The page numbers below refer to the 2001 TOR Books reprinting of Mothman Prophecies by John Alva Keel, the version most easily obtainable by the general public.
CHAPTER SIX
For those of you who own Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend, the following list might be helpful in the Eyewitness Reports section:
Page 59: Generator plant: The North Power Plant was torn down ca. 1993.
November 15, 1966: Night of the Leonid meteor shower, this night's being one of the brightest meteor showers on record. Coincidence?
Page 60: "It turned slowly": Linda Scarberry, in Sargent/Wamsley, states that Mothman had a wing caught in a guide wire near the power plant. She also says it had humanlike arms as well as legs; "Its hands were really big." [p. 20] This is the first time, to my knowledge, Mothman was described with arms. Strange Creatures states flatly "No witness has ever reported seeing arms." [p. 229]
Page 60: Dead dog: Barely mentioned here or in Strange Creatures, the dead dog (Bandit?) by the road sequence is quite bizarre in Barker's Silver Bridge. After discussing their sighting at Dairyland, the young quartet decided to drive out to the TNT Area again. Once they neared the farm of C. C. Lewis, however, they began to chicken out. At the "Lewis Gate" -- a popular landmark, being the only place for a couple of miles one could turn around easily -- Roger pulled in to turn. The headlights flashed over the dog:
"Oh, that poor thing," Linda sympathized. "Somebody's hit it and it's crawled off the road to die."
"Get out, Steve," Mary begged, "and see if it's hurt badly. Maybe we can take it to a veterinary."
"It's dead, I can tell," Steve said as he shined the light on it again; "dead as a doornail."
"Then, from behind a tree, or from the ditch," Roger told us, "this thing came out and jumped over the car. We got a good sight of it running through the field, still staggering sideways like a crippled chicken!" [p. 43]
The scribbled notes by Linda, Roger, and Mary agree with Barker's account of the dog-by-the-road incident. At this point the frightened quartet visited Tiny's Restaurant "to get Gary Northrup's reaction to what we had seen." Seeing how genuinely frightened the teens were, Northrup called the police.
The implication is strong that the dead dog, instead of being Mothman's dinner, was bait to get someone to stop and possibly leave their car. Why? Perhaps it's better not to know.
Was it coincidence that it was the same carload of kids who fell for the dead dog trick? That question cannot be answered.
Page. 61: Going back to the power plant: Linda Scarberry's scribbled notes from 1966 state she saw Mothman out in a pasture but walking towards the [presumably moving] car as they led Deputy Halstead to the TNT Area. [Sargent/Wamsley p. 43] Mary and Roger's notes agree with this. All three contemporary accounts mention a cloud of "dust or smoke" rising from the coal yard near the plant.
The name Mothman: A news clipping in Sargent/Wamsley, undated but apparently written no later than the Thursday or Friday after the Tuesday encounter, is headlined MASON COUNTIANS HUNT 'MOTH MAN', so someone named the creature very quickly.
A Point Pleasant Register editorial written by John Samsell (Thursday, Nov. 17), mentions that newscasters elsewhere in the country were calling the thing a "monster moth", "red-eyed demon," or "bird man." (Sargent/Wamsley, p. 71) I've always gotten the impression John Keel disliked the name Mothman, as he usually refers to it simply as "the Bird."
Page 62: "trigger-happy hero": "One officer heard an automatic rifle bark several times Thursday night behind one of the many buildings," according to an Athens Messenger story by Roger Bennett (Nov. 18, 1966).
Page 63: Wamsley/Thomas sighting: In Strange Creatures Mrs. Bennett was left to pull herself together, pick up her daughter, and then make for the house. Five years later Raymond Wamsley more-or-less pulls her from the clutches of Mothman. An attempt by a male ego to save face in the later version, or was it a correction? It is a very human touch to a weird tale.
A clipping from the Athens Messenger, undated but presumably around Nov. 17, mentions that "Later they ventured outside and spotted the creature watching them while partially hidden behind a pile of bricks." [Sergent and Wamsley, p. 86] It then flew away.
This seems to verify the implication that Mothman "haunted" certain people, observing them (and vice-versa) multiple times.
An article from the Columbus Dispatch (Friday, Nov. 18) states that on this same Wednesday night "a Cheshire, Ohio, man who asked that his name not be used, said 'it' chased him near Gallipolis, across the river."
Page 72: 14-foot monster traps. Yes, I admit it, as a naive youth I thought he really had monster traps, and I whiled away a few afternoons wondering if they were fourteen-foot tall traps, or if they were for fourteen-foot tall monsters. "I know from bitter experience that some of my humorous comments will be taken seriously and will prompt new venom," says Keel in Our Haunted Planet (pp. 9-10).
Barker, Gray. Silver Bridge (Clarksburg, WV: Saucerian Books, 1970).
Coleman, Loren. Mothman and Other Curious Encounters (New York: Paraview Press, 2002).
Keel, John A. Our Haunted Planet (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1971).
Ibid. Strange Creatures from Time and Space (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1970).
Sergent, Donnie, Jr., and Jeff Wamsley. Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend (Point Pleasant, WV: Mothman Lives Publishing, 2002).
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