Cryptids of North America #13: West Virginia
Artist credit: Lipstick Kiss Press on Etsy
Country roads, take me home to the place where the Mothman dwells.
West Virginia was a late addition to the Union, becoming the 35th state in 1863. It was initially part of Virginia, but it split off and joined the Union thanks to the comparative lack of slaveholders in that region of the state. It was also the site of John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid in 1859, a failed attempt to spark a slave revolt across the South that some consider to be the actual start of the Civil War, as opposed to the Fort Sumter battle that officially started it in April 1861.
Ironically enough, considering this abolitionist past, as well as its central role in the history of violent clashes between striking coal workers and their bosses (the 1920 Battle of Matewan being the most dramatic example), West Virginia is now a deep red state. Perhaps not coincidentally, it also ranks among the lowest U.S. states in terms of health, life expectancy, education, and poverty, with some outside observers even comparing its living conditions to those of third-world countries.
Perhaps it’s the reality of systemic neglect, combined with the numerous potential hiding places in the rolling Appalachian hills and mountains, that have allowed the appropriately nicknamed “Mountain State” to harbor so many of the strangest cryptid stories I’ve ever encountered in my many years of studying these kinds of creepy creatures. Granted, there are somewhat fewer cryptids profiled here, with only 11. Still, what West Virginia cryptids lack in numbers, they make up for in sheer weirdness, so much so that a disproportionate number have grown to be major league celebrities in the cryptozoological canon.
Before we talk about them, though, I must, as always, give credit to Monica Gallagher and Kaitlyn Bullock, whose graphics have been a constant source of inspiration for this series. I also took some inspiration from this graphic created by West Virginia native Liz Pavlovic. With all that said, let’s begin our cryptozoological tour of the American South.
Batboy
Let’s be clear here: Batboy is an entirely fictional character created by Dick Kulpa, editor of the satirical supermarket tabloid Weekly World News, for the June 23, 1992, cover story. Even so, he has become an enduring pop culture icon, so much so that he’s practically become WWN’s mascot.
The story goes that Batboy was discovered in an uncharted cave east of Seneca Rocks, a crag jutting out from the forests of Pendleton County in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle. He appeared as a two-foot-tall 19-pound humanoid with oversized amber eyes and ears shaped like satellite dishes. The tabloid quoted a zoologist who conjectured that Batboy was the descendant of a group of humans who had taken to living underground and whose appearance had changed as they adapted to their new lightless surroundings.
WWN would spend the next several years chronicling his various adventures, like constantly escaping from government labs trying to study him, finding love, endorsing Al Gore for president, biting Santa Claus, joining the US Army and leading the team that captures Saddam Hussein, becoming an astronaut, and even predicting that he will become president in 2028 (hey, if it gets Trump out of the White House, I’m not complaining).
Further adventures are chronicled in the “Adventures of Batboy” comic, which has him resign the presidency to go hitchhiking, having an affair with Beyonce (who is apparently half-Sasquatch), placing WWN columnist Ed Anger (a parody of Rush Limbaugh and other ultraconservative media figures of the era) under arrest, and becoming the lead singer of a death metal band. The comic strips have apparently been declared non-canon, however (much to Beyonce’s relief, I’m sure).
In many ways, Batboy’s popularity has outstripped that of the newspaper that gave birth to him, with his grotesque, screaming face showing up on T-shirts and other merchandise. He remains popular enough to show up in the intro to the classic Disney TV show Gravity Falls and the cover for rapper Travis Scott’s 2021 single “Escape Plan/Mafia.” There was even an off-Broadway musical about him that premiered at the Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles in 1997, and Netflix was reportedly developing a TV show based on the character in July of last year. We’ll see if that goes anywhere.
Bigfoot
The deeper I dive into America’s cryptozoological lore, the more it seems how inescapable the Bigfoot legend is. Every state I’ve covered so far has had some story of hairy hominids lurking in its forests and mountain ranges, and West Virginia has plenty of both. Some sources, such as the book Old Man of the Mountain by Les O’Dell (founder of the West Virginia Bigfoot Museum in Sutton), claim to have documented sightings dating back to 1921. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, for its part, has documented 106 sighting reports, with the earliest being an article from the March 4, 1919, issue of the Tampa Bay Times telling of how the “Return of Wildman Revives Old Terrors” in Braxton County. Sadly, though, the link only leads to a 404 error page, so I don’t know the details. Most of the sightings they’ve documented occurred after the mid- to late 1960s, with the most significant hotspots around New River Gorge National Park and Preserve and in Pendleton County in the eastern panhandle.
Here are some of the more notable reports:
November 24, 1969: An 11-year-old Pocahontas County resident was hunting with his dad near the Greenbriar River when the elder man thought he saw a bear creeping along a wooden fence that surrounded a hay field. As the two got a better look, they realized it was something else entirely. It stood seven feet tall and was covered in reddish-brown hair everywhere except its dark brown face, which the witness said resembled a “very kind and wise black gentleman that my father knew.” They looked at the animal, which the witness believed was more scared of them than they were of it, for about a minute before deciding to quietly slip away to their cabin and vow never to speak of it to anyone.
