Lore - REMASTERED – Episode 47: Missing the Point

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

In this remastered fan favorite, we return to the folklore of bird-man legends, and the events in Point Pleasant that have left us with one of the biggest cryptids of all time: Mothman. Come for the fresh narration and score, but stay for the brand new bonus story at the end. Researched, written, and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with music by Chad Lawson, with additional help from GennaRose Nethercott and Harry Marks. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ———————— This episode of Lore was sponsored by: BetterHelp: Lore is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp.com/LORE, and get on your way to being your best self. SimpliSafe: Secure your home with 24/7 professional monitoring for just $15 a month. No contracts, no salespeople, just simple and easy security. Sign up today at SimpliSafe.com/Lore to claim a free indoor security camera plus 20% off your order with Interactive Monitoring. Squarespace: Build your own powerful, professional website, with free hosting, zero patches or upgrades, and 24/7 award-winning customer support. Start your free trial website today at Squarespace.com/lore, and when you make your first purchase, use offer code LORE to save 10%. To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

In September of 1952, something bright flashed across the dark West Virginia sky and came to rest on a nearby farm. A trio of local boys saw it happen with their own eyes and ran home to report it. The mother of one of the boys agreed that it was worth looking into, so she gathered a group of older boys and together they all walked over to find whatever it was that had fallen to the earth. When they arrived, they found what they described as a ball of fire and the air was thick with a mist that burned their eyes and noses.

When one of the boys noticed a pair of red lights in the shadows nearby, he turned his light on it. There, they say, stood a dark figure with bright eyes and a pointed head. They couldn't see arms, but when it saw the light, it glided toward them and hissed. Naturally, they all ran away. They claimed it was an extraterrestrial, protecting the ship that had just crash-landed. Keep in mind, this was 1952. The Roswell, New Mexico incident had taken place just five years before, and many people

were expecting it to happen again, a real-life UFO crash. Major reports suggest something much less fantastical, though. On that very same night, a meteor had been sighted crossing the sky over Maryland, Pennsylvania, and, you guessed it, West Virginia, and that mysterious, armless, pointed head creature that flew toward them, nothing more than a local owl. Our world is full of things that are hard to explain, things that frighten us and cause us to doubt our safety. It might happen less and less often in this connected modern culture of ours, but it's

still part of our legacy. People have always seen things that are hard to believe. Sometimes though, people see what they want to see, rather than reality. The challenge lies in distinguishing between the two, fact or fiction, truth or lie, figments of the imagination, or something more. But when dozens of people manage to see the same strange thing, our clarity has a way of falling apart. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

For as long as we've been looking up, humans have been seeing things they can't explain. And for every time it's happened, those experiences get framed within whatever world view or experience people had at the time. One of those common interpretations, for a very long time, was sky serpents. The English county of Devon has played host to at least two sightings of a mysterious event that was recorded as a twisting serpent in the sky. In both 1388 and 1762, something long and winding appeared in the English skies, remaining visible for over six minutes by multiple witnesses.

In 1857, the crew of a steamboat on Nebraska's Missouri River saw something similar. Witnesses later described it as resembling, and I quote, a giant, undulating serpent in and out of the lower clouds, breathing fire. Sixteen years later, a number of farmers in the Texas town of Bonham saw something in the sky that defied all explanation. They said it was twisting and writhing like a snake, but enormous and yellow. Witnesses seemed to come from all walks of life. In 1897, a Michigan paper boy named John Rosa stopped to chat with a local police officer

while he was out on his 4 a.m. delivery route. Both Rosa and the officer looked up and saw an enormous silvery serpent fly across the sky. Similar events have been recorded in Brazil, South Carolina, Maryland, and Northern Europe, and those accounts span centuries. Clearly, something was going on. But most of those sightings are easy to explain away with a bit of knowledge about how meteorological events work, and with a bit of an open mind.

