The Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant, West Virginia keeps the 1966 witnesses' own handwritten police reports framed on the wall: a seven-foot figure with white wings and red eyes, and a sighting wave that stopped the month the Silver Bridge fell.
The Mothman Museum at 400 Main Street in Point Pleasant, West Virginia keeps police reports in the witnesses' own handwriting, framed on the wall. They describe a figure about seven feet tall, with white wings and red eyes, that chased a car out of an abandoned munitions site on the night of November 15, 1966.
Four young people were in that car: Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette. Linda called the thing a "slender, muscular man," and said its eyes held her so completely that she never made out a face. Steve Mallette put it plainer on the museum's exhibit poster: "It was like a man with wings." The Point Pleasant Register ran the story the next morning under the headline "Couples See Man-Sized Bird ... Creature ... Something."
Then it kept happening. A contractor named Newell Partridge caught a pair of eyes in his flashlight beam in the field by his house, and said they glowed "like bicycle reflectors." His German Shepherd, Bandit, ran toward them. The dog never came back. Partridge found paw prints circling in the grass, and then nothing. The state encyclopedia, e-WV, counts 26 sightings in the year that followed, clustered around the old TNT munitions grounds, with witnesses reporting phones, radios, televisions and car engines going wrong at the same time.
And then it stopped. On December 15, 1967, at about 5 p.m., the Silver Bridge came apart and dropped into the Ohio River. 46 people died. Investigators traced the failure to a fracture inside a single eyebar, a flaw nobody could have seen without taking the joint apart. The sightings ended that month. The Mothman Wiki's walkthrough of the exhibits puts a piece of the bridge in the Silver Bridge room.
Nothing has ever been reported inside the building itself. No footsteps on Main Street, no red eyes in the stairwell. Everything in the record happened out at the TNT grounds and on the dark roads, and the museum is only the place where it is held.
What it holds is remarkable. The exhibit notes say the framed 1960s clippings covering much of the floor were given by Linda Scarberry herself. The same walkthrough describes a glass case holding the white suit John Keel wore as guest of honor at the 2003 Mothman Festival, his last trip to Point Pleasant, and puts original rough-draft pages of The Mothman Prophecies in the frames around it, beside a letter to Keel from Senator Robert F. Kennedy. It also has the Mary Hyre room furnished with a stand-in desk, typewriter and lamp, because the museum owns nothing that was actually hers.
In 2017 the family of Carolin Harris donated the soda fountain counter, chairs and sign from the Harris Steak House, the place everyone called the Mothman Diner. Harris lost her three-year-old son Timmy and his father in the collapse. She opened the steakhouse two years later, and spent the rest of her life helping run the festival.