July 1987: Nicholas County resident D.A. and two friends were fishing and swimming at Krofford Hole along the Gauley River when the woods suddenly went silent. The group then noticed a seven-foot-tall bipedal creature covered in dark brown hair observing them from the opposite bank. It stared at them for two minutes, then turned and disappeared over the bank.
October 15, 1994: A father and son were out camping in the Monongahela National Forest along the shores of Lake Sherwood when they heard branches snapping about 125 feet away. They went over to investigate and were shocked to see three black creatures walking upright as they ripped branches and bark off of the trees, evidently in search of food. The witness claimed that the smallest one’s arms alone were 10-12 feet long, making them truly enormous animals. The witness has gathered several other reports of similar creatures being spotted in the region and has even claimed he heard knocks on wood when he and his wife returned about a decade later.
November 1995: An anonymous Fayette County resident was hunting outside Kanawha Falls near the shore of the Kanawha River one evening when he noticed that the regular chatter of the forest animals had gone silent. As he returned to his camp and started a fire, he was startled by a scream coming from the woods. He described it as resembling a screaming woman at first before it descended into a guttural growl. He has heard nothing like it before or since.
January 1998: Motorist Scott Fadely was driving through Seneca Valley in Pendleton County when he was forced to swerve to avoid a strange creature crossing the road. He described it as very tall with dark hair and primate-like features.
August 8, 2002: Another Pendleton County motorist was driving along Kiser Gap Road when she saw a reddish-brown creature with long arms cross the road in just three steps. She claimed that it turned its head to look at her as it passed. She later heard rumors that the creature had been photographed on trail cameras in the area, but was informed that the camera’s owners had “got rid of it” and that they “won’t tell no one” about the photos.
January 13, 2007: Yet another Pendleton County motorist was driving a U-Haul trailer along Highway 55 north of the Seneca Rocks at 11:30 in the evening when he saw a figure walking on two legs in an apelike “swaggering lope” near an abandoned house. It was covered in dark hair, with clumps of shredded debris tangled in it, and was very tall, with a large head, broad shoulders, and arms that hung down to its knees. The driver was so intrigued that he immediately turned the van around to investigate further. While the creature had vanished from view, he heard it stomping through the brush. It then roared at him with a sound halfway between “a laughing/squealing noise and a grunting noise” and knocked large pieces of wood together, likely in an effort to intimidate the motorist into leaving it alone. The motorist returned the next morning to investigate further, where he found large footprints and photographed them.
July 2, 2007: A hiker at Seneca Rocks had gotten lost and was trying to regain his bearings when he noticed a creature with orange-brown hair moving up the hill away from him. It vanished from view rather quickly, but the witness noted that it stood 6.5-7 feet tall and had black hands and feet.
July 8, 2007: Yet another Pendleton County motorist was driving along Highway 33 between Harmon and Seneca Rocks when the car behind them suddenly pumped the brakes and flashed its high beams. While the driver didn’t see it, her boyfriend did, and described it as a bulky, six-foot-tall humanoid covered with mossy grayish-green hair that walked with a hunched, apelike gait. When the boyfriend described what he saw, the girlfriend responded, “Sasquatch! That’s what you saw!”
November 2007: A deer hunter was out the day before Thanksgiving near the New River Gorge Bridge outside Fayetteville when he noticed strange movements about 60 yards down the slope. He raised his rifle scope to get a better view and was astonished to see a large hand reach out from behind a large poplar tree. He was even more astonished to see a face with large eyes peek out from behind the trunk. The witness claims the face resembled a Troll doll’s and the eyes resembled an owl’s. The witness also described the creature as having brownish-blonde fur. It stared at the hunter for about 20 seconds before it almost literally faded into the trees; the witness doesn’t recall hearing any sounds as it moved away through the brush. The witness, who holds multiple degrees from West Virginia University and has thirty years of experience as an outdoorsman, swears that it was no animal known to science.
November 2013: Another anonymous Fayette County resident claims to have stumbled across a Bigfoot scavenging a deer carcass while driving along Route 60 outside Lookout. They described it as being 6 1/2 to 7 feet tall, with dark, reddish-brown hair, a smooshed-looking face (especially its flat nose), and arms that stretched past its waist.
October 2019: Billy and Sheena Humphrey were investigating a deer blind that the former had set up in their backyard near Danese to determine what kind of animal was stealing the food they had left out by staying in the blind all night to keep watch. On the third evening, the creature finally showed itself. While it only emerged from the woods for about 15 seconds, Bill managed to snap a photo before it was lost in the foliage. The Humphreys described it as standing 8 1/2 to 9 feet tall, with a cone-shaped head, dark fur with a tan stripe under the eyes, and a barrel chest. They quickly grew uneasy and fled the area. When they finally mustered up the courage to return to the blind a month later, it was destroyed.
The Flatwoods Monster
This possibly extraterrestrial entity (also sometimes known as the Braxton County Monster, Braxie, or the Phantom of Flatwoods) is best remembered for a single encounter that occurred almost in the dead center of the state at the height of the “flying saucer” craze in the early 1950s. To this day, what the residents of Flatwoods saw in the woods on the night of September 12, 1952, remains one of the most well-publicized stories among both cryptozoologists and ufologists alike.