Comets, meteors, northern lights, all of these natural, regularly occurring events could explain the odd sightings that people have claimed to be fiery snakes in the sky. This is so often the case. When we see what we want to, it prevents us from seeing everything else. But other sightings are harder to explain. When they get closer to the Earth and even stand on solid ground, our ability to filter the truth from the fantasy starts to break down. The mysterious creature witnessed multiple times in Cornwall, England is a prime example

of this, and to this day, that hasn't been easily explained away. In April of 1976, the Melling family from Lancaster was vacationing in Cornwall when something unusual took place. On the 12th of April, Don Melling's two daughters, 12-year-old June and 9-year-old Vicki, were exploring the woods near a church in Mornan. While they were there, they reported seeing a strange, bird-like man in the air above the church. It frightened them so much that they convinced their parents to pack up and end their vacation

early. Only three months later, in early July of that year, more sightings were reported near Mornan Church. Again, two girls, this time Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry, reported a hissing sound in the night sky and looked up to see something unexplainable. They described it as a big owl with pointed ears as big as a man. They also added a new detail, red glowing eyes. It was sighted again the following day by three other travelers, and it's been seen

off and on for years ever since. Back in the United States, similar creatures have been witnessed. In December of 1975, for example, two police officers in Texas saw something that they would never be able to forget. One morning, they were patrolling the city of Harlingen when something flew over their car. According to their report, that something was a giant bird with a wingspan that measured over 10 feet across.

A few days later, a similar creature was sighted by two local teens. When they reported it to their parents, everyone headed out to have a look. All they found were a set of enormous tracks in the dirt. Tracks made by a large, three-toed foot. They made the evening news for that discovery, and then the community erupted in hysteria. Half a dozen more sightings were reported over the following month. The officers in Harlingen later admitted that whatever it was they'd seen could probably have been a pelican.

Maybe. They weren't really sure. But others absolutely insisted it was an enormous bird of mysterious origins. Heck, one man claimed that he was even attacked by it. That many sightings, well, it makes you wonder what was really going on. And that's the trouble with all of these stories, isn't it? There are always loose ends, bits and pieces that can't be explained away, no matter how expertly we apply logic to them.

Which of course, is why they're still told to this day. It seems that these stories always have two sides, don't they? The passionate eyewitness and the cold voice of reason. And that's pretty much par for the course for humans. We often refuse to believe the things that others claim to have seen just because those stories drift outside the realm of accepted reality. Most of the details, along with the mystery itself, can be explained away with reasonable logic.

But sometimes there's more than one event. More than a handful of sightings. More detail or evidence than logic can explain away. Sometimes the reports are so strong that they become hard to ignore. And when the unexplainable becomes the believable, that's when things truly become horrifying. When World War II ended in 1945, a number of military-related factories around the U.S. were closed up and either abandoned or converted into something more practical. The Gopher Ordinance Works in Rose Mountain, Minnesota, for example, is now a concrete

skeleton of what it once was. The Dodge Chicago plant was first transitioned into a shopping mall, and now they use a portion of it to manufacture candy. And about six miles north of the West Virginia town of Point Pleasant, they built a TNT plant and storage facility, but shut its doors after the war ended. They built it on property that had originally been a game preserve. But rather than transition it back when they were done, the manufacturing facilities were simply left to rot, including the dozens of concrete igloos that had been used for storage.

Today it's used as a wildlife preserve, and homes have been built nearby. But it's still probably safe to say that ever since the war ended, the old TNT factory property hasn't seen much action, not until the mid-60s at least, because that's when something unusual began to take place. On the night of November 15th of 1966, a car entered the abandoned property. Inside were two young couples, Steve and Mary Mallette, and Roger and Linda Scarbury. They were just out looking for some innocent fun, and that search had led them onto one of the dirt roads that cut through the old factory grounds.

Their car was full of laughter, conversation, and the beats of the radio, but all of that came to an end when the very edge of their headlights illuminated something odd. Linda Scarbury later described it as an unnaturally large man-shaped figure. Most frightening, though, were the eyes, which glowed in the darkness with a red light. Whatever they'd seen, the thing didn't appear to see them, at least it didn't react to their presence. I have a hard time understanding how the bright headlights of a car could fail to catch the attention of anything close to a sentient being in the middle of a dark wildlife preserve.

But according to all four witnesses, it just sort of waddled off away from the road at a slow, rambling pace. The two couples didn't spend any time debating what they'd all seen. They didn't stop and get out to investigate. They were too afraid to do anything other than turn their car around and head back toward the exit of the preserve as quickly as they could. All they wanted to do was get away, but that wasn't going to be as easy as they thought. A minute or two later, as they were whining their way back through the dirt roads that

led to the exit, they saw it again. This time the figure was more clear, and the four witnesses were able to get a better look at it. They described the same tall, human-like shape with red eyes, but said this time they were able to see something else, wings. They stuck out from the center of the creature's back, they said, like an angel. They weren't able to see any arms, and the head was sort of indistinguishable from the body, but all of that could have been a trick of shadows and light.

