I spent a weekend driving seven hours from Alfred, NY to Point Pleasant, WV to attend the Mothman Festival – the annual celebration of the fact that some people reported seeing a looming, winged figure with red glowing eyes chasing them through the woods back in the ’60s.

My 14 year-old daughter has been fascinated by Mothman for a while. I’m not exactly sure why, but she’s apparently not the only one who thinks he’s cool. (I’m beginning to suspect she’s part of a secret cabal of teenagers who meet in a parallel dimension to determine which cultural motifs deserve a t-shirt at Hot Topic and which patterns to print on school notebooks.)

In the fall of 2020, after it was announced that the festival had been canceled, I promised I would accompany her to the next one “just as soon as this darn pandemic lets up.” It felt like a safe bet, since I thought for sure she’d be on to something else by then. But no. By 2022 the mysterious allure of the Mothman had grown even stronger, leaving me with no choice but to make the road trip, or be forever haunted by the guilt of being a crap-dad who can’t keep a promise.

It turns out, once you’ve driven two hours through Pennsylvania and Ohio, you might as well have driven all seven. There’s some kind of time warp brought on by the repetition of the lines on the highway and the Cracker Barrel signs. Arriving in Point Pleasant, WV was about the same as arriving in any of the other towns where we pulled off for gas and thought, “Maybe we should have bought some of those locally made venison sticks to help boost the economy.”

Point Pleasant is positioned near a nuclear plant, a psychiatric prison, an abandoned storage facility for large amounts of TNT, and a Dairy Queen. After spending only a few hours in this location, I began to understand how the appearance of an otherworldly harbinger of doom might seem like something within the realm of possibility.

Now I don’t want to be like Velma from Scooby Doo, always insisting that “there has to be a rational explanation for all of this.” I’ll be the first to admit that the irrational explanations are way more fun than the rational ones. But as the dad of a teenager stuck growing up in a “post-truth” world of deepfakes and conspiracies, I feel a certain obligation to try and explic the inexplicable. Plus, I always thought Velma was kind of the hot one.

When it comes to sightings of the otherworldly, whether it’s Mothman, Bigfoot, UFOs, the Virgin Mary or the Ghost of Elvis, people like to frame the question as, “do you believe in such things?” The answer to this is yes. I believe these things do exist. They exist as concepts. Which may seem like a low threshold for believability, but if something doesn’t first exist as a concept, you wouldn’t be asking questions about it, and it definitely wouldn’t get a festival in its honor, or its own brand of cotton candy.

Even though it’s happening almost constantly, becoming a  concept is no small accomplishment for any phenomenon. First you gotta make your way into the sensory organs, then twist around a bunch of synaptic pathways, and eventually convince several million neurons to configure themselves in your honor.

Once you’re in there, all nestled in the mushy recesses of one human brain, getting into a whole bunch of other brains is much easier. All it takes is for the host to convert you into a story that’s good enough to get you passed into the news cycle. Next thing you know, you’ve got your own Wikipedia page.

By that time, the pesky “truth” is long-gone. In the case of Mothman, we’re left with the conveniently un-answerable question, “Is Mothman real?” In other words, did the chain-reaction of story-telling begin with an actual, external phenomenon that matches the folklore lodged in the popular imagination? Was it a literal, floating humanoid figure with black wings and glowing red eyes that appeared before some couples driving around the woods outside a small town in West Virginia?

Oh… sorry. You’re hoping for an actual answer?

The closest we can get to the source of the incident, is a news story from the next day that doesn’t offer too many helpful details. One witness says “we definitely weren’t drinking,” but says nothing about what they were smoking. It was 1966. They were cruising around the abandoned TNT storage facility looking to get freaked out.

We paid a visit to this place. This was during the day, but it was still pretty spooky. Anything would’ve freaked me out. If the headlights suddenly shone on the eyes of a Sandhill Crane, or even a chipmunk, it would’ve sent me running to the police station.

All the reports of sightings that occurred after that are pretty useless. Once the first story was told, the Mothman concept was freely available, like a video of a baby monkey riding on a pig. Any psyche with an unmet need for attention could now, either consciously or unconsciously, summon a demonic figure to stand in for inexpressible cold-war angst and small-town alienation. Mothman was just what the psychiatrist ordered for a culture that had outgrown angels a long time ago, and was already starting to get bored with UFOs.

I’m not saying people who reported seeing Mothman were “lying.” But they were maybe latching onto a concept that satisfied a deeper need, then dressing it up with their own details and sending it back out into the world.
When it comes to spooky stuff like Mothman, a lot of bumper stickers like to tell you, “The Truth is out There,” but maybe they should say “The Truth is in There” – buried somewhere in the blob of twisted, mysterious wiring inside our skulls.