The story started at 7:15 that evening when brothers Edward and Fred May and their friend, Tommy Hyer (who were out playing football outside the local elementary school), claimed to see a bright object descend from the sky that appeared to land near G. Bailey Fisher’s farm. The boys gathered an impromptu posse consisting of them, Ed and Fred’s mother Kathleen, local children Neil Nunley and Ronnie Shaver, and Kathleen’s National Guardsman cousin Eugene Lemon (along with his dog), to investigate the landing site. When they arrived, they were enveloped in a foul-smelling mist and noticed a flashing red light. Lemon turned his flashlight toward it, revealing a sight the group would never forget.
It was a humanoid being that appeared to be levitating several inches off the ground, was wearing what appeared to be green armor, had spindly arms ending with clawed fingers, and had a red face with glowing red eyes that seemed to be shrouded by a cowl shaped like an ace of spades (estimates of its height varied from 7-12 feet). It stood illuminated by the flashlight beam for a few seconds, then lunged at the group and hissed. The terrified group immediately made a break for the safety of the local police station. One of the children reportedly became so overwhelmed with terror that he passed out, while Kathleen reportedly cleared a six-foot fence in a single bound in her rush to escape from the thing.
Once the police had calmed the group down, they convinced Lemon to lead them back to the site, accompanied by local reporter A. Stewart Lee of the Braxton Democrat. The creature and its craft had vanished, but the group noted what seemed to be evidence of its presence, including tracks, a black and oily residue, and a faint sulfuric odor. Chillingly, several members of the group later claimed to develop symptoms like irritation and swelling of the nose and throat, vomiting, and convulsions for weeks afterward, which some claimed resembled exposure to mustard gas.
While the September 12 sighting is by far the most well-publicized, there were at least four others reported in the area both before and after that date. Here they are in chronological order:
Early September 1952: The first reported encounter with the Monster came about a week before the 12th, when an anonymous mother and daughter (also Flatwoods residents) claimed to have seen a similar creature near their house, with the daughter apparently being hospitalized for three weeks due to respiratory illness and a swollen throat.
September 12: At 10 p.m. on the same night as the Fisher farm sighting, George Snitowsky and his wife, Edith, claimed to have been accosted by the Monster while driving outside of Frametown, about ten miles away from Flatwoods. They say their car stalled, then a sulfuric odor filled the air, and then the Monster (which they described as having a metallic lower body, a reptilian upper body, and glowing eyes) slowly approached their vehicle. Fortunately, Snitowsky managed to restart the car and drive away.
September 12: Yet another sighting from that same evening was apparently reported by Audrey Harper of Heaterville, who claimed to see a bright object descend from the sky and land, after which a tall, dark entity with glowing eyes emerged from it. My research indicates that there is no place by that name in West Virginia, though, so this account may be dubious (a Google search turns up Fayetteville instead).
September 13: Local reporter and Board of Education director A. Lee Stewart Jr., who visited the Fisher farm at 6:30 a.m., claimed to see a flying saucer rise out of the trees, emitting a metallic hum. He did not encounter any creature resembling that seen the previous night.
Theories as to the true identity of the Flatwoods Monster abound. Some, such as ufologist Gray Barker and cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson, who personally investigated the site in the days following the encounter, believed it to be a bona fide alien invader. Other, more religious types suggested that it was an angel sent to Earth by God for some nebulous purpose. Others argued that a meteor passing overhead, combined with flashing plane beacons, was to blame. Perhaps the most amusing explanation was that a rubber cow balloon launched by a Wisconsin cheese factory as a publicity stunt had somehow been blown all the way to West Virginia.
I believe the most likely explanation is the one proposed by Joe Nickell in the November 2, 2000 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer. He points out that a meteor was indeed observed passing over Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia on September 12, which, combined with the three red flashing airplane beacons visible from the area, could have been mistaken for a UFO and accounted for the reddish coloration of the Monster’s face. As for the Monster itself, Nickell believes that it may have been a misidentified American barn owl, which has been colloquially referred to as the “demon owl” or “death owl” due to its harsh, screeching call, quite unlike the classic deep hoots of the great horned or barred owl. Nickell proposes that a startled and territorial owl may have screeched at the Fisher farm posse, and that in their terror, their agitated minds have accidentally fused the bird with a tall bush standing behind it to form a towering extraterrestrial horror.
As for the oily substance and tracks found afterward, Brian Dunning points out that investigators insisted these were signs of a UFO landing, even after local teen Max Lockard admitted to driving to the site, hoping to see the Monster for himself. Even the sickness several witnesses reported afterward can be easily attributed to hysteria and overexertion rather than an environmental toxin (although this is coal country we’re talking about, which could explain the sulfur smell). It is hard to reconcile this explanation with the other reported sightings, though, unless, of course, the other witnesses were lying to gain their fifteen minutes of fame via association with the case.
Like with many other local cryptids, however, the skeptics haven’t stopped Flatwoods and Braxton County as a whole from adopting the Monster as a local mascot. There is a museum dedicated to the Monster in nearby Sutton, the county visitor’s center is surrounded by chairs fashioned to look like the Monster, and Flatwoods itself has hosted an annual Flatwoods Monster Convention since 2019. It’s hard to keep a story as good as that down for long.