It was something that seemed like a cross between a giant bird and an enormous man, which of course was impossible, but that didn't mean that it wasn't frightening, and when the creature spread its wings and flew after them, they were downright horrified, so they sped up. Roger Scarborough later told the police that he managed to coax his old Chevy up to a hundred miles an hour, but when they glanced behind the car, the flying thing was still there, still chasing them, and over the roar of the engine they could all hear a sound, a sort of high-pitched squeaking noise.

But all of it, the sight of the creature, the eerie noise, and the fast pursuit, it gave them all the incentive they needed to head back to town as quickly as they could, and it was only after the car had entered the city limits of Point Pleasant and was bathed in the bright electric light that the bird or creature, whatever it had really been, finally gave up and turned around. It quickly vanished into the night. The two young couples were understandably terrified by what they'd seen, but they were also unanimous on the details.

Something large, something that could fly and scream at them, had chased them all the way from the Wildlife Preserve into town, so they decided to tell the police. Roger turned the car toward the Mason County Courthouse, and before long they were reporting the event to an officer inside. The deputy sheriff agreed to send a handful of officers out to the preserve immediately, and the young couples bravely went with them. Unfortunately, they found nothing definitive that proved the couple's story, but there were still some tense moments.

While searching the general area of the sighting, sounds could be heard in the darkness outside the glow of their flashlights. One of the officers even claimed that he saw movement and a cloud of dust that could have been made by someone walking down a path, but whatever caused it remained hidden from view. Most chilling of all, though, was when one of the other officers saw what he described as a shadow in the night sky overhead. It seemed to be circling above one of the abandoned buildings, slow and deliberate,

like a large bird. Everyone got back in their car, and they left as fast as they could. Oddly enough, the events of November 15th weren't the first of their kind in the area. They were just the first to be given anything close to a reasonable amount of attention by the authorities and the press. Sightings of something large and unusual had actually been happening in the area for years. According to historian and professor James Gay Jones, the first local sighting might have actually occurred during the early 1900s.

According to the tale, multiple families in the area witnessed a creature that they described as man-sized, with a wingspan of over 12 feet. They claimed that this man-bird had no discernible head, something that sounds oddly similar to the thing that the two couples witnessed in 1966. Five years earlier, in 1961, two people from Point Pleasant were driving south of town along the Ohio River when they saw something step out into the road in front of them. They described it as a large man, but covered in gray fur or maybe feathers, and protruding from its back were wings.

A moment later, it launched itself into the air and flew away. On November 1st of 1966, just two weeks before the frightening car chase and the police investigation, a number of National Guardsmen were outside at the Armory, a military facility east of town, when they saw something in the nearby trees. It was perched on a branch of a tree in the distance, but all of the men agreed that it was too large to be a bird. It was man-sized, they said, maybe larger. This time, though, it was brown.

Then just three days before the two young couples had their experience in Point Pleasant, five men saw something in Clintonan, a town about 80 miles to the southeast. Ken Duncan and his co-workers were digging a grave in the local cemetery, getting it ready for a burial later that day, when a large bird took off from one of the trees at the edge of the property. As it flew closer, though, each of the men became convinced that it wasn't a bird at all. Because as large as a man, but with wings.

After the events of November 15, though, all of those disconnected, unreported sightings started to get pulled into the larger story. The local newspaper, the Point Pleasant Register, ran a headline the next day that declared — couples see man-sized bird, creature, something. It was an odd story, for sure. The paper just didn't know what to do with it. And honestly, I don't blame them. The following evening, Raymond Womsley drove north toward the Wildlife Preserve on his

way to see a friend who lived in one of the homes built near the property there. With him in the car were his wife and another friend, Marcella Bennett. When they arrived at their friend's house, they parked in a shadowy dirt lot across the road and then got out and approached the front door. Unfortunately, their friend wasn't home, so they turned around and returned to their car. It was on their way back that they saw something none of them would forget — just a few feet from the car.

Farther back from the road in the darkness, something large seemed to rise up from the ground. It happened suddenly, and the sight of it horrified each of them. Bennett later described it as an enormous figure, roughly the shape of a human, but with glowing red eyes. They stood beside the car, paralyzed with fear, while they watched a pair of wings unfold from the back of the creature. Then it was gone.

They weren't the last in town to see something that fit such an unusual, almost unbelievable description. On the morning of November 25, Tom Urie was driving to work just a couple of miles north of the Wildlife Preserve when he saw something on the side of the road. Maybe he thought it was a hitchhiker or a local out for a walk. Whatever he might have assumed, the closer he got, the less it made sense. It was an enormous, man-shaped figure, and as he passed it, the creature spread huge wings and took flight.

