TNT Area

The TNT Area, a former WWII munitions complex seven miles north of Point Pleasant, is where the first documented Mothman sighting occurred on November 15, 1966, when two couples spotted a winged creature with glowing red eyes near the abandoned power plant. Thirteen months of sightings followed before the Silver Bridge collapsed on December 15, 1967, killing 46 people, and the Mothman vanished the same day.

On November 15, 1966, Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette were driving a black 1957 Chevy through the abandoned munitions complex north of Point Pleasant when two red eyes caught their headlights. The thing standing at the edge of the road near the old North Power Plant was six to seven feet tall, with a wingspan of roughly ten feet and red eyes about two inches in diameter, spaced six inches apart. The next day, the Point Pleasant Register ran the headline: "Couples See Man-Sized Bird... Creature... Something."

That was the beginning of thirteen months that turned a quiet West Virginia town into a permanent fixture of American folklore.

The TNT Area is the local name for the former West Virginia Ordnance Works, a sprawling 3,655-acre site seven miles north of Point Pleasant. The federal government designated it as the McClintic Wildlife Management Area before World War II, then secretly tore apart hundreds of acres to build a munitions production and storage facility. Almost a hundred concrete domes, called igloos, were constructed into hillsides to store explosives. The design was deliberate: each igloo was built to be invisible from the air, covered in earth and grass so that aerial surveillance would see nothing but rolling hills. After the war, the government abandoned the site. The igloos sat empty. The power plant went dark. The forests grew back over everything.

By the time the Scarberrys and Mallettes drove through in 1966, the TNT Area was a popular hangout for local teenagers precisely because it felt dangerous and forgotten. Crumbling concrete, overgrown bunkers, pitch-black tunnels. Then the sightings started.

Over the next year, dozens of people reported seeing the creature. The descriptions were remarkably consistent: tall, winged, with enormous reflective red eyes. It became known as the Mothman. Sightings clustered around the TNT Area and the surrounding roads, though reports came in from other locations around Point Pleasant as well. John Keel, a journalist and author, traveled to the area to investigate and spent months interviewing witnesses. His reporting became the basis for The Mothman Prophecies, published in 1975.

Then, on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed during rush hour, killing 46 people. The Mothman sightings stopped immediately. Whatever people had been seeing for thirteen months vanished the same day the bridge fell.

The connection between the creature and the disaster has never been proven, and the bridge collapse has a clear engineering explanation (a stress fracture in an eyebar suspension link). But the timing locked the two events together permanently in local memory and American paranormal culture.

The TNT Area today is still the McClintic Wildlife Management Area. The igloos remain, cracked and moss-covered but structurally intact. Some are accessible. Local photographer Jeff Landrum has displayed photos taken inside the igloos at his Point Pleasant coffee shop, claiming they show light orbs and, in certain images, the face of the Mothman. The old power plant is a concrete ruin surrounded by forest.

Visitors come year-round, though October and November see the heaviest traffic. The annual Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant has run since 2002, and the downtown Mothman Museum documents the entire saga. But the TNT Area, not the museum, is where the story started. The igloos, the power plant, the overgrown roads. This is where four people in a '57 Chevy looked into a pair of red eyes and launched a legend that outlived every explanation thrown at it.