The Grafton Monster
The Grafton Monster, as portrayed in Fallout 76
Of all the weird cryptids that have stalked through West Virginia over the years, Taylor County’s Grafton Monster may be the weirdest of them all, which is quite the accomplishment.
Its story begins at 11 p.m. on June 16, 1964, when Robert Cockrell, a reporter at the Grafton Sentinel, was driving home from work along Riverside Drive (officially known as Yates Avenue). He slammed on the brakes as he rounded a bend and was confronted by a large white object standing on the side of the road closest to the bank of the Tygart Valley River. It stood 7-9 feet tall and four feet wide, with skin as smooth and shiny as a seal’s and “no discernible head.” A frightened Cockrell understandably floored it out of there, but soon his investigative reporter instincts took over, and he returned to the site, with two of his friends backing him up. They found no tracks, but did find crushed foliage. They also felt like they were being watched the whole time, and heard something whistling in the trees.
Cockrell spent most of the next day writing an article for the Sentinel describing his encounter. While his editors initially refused to publish such an outlandish story, rumors of further sightings led them to relent. Cockrell’s article added more fuel to the fire, and soon the local police were overwhelmed with trespassers, primarily teenagers, swarming the woods in search of the Monster.
Most online sources about the Grafton Monster do not describe any subsequent sightings of the beast in much detail. A video about the Monster from the YouTube channel Bedtime Stories describes a few in more detail, including an undated encounter in which it lumbered across a lumberyard, seemingly oblivious to the father and son pair of woodcutters nervously aiming shotguns at it, and another from the mid-1980s in which a camper fishing on the river at night had his boat overturned when the headless giant suddenly burst out of the water.
There are several theories as to what the Grafton Monster actually was. Some speculated it may have been a polar bear that escaped from a nearby zoo. Others argued it was a bear or another large animal that had been mutated in some way. Famous ufologist Gray Barker, who investigated the sightings, suggested that the giant was an alien probe. Some have even gone as far as to propose that the Monster was a golem that had somehow gone rogue.
An investigation of the legend by Daniel A. Reed for the Skeptical Inquirer, however, uncovered a letter to the editor that Robert Cockrell wrote to the Mountain Statesman (the newspaper that succeeded the Sentinel in 1975) in April 2014 in which he attempted to set the record straight about the Monster. Cockrell explained that what he actually saw was a local eccentric named Tommy Peters, who was known to ride around on his bike all day and night, loading it with boxes full of interesting items he found on the side of the road. Cockrell argues that what he actually saw that night was Peters on his bike, his outline obscured by the pile of boxes he was lugging around. Unfortunately, once the story got out, it quickly took on a life of its own and was blown way out of proportion. He goes on to accuse Rosemary Ellen Guiley, author of the 2012 book Monsters of West Virginia, of falsely attributing quotes to him and making up everything that happened after his initial sighting, and describes the Destination America TV series Mountain Monsters (which had done an episode on the Grafton Monster earlier that month) as a show full of offensive hillbilly stereotypes that “gives West Viginians a public relations black eye.”
Despite the beast’s proverbial Frankenstein publicly disavowing the existence of the Monster he accidentally helped create, Grafton would launch the Grafton Monster Festival in 2024 (two years after Cockrell’s death) and open a museum based around it on Main Street. The Monster was also one of several from Appalachian folklore that were featured in the much-maligned 2018 video game Fallout 76. Despite Cockrell’s best efforts, it appears that the legend of the Grafton Monster isn’t going away any time soon.
Indrid Cold
Image source: The Legends of History on YouTube
Mothman is undoubtedly the most famous paranormal entity to emerge from the period of high strangeness that plagued West Virginia in the mid-1960s, but he was far from the only type of supernatural weirdness reported in the area. There were also reports of UFO sightings, poltergeist activity, encounters with the Men in Black, and much more. But the most famous non-Mothman story from that area is undoubtedly that of Indrid Cold, also known by his nickname, the Grinning Man.
Cold first came to prominence in November 1966, right as the Mothman’s reign of terror was about to begin. A sewing machine salesman from Parkersburg named Woodrow Derenberger claimed to have been driving along Interstate 77 at 7:30 p.m. on the 2nd of that month when the road was suddenly blocked by a UFO shaped like an “old kerosene lamp globe.” A man with olive skin, brown hair, a glossy dark blue coat, and a smile on his face emerged from the craft and walked up to Derenberger’s vehicle. He spent the next ten minutes communicating with Derenberger via telepathy and told the salesman to contact the authorities once he had left. Derenberger spoke with the police shortly after and set up press conferences and interviews in the days that followed to publicize his story.
Over the years, Derenberger would claim to have maintained regular contact with Cold and some of his associates, even going as far as to claim to have visited their home planet, Lanulos, on several occasions. His obsession with his story would eventually cost him his job and his family, likely due to his long absences whenever Cold visited, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. He became a recluse to escape the UFO enthusiasts and skeptics who regularly came calling at this front door, and eventually died in 1990.
