old West Virginia National Guardsman. With Lemon's dog leading the way, the group climbed the hill toward where the light had fallen. Near the top, they encountered a pulsating ball of fire and a thick, sickening metallic odor that filled the air. Then Lemon's flashlight caught something in the branches of a nearby oak tree.
The witnesses described a creature unlike anything in their experience: a towering figure nearly twelve feet tall and approximately four feet wide, with a bright red face, glowing green eyes, and a dark body that appeared to be clad in some kind of metallic garment. Its head was shaped like an ace of spades -- a pointed hood or cowl that framed the glowing face. The creature floated toward the group in complete silence, emitting the nauseating metallic stench that had already begun to make several of the witnesses physically ill. Lemon's dog bolted. The group fled in terror.
The aftermath was immediate and far-reaching. Newspaper stories were carried throughout the country, radio broadcasts went out on major networks, and hundreds of phone calls flooded into Flatwoods from across the nation. The sighting prompted a U.S. Air Force inquiry under Project Blue Book, the government's official UFO investigation program. Investigators who returned to the Fisher property found physical evidence: two large skid marks in the earth, trampled grass in a pattern consistent with something heavy having landed and departed, and a lingering chemical odor.
Skeptics have offered explanations. The fireball was likely a meteor -- several were reported across three states that evening. The creature, some suggest, was a barn owl perched in the oak tree, its natural markings and the play of flashlight and shadow creating the illusion of a towering humanoid figure. The metallic smell could have come from the meteor itself or local industrial sources. These explanations account for some elements of the encounter but fail to satisfy those who were there. Kathleen May and the boys maintained their account for the rest of their lives.
The Flatwoods Monster never reappeared, but its legend only grew. The community held a 50th anniversary festival in 2002, and an annual convention continues to draw enthusiasts. The Flatwoods Monster Museum -- now located on Main Street in nearby Sutton as the Braxton County Monster Museum -- preserves the history of the sighting through artifacts, witness accounts, newspaper clippings, and the original Air Force investigation files. A distinctive monster-shaped chair marks the approximate site of the encounter on the Fisher property.
West Virginia embraced the Flatwoods Monster as one of its signature cryptids, alongside Mothman and the Grafton Monster. The creature appears on the state's official Paranormal Trail, and its image has become an icon of American UFO folklore. The 2018 video game Fallout 76, set in a fictionalized West Virginia, further cemented the Flatwoods Monster in popular culture. But in Braxton County, the story needs no fictional embellishment. Something came down from the sky on September 12, 1952, and the people who saw it never forgot.