Tom sped away, horrified by what he had seen, but the thing, whatever it was, followed him Even when Tom reached 75 miles per hour, it kept up, even circling his car. When it finally did disappear, Tom went home. He said he was just too frightened to work after that. There were others, too. Connie Joe Carpenter saw something large on the 27th that flew toward her car. On the 28th, Richard West called the police in a panic. There was something on his neighbor's roof, he told them.

It was a man with wings. And later, an elderly man from Point Pleasant claimed that he looked out his window and saw a winged man with gray fur and bright red eyes, just… well, standing there, in his yard. The sightings continued for months, sometimes in the area of Point Pleasant and sometimes farther away. The Ohio River Valley seemed to be the focal point for many of the reported encounters with the creature, but the descriptions varied just enough to make that assumption far from

definitive. And then, of course, there were the dreams. A year after the 1966 sightings, multiple people claimed that they were having nightmares about death, and they blamed them on the mysterious creature. One woman said that her dreams involved Christmas presents and people drowning. Another woman dreamt of people dying in the nearby Ohio River. And each of them believed that the bird-man creature's appearance had something to do with it.

But of course, these were just dreams. And as we all know, dreams don't come true. Or do they? On the evening of December 15th in 1967, the nearby Silver Bridge, which connected Point Pleasant with Ohio to the west, collapsed into the river. When it did, it took 46 lives with it, cars full of people driving home from work, families returning from after-school programs, folks coming back from their holiday shopping. They're floating in the water, they said, among the wreckage of cars and metal support

beams or tiny pops of color. Christmas presents. There's a lot to be said for seeing what we want to see, and when a whole community gets caught up in something as sensational as a man-sized bird thing, well, it's easy to see how things can get out of control and fast. In the years since, there have even been stories in Point Pleasant of UFOs, of government cover-ups and aliens. And the creature has been given a sensational, mysterious name.

The Mothman. Others though take the more logical approach. No one saw anything unusual at all. In every instance, they say it was just a large bird, nothing more than shadows and hysteria convincing people that they were seeing something otherworldly. Biologists have suggested that it was just a sandhill crane, or much like the events from 1952, it was just an owl, enlarged by adrenaline and an overactive imagination. We see what we want to, whether we're a skeptic or a believer.

We wear our own pair of colored lenses, and they tint the world that we see. Because that causes us to dismiss things that we should give more attention to. Other times, it convinces us that the unexplainable is undeniable. None of this, of course, sheds light on the odd connection between the sightings of these creatures and the tragedies that followed them. The first recorded appearance of the Point Pleasant creature way back in the early 1900s was said to have occurred just prior to a tragic event, and the collapse of the Silver Bridge in 1967 certainly deepened that possible connection.

Unlike the creature itself, though, those are harder to explain away with simple wildlife biology. Meanwhile, large man bird creatures are still occasionally sighted, and oftentimes very far from Point Pleasant. Creatures matching the Mothman description have been sighted in Singapore, Argentina, England, Mexico, and Brazil, among many others. First witnesses describe the same glowing red eyes, human-like body, and enormous wings. In April of 1986, there were similar sightings in a small Russian town located in a river

valley just north of a wildlife preserve. Witnesses claim to see a large creature they described as a tall, headless man with enormous wings and eyes that glowed with a bright red light. All of those details, from the location to the physical description, sound eerily familiar to the Point Pleasant incident. These sightings in the Russian town went on for over two weeks, and locals began to refer to it by a name. They called it the Blackbird.

Just as odd as the sightings themselves are the reports of eyewitnesses having nightmares later on. What those dreams entailed? No one really knows. We don't know because there's no one left in town to ask about those dreams, or the sightings of the Blackbird creature. You see, all 14,000 residents were relocated about 30 years ago, shortly after a reactor at their nuclear power plant tragically failed.

The city, you see, was Chernobyl. In the world of cryptids, few have soared to the heights of popularity like the Mothman. When this episode first aired back in 2016, I unknowingly published it in the very same week as the 50th anniversary of Mothman's first sighting in 1966. Math isn't my strong suit, but apparently the episode was meant to be. Thankfully, nothing bad happened as a result. But Mothman isn't the only winged omen of dark days. In fact, all the way around the globe, there's another example that needs to be mentioned.