John Keel, who later popularized the Mothman legend in his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies, wrote a whole chapter about the Grinning Man in his 1970 book Strange Creatures from Time and Space, in which he included an account of a similar entity spotted in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a month before Derenberger’s encounter on October 11. The story goes that local youths James Yanchitis and Martin Munov were returning home from a movie theater via a corridor under the New Jersey Turnpike when they noticed a strange figure standing in the bushes behind a chain-link fence. The man stood six feet tall, was dressed in what they described as a “sparkling green coverall costume” with a black belt around his waist, dark skin, and, most unnerving, a face sporting an unnaturally wide grin, beady eyes spaced widely apart, with no sign of hair, ears, or a nose. The man stood staring at a house across the street, at least until he turned to look at the boys, at which point they fled.
Keel also wrote of another encounter with the Grinning Man that supposedly took place in Point Pleasant during the height of the Mothman scare. The Lilly family had been reporting poltergeist activity in their house for a while, but the apogee of their haunting came when their young daughter, Linda, woke up one night to see a large and dark humanoid figure standing over her bed. It was too dark for her to make out any facial features, except for a large grin. She screamed and hid under the covers. When she gathered the courage to peek out, the figure had vanished.
The YouTube channel Bedtime Stories included other reports of similar entities from across the globe, including one involving a woman living in a rural area of Scotland outside of Cairngorms National Park, who woke up one night to see the curtains of her bedroom window opened (despite distinctly remembering closing them before going to bed) and saw a grinning man with widely-spaced beady eyes staring through the window who somehow caused her to levitate out of bed. They also make note of some alien abduction victims who claimed to have seen similar figures interacting with their abductors, most notably Pier Fortunato Zanfretta of Torriglia, Italy, who claimed to have been abducted 11 times between 1978 and 1981.
However, it should be noted that when one actually reads Derenberger’s original description of his encounter, Indrid Cold seems like a perfectly normal human being as opposed to the figures described in the other encounters, which sound like they would feel right at home in a David Lynch production (God rest his soul). Indeed, Derenberger didn’t note anything unusual about any part of the man’s appearance (aside, of course, from the fact that he emerged from a UFO). He even described Cold’s smile as “courteous and friendly,” a far cry from the uncanny valley-leaning descriptions from the other witnesses.
This is among several fishy details noted by Brian Dunning in his investigation of the Grinning Man. He also notes how John Keel claimed that the New Jersey sighting coincided with a wave of UFO sightings across the northern part of the state, although Dunning could find no records of any UFO sightings in the state on October 11, 1966. Dunning also notes Keel’s frustrating habit of not citing his sources, which makes it hard to find primary sources to verify his claims.
Even if his ties to reality are dubious, Indrid Cold remains a popular figure in American folklore, often being portrayed as an associate or even a disguise of Mothman. His most prominent role is probably in the 2002 film adaptation of The Mothman Prophecies, where he is played by Bill Laing and voiced by director Mark Pellington.
Speaking of Mothman, though, let’s turn our attention to the real star of this story.
Mothman
Seriously, though, what was this thing? An alien? A visitor from a parallel universe? An angelic harbinger of doom? The manifestation of a Native American curse? An owl or sandhill crane whose appearance was blown way out of proportion? Before we speculate about any of that, however, let’s see where this cryptozoological superstar’s story first started.
The first canonical sighting of the Mothman is generally agreed to have taken place on November 12, 1966, near the town of Clendenin in Kanawha County, when Kenneth Duncan, who was digging a grave for his father-in-law at a local cemetery alongside four other men, claimed to see a brown humanoid figure fly through the trees. None of his companions saw it. Three days later, Harrison County resident Newell Partridge claimed to have a harrowing encounter with a similar creature at his farm in Salem. Partridge was watching TV with his wife when the screen suddenly glitched into a herringbone pattern. His dog, Bandit, started barking at something outside. When Partridge investigated with a flashlight, he was shocked to see a manlike figure standing by his barn, with two big red eyes that glowed like bicycle reflectors. In the time it took for Partridge to slip inside to grab a shotgun, however, both it and the dog had vanished.
But it would be the next sighting, an hour later, that would not only permanently cement Mothman’s place in American pop culture but also forever tie this avian anomaly to the Mason County community of Point Pleasant, which lies at the spot where the Kanawha River empties into the Ohio River.
At 11:30 that evening, married couples Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette went on a late-night drive through an abandoned World War II-era munitions dump located within the McClintic Wildlife Management Area, officially known as the West Virginia Ordinance Works and colloquially referred to as the TNT Area. As they eased past a deserted power plant, the headlights illuminated a strange humanoid creature standing near an open door. Linda later described the creature as seven feet tall, muscular, and slender with large white wings folded against its back. She also noted its red eyes, which glowed like bicycle reflectors.
When the creature started for the door with an odd shuffling gait, Roger, who was driving, lost his nerve and floored it out of there. One can imagine the group’s shock, then, when they suddenly noticed the creature following them, even though the car was going a hundred miles an hour, and the entity never seemed to flap its ten-foot wings. They recalled the creature uttering a squeaking sound as it chased them. It finally broke off the pursuit as they approached the city limits of Point Pleasant, five miles to the south.
An equally dramatic encounter was reported the following evening, when Marcella Bennett and the Wamsley couple visited Ralph Thomas’ family on the outskirts of the TNT Area. No sooner had the visitors exited the car when “a big gray thing…with terrible glowing eyes” emerged from the brush just a few yards away. Marcella found herself frozen in a trance, even dropping her two-year-old daughter, Tina, on the ground. Luckily, Raymond Wamsley managed to snap her out of it and pull her and Tina into the house. The creature stepped onto the front porch and spied on the terrified occupants as they called the police. It had vanished by the time they arrived.
Earlier that same day, county sheriff George Johnson had decided that the incident was unusual enough to warrant a press conference. He emphasized that he genuinely believed that the Scarberrys and Mallettes had seen something that scared them. However, he thought the creature was nothing more than a misidentified “shitepoke” (an archaic slang term for herons). Regional newspapers seized on the popularity of the Adam West Batman series (which had just started airing that January) to christen the creature as Mothman, combining the Caped Crusader’s alias with that of one of his villains, Killer Moth.
Other notable sightings recorded in the following months include:
November 20: A Point Pleasant businessman stepped onto his backyard to quiet his dog, only to be confronted by a seven-foot winged being with “flaming eyes.” When he staggered back into his house, he was so pale and shaken that his wife thought he was suffering a heart attack.
November 21: Mothman apparently stopped by the state capitol of Charleston, where he was spotted sitting on someone’s roof and, when spotted, took off “straight up, like a helicopter.”
November 25: A rare daytime sighting was reported by shoe salesman Thomas Ury, who reported seeing a tall grey figure standing in a field near the TNT Area while on his morning commute. He, too, reported seeing the creature spread its ten-foot wings and fly straight up, much like a helicopter. He also claimed that it chased his car, despite his traveling at 75 mph. This time, though, the Mothman at least had the decency to pursue from a distance of “three telephone poles up.”
November 26: Mothman returned to the Charleston area, specifically the suburb of St. Albans, frightening Ruth Foster when she saw it standing in her front yard, then chasing 13-year-old Sheila Cain and her sister out of a junkyard.
November 27: New Haven resident Connie Carpenter claimed that the Mothman charged at her car while she was on her way to church, only to veer off at the last second. She described its face as “horrible, like something out of a science fiction movie.”
December 4: Five pilots at the airport in Gallipolis, Ohio, spotted something flying 300 feet over the Ohio River at about 70 mph. When they realized it was likely an animal rather than a small aircraft, one of the pilots leaped into his plane with a camera and took off after it. It was gone by the time he was airborne, though.
Meanwhile, more rational minds sought earthly explanations for the avian anomaly. Dr. Robert L. Smith, associate professor of wildlife biology at West Virginia University, argued that Mothman was nothing more than a sandhill crane, which, while not endemic to West Virginia at the time, may have wandered out of its regular migration route (they are known for their red faces, which may account for the reports of glowing red eyes). Several hoaxers were unmasked, including one who ran around in a costume and a construction crew who tied a pair of flashlights to a pair of helium-filled balloons (some also proposed that someone flying a hang glider may have been responsible, although no such hoaxer was ever uncovered).
Despite this, investigators like John Keel, future author of The Mothman Prophecies, were convinced that something supernatural or extraterrestrial was at play, especially since several witnesses, including the Scarberrys and Marcella Bennett, claimed that they could somehow feel when the Mothman was about and even claimed that it visited them several times after their initial encounters. Indeed, one of the last significant witnesses, Virginia Thomas, even claimed that the creature paralyzed her and “took over [her] thinking” when she encountered it in the TNT Area on the afternoon of November 7, 1967.
Some other paranormal enthusiasts have also connected Mothman to a curse supposedly laid on the town by Chief Cornstalk (Hokoleskwa in his native tongue), a Shawnee general who led his people in the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774, which he lost to the Virginia colonists, and was subsequently imprisoned in Fort Randolph and lynched by an angry mob three years later. The curse has been linked not only to Mothman and the Silver Bridge but also to several other local disasters, including mining accidents, plane crashes, tornadoes, and train derailments. However, as this YouTube video from the PBS series Monstrum points out, it has since been discovered that Cornstalk’s curse actually originated in a grade school pageant play, presumably added to give the play some dramatic flair.
The story of the Point Pleasant Mothman would come to a tragic end a little over a month later, when the Point Pleasant Bridge, locally known as the Silver Bridge due to its aluminum paint job, collapsed into the Ohio River on December 15, sending 46 motorists to their deaths. Officially, the cause of the collapse was a weakened eyebar in one of the suspension chains. Others argued that Mothman (who some claim was spotted on or near the bridge shortly before the disaster) was involved, either as a malicious influence or as a harbinger trying to warn locals of the upcoming catastrophe. Whether because its nebulous mission had been fulfilled or because the locals were too preoccupied coping with the tragedy to care what their supernatural visitor was up to, Mothman vanished from Point Pleasant, never to return.
Or did it? On November 20, 2016, a man called the Charleston-based news station WCHS to claim that he had photographed the Mothman while driving down State Route 2. While many cryptozoology fanatics were thrilled by the photographs, others argued they were nothing more than an owl carrying a snake away for dinner. Indeed, owls have been proposed as another likely explanation for Mothman’s true identity, especially the barred owl, whose eyes glow bright red in the flashlight or headlight’s glare thanks to the density of the ocular blood vessels.