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Squarespace, build something beautiful. The idea of confronting giant winged creatures in the night is terrifying. With their glowing red eyes and enormous wings that seem to swallow light, it's hard to imagine their intentions as anything less than sinister. Maybe it's our intense distrust of the unknown. Or maybe we've just watched too many scary movies. Whatever the case, these beasts are seen as harbingers of a terrible fate to those who have witnessed them.

However, there is something else out there that's known to prophesy ruin. But don't worry, it comes as a friend. From 1858 to 1860, a cholera epidemic ravaged Japan. It steamrolled across the country, first in Nagasaki before moving through Edo, the Kaiprovance, and beyond. Looking back, it's easy to draw parallels between Japan's cholera outbreak and the viruses that plague us today. For example, the expedited trade routes of old meant the disease was able to spread

more swiftly than before, resulting in a higher number of casualties. The faster that people were able to cross the land and the sea, the wider the outbreak. By the time it was over, an estimated 200,000 people in Japan had died from cholera, with Nagasaki having the highest mortality rate. It lost 8.3% of its population. Edo, otherwise known as modern-day Tokyo, had a larger population and thus lost a greater number of people. The rapid spread of the disease and the climbing death rates meant crematoriums and coffin-makers

just couldn't keep up with demand. It got so bad at one point that carpenters had to be pulled from their daily construction work to build more coffins. Coopers were also enlisted to use their skills making casks and barrels to build coffins for the dead. Even the casks themselves were sometimes used if necessary. As for the crematoriums, bodies were stacked for weeks waiting to be burned. The stench of decaying flesh got so bad that districts far and wide could smell it, carried

on the wind, like a terrible perfume. The names and the totals of the dead were published in tabloid broadsheets called disaster collages. They detailed many of the statistics surrounding the epidemic and reprinted the government's bulletins for convenience. Doctors hoping to control the spread did everything they could to advise the public and keep them safe. But much of their information was lacking due to their own inexperience with the disease. For example, they published lists of foods to avoid, including cucumbers, melons, tuna,

and shrimp. Unfortunately, this information wasn't based on the food's likelihood to transmit cholera, but rather their chances of causing food poisoning. People were also advised to keep their temperatures even, not too hot, not too cold, and for those who did contract the virus, mustard paste slathered on the hands, feet, and stomach were prescribed, as were beverages high in ginger, cardamom, and laurel. And as if the parallels between then and now weren't enough, foreigners were even blamed for bringing the disease to Japan in the first place, which led to a rise of anti-foreign

sentiments. As French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Carr once said, the more things change, the more they stay the same. But the truth was that no one really knew what was causing the outbreak, nor how to stop it. As information and misinformation continued to spread, so did a rumor. It was a rumor of a creature whose presence could either foretell devastation or bring hope.

The people of Japan clung to the latter. It was called the Yogan Notori. In English, that translates to prophecy bird, a two-headed crow where one head is white and the other is black. According to the legend, the Yogan Notori were sent from the gods to warn those on earth of impending doom. They were said to be so sacred and powerful that even looking at pictures of one could help protect someone from tragedy.

One government official named Kazaman wrote a journal entry about a Yogan Notori that had appeared in Kaga Province the December before the cholera epidemic swept through Japan. The bird said the following, A tragedy will befall your people, of whom nine in ten will die in August and September next year. Those of you who pray to us morning and night and truly believe shall be spared from this disaster. An ominous message, to say the least, but also one of promise.

So had a two-headed crow really flown to Kaga Province and deliver a terrible prophecy, or had the Japanese people been so devastated by the cholera outbreak that they were desperate for some semblance of hope and control? When all seems lost, we tend to grab whatever we can and hold on. It's hard to know the truth for sure, as stories about the Yogan Notori faded away after the outbreak subsided. Nobody really brought them up again for over 160 years. And then in the spring of 2020, a new virus spread across the world, COVID-19.

Like all of us, the Japanese once again needed something to help them get through their days of isolation and anxiety. That's when a curator at the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum tweeted a photo of Kazaman's journal, highlighting the prophetic quotes about the unearthly bird. It earned over 10,000 likes in just one week. It wasn't long before businesses and shrines all over Japan started asking for permission to use the Yogan Notori's image on all sorts of products, like rice crackers and temple charms.

People wanted to keep an image of the creature with them at all times to protect themselves from the virus. Then it's hard to blame them. It doesn't matter how old we get, or how far science and technology progress. We as humans will often seek a higher power to help us in our time of need. For the people of Japan, that higher power came in the form of a two-headed prophetic crow. Exactly what the doctor ordered.

This episode of lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with additional research from Jenna Rose Nethercotts and writing by Harry Marks, and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.