Despite the bevy of earthly explanations for Mothman’s appearance, the legend has spread worldwide, with either the same or similar creatures allegedly being spotted around Prypiat, Ukraine, shortly before the Chernobyl disaster; in the smoke rising off the World Trade Center on 9/11; in Chicago in 2017; and in Cornwall, England, in 1976, where it came to be known as the Owlman of Mawnan.
Predictably, Point Pleasant has seized upon the Mothman’s fame to boost its own profile. The Mothman Festival, hosted annually every third week of September, was established in 2002. A twelve-foot metal statue of the creature was erected on Fourth Street in 2003, and a museum dedicated to Mothman was opened right across the street in 2005. While Denny Bellamy, the executive director of the Mason County Visitors Bureau, openly admits in the PBS video I linked above that Mothman skeptics outnumber Mothman believers in Mason County, the festival nets roughly $2 million in profits and 15,000 visitors every year, so it’s probably not going away any time soon.
Ogua
Snapping turtles are already fearsome beasts, although moreso in appearance than temperament (while their jaws are strong enough to sever human fingers, there are only three recorded instances of alligator snapping turtles doing so, and they are generally not aggressive as a rule). But what happens if you inflate their size from 20 inches to 20 feet and give them a second head? Well, you get Ogua, one of the most unique American river monsters.
This oversized chelydrid is said to make its home in the Monongahela River basin, which covers much of northern West Virginia, the westernmost tip of Maryland, and southwestern Pennsylvania, where it joins the Allegheny River at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. It was known to the Indigenous inhabitants of the region (the river’s name derives from the Lenape word for “falling banks”), who warned European settlers of its aggressive and carnivorous nature. Ogua was said to rush onto the shore, grab its unsuspecting victims, and drag them to an underwater den to save for later.
Ogua mainly preyed on deer, but was not above taking human prey when the opportunity presented itself. The Nichols family seems to have found this out the hard way on October 22, 1746, when their twelve-year-old son was pulled into the water by what they described as a turtle larger than a bear. They never recovered his body, and subsequently moved out of the area after one of the dead boy’s siblings was awakened one night by a rough scratching sound and saw an animal larger than a sow outside her window.
A similar beast was reportedly observed near modern-day Marietta, Ohio, where it was described as a 15-foot, 444-pound turtle with two heads that lay near deer runs at night waiting for a midnight snack to stumble across it. A letter from a resident of the area describes how a group of hunters clubbed one such specimen to death.
Possible rational explanations for the origins of the Ogua legend include the possibility that an American alligator somehow made its way up to the Monongahela in pre-Columbian times and that the legend was the Natives’ (and later the colonists’) way of making sense of this unfamiliar animal. Indeed, the behavior described in the legends, including the storing of prey in underwater caches, is consistent with how alligators operate. These elements may have been combined with sightings of larger-than-normal alligator snapping turtles to create the Ogua we know today.
In any case, while Ogua is not quite as well-known as other Appalachian cryptids, that still didn’t stop it from being included in Fallout 76, albeit without the second head that it’s so famous for.
While no sightings of Ogua have been reported in the present day, other, more traditional water-dwelling cryptids have been reported in the Monongahela. Most notably, Marion County coal miner John Edward White claimed to have been nightfishing near where Paw Paw Creek empties into the Monongahela in May 1983 when he noticed a school of fish that seemed to be fleeing from something. He was then startled to see a fin rise 6-8 feet out of the water. He described the animal it was attached to as 20 feet long and reddish-brown, with a serpentlike head, razor-sharp teeth, and a long, flat tail. This creature is different enough from an oversized snapping turtle to earn its own name: Winifred the Waterhorse (also sometimes called the Appalachian Waterhorse or the Rivesville River Monster).
And the craziest thing is that that’s still not all the legendary monsters said to dwell in the Monongahela. There’s one more, a mermaid-type creature from Indigenous folklore known as Monongy that has apparently been reported in the river since the French and Indian War, when it got into tussles with British troops. It apparently prefers to hang around Pittsburgh, where it was spotted several times between the 1930s and 50s. There were even rumors that the creature was photographed in 2003, but that the pictures mysteriously vanished from the Internet shortly after. However, some skeptics assert that the legends were made up from whole cloth to promote the 2010 “Search for Monongy” swim race in Pittsburgh, a claim that may be supported by the fact that the legend dubiously claims that it was Monongy itself that gave the river its name (which is demonstrably untrue, as I pointed out above).
Sheepsquatch
Image credit: blewzen on DeviantArt
Also known as the White Thing, this hybrid monstrosity could be considered West Virginia’s contribution to the Goatman legend. It’s a relatively recent entry in the cryptozoological canon, as its first sightings date only to 1994. It has been described as a bear-sized creature with white fur, a long doglike head, teeth like those of a sabre-toothed cat, goatlike horns, raccoonlike hands, and a hairless tail like that of an opossum. It is also said to give off a sulfur-like smell, either due to the polluted mining environment or a natural scent gland.
Most sources claim the first sighting was by Navy SEAL Edward Rollins, who said he saw it burst through the forest undergrowth while he was hiking in Mason County near the TNT Area (yes, you heard right), take a drink from a creek, then continue on its way. A second 1994 sighting was reported by two Boone County children who claimed they spooked it while playing in their yard. It reared up on its hind legs, then ran off into the trees, breaking branches as it went.
In 1995, a couple driving through Boone County noticed something large and white in a ditch and stopped to take a closer look. This time, though, the Sheepsquatch appeared to be in a bad mood, as it leaped out of the ditch and attacked the car. Luckily, the couple managed to escape, but not before the beast left deep scratches on the sides. Oddly enough, the couple recalled the creature having four eyes, which is unusual for an ostensibly mammalian animal.
The beast would retreat into the forests of Boone County for the next four years, until, in 1999, a group of campers may have unintentionally trespassed on its territory. They recalled hearing noises like an angry bear circling their campsite, and when they went out to investigate, the Sheepsquatch charged at them. Luckily, one of the campers’ houses was nearby, so they sought refuge there. The beast stopped chasing them once they left the woods, then uttered a “terrible scream” before disappearing. When the group returned to the campsite the next day, it was torn apart.
It next appeared in Fairy Stone National Park in June 2011, when a witness known only as Teena said she was hiking with a friend when they saw something moving in the brush 50 yards away. They got a good look at it when it clambered onto a rock. They said it resembled a medium-sized bear but with yellowish-gray fur and dark eyes set far lower on the head.
The most recent sighting was in 2015, when the beast apparently crossed the border into Virginia. There, in the tiny unincorporated Rockingham County community of Fulks Run, a group of six campers were startled one night to see an 8-9-foot-tall humanoid form crouched on a hill, illuminated by the moonlight. They didn’t run even as the creature stood up and descended the slope, for a river separated the campsite from the hill. Even when the beast waded across the water, they still stayed put, probably terrified beyond all capacity for rational thought. Interestingly, though, the animal suddenly stopped in its tracks when a guttural screech suddenly echoed through the woods from two miles away. The clearly frightened creature looked up and around (giving the campers a good look at its doglike face), then took off running in the opposite direction, whimpering as it went. The campers immediately packed and left.
It has been suggested that Sheepsquatch might be part of the groups of West Virginia cryptids known as the White Things. We’ll learn more about them in a little bit.
The Veggie Man
Artist credit: Kristen Puckett
Possibly the weirdest cryptids we’ve encountered so far, this one is known from only a single encounter that allegedly occurred in the forests surrounding Grant Town in Marion County in July 1968.
Jennings Frederick claimed he was out hunting groundhogs when he was suddenly distracted by a “high-pitched jabbering, much like that of a recording running at exaggerated speed.” Here’s how paranormal investigator Brad Steiger described what he saw next in his 1978 book Alien Meetings: “Suddenly, there it was, a being with semi-human facial features, long ears, and yellow, slanted eyes. Its arms were no bigger around than a quarter… its body resembled the stalk of a plant in shape and color, for it was slender and green.” He claimed that the creature spoke to him via telepathy, saying, “You need not fear me. I wish to communicate. I come as a friend. We know of you all. I come in peace. I wish medical assistance. I need your help.”
Frederick barely had any time to react to the being’s request before it shot out a hand, whose fingers ended in suction cups where the first knuckles would be on a human hand with thornlike fingertips, and stuck the needles into his arm. Frederick was alarmed to see the creature’s eyes turn red as it sucked his blood, only to calm down as swirls appeared in the darkening eyes, which seemed to have a hypnotic effect. Once it had gotten its fill of blood, the Vegetable Man bounded away in a gravity-defying sprint, carrying it 25 feet with each step, according to Jennings’ estimation. As Jennings fled for the safety of his house, he heard a deep humming sound, which he believed to be the Veggie Man’s spaceship taking off.
While Jennings never saw the Veggie Man again, when he mustered the courage to tell his mother, Ivah, about it, she replied that she had seen something similar three years before while her son was away at school. She claimed that a flying saucer ten feet wide and five feet tall had landed near their house, and that a dark green creature with pointed ears and a tail emerged from it. Ivah was so terrified that she ran into her bedroom and pulled the covers over her eyes. She peeked out from under them just in time to see the creature return to the saucer and fly away.
Where the story loses many skeptics is in who Jennings eventually told the story to: fellow West Virginian Gray Barker. Barker not only helped to popularize many of the cryptids we’ve discussed in this article, including Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster, but also introduced the concept of the Men in Black in his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. In the years since he died in 1984, though, many of his former associates, most notably John C. Sherwood, described Barker as a hoaxer who only wrote about the paranormal because it made him boatloads of money. Indeed, the Veggie Man story already sounds like it came straight from the kind of B-movie script that Mystery Science Theater 3000 would have a ball with, and Barker’s association certainly does it no favors.
While Daniel A. Reed, who wrote an article about the Vegetable Man for the Skeptical Inquirer, concedes that the fact that Jennings Frederick was an Air Force member with security clearance who received an honorable discharge speaks highly of his character, the fact remains that there is no evidence beyond what paranormal investigators like Barker and Steiger wrote about it (for the record, Steiger was a believer in Atlantis and that the Paluxy River “man tracks” were evidence that humans existed alongside dinosaurs, which doesn’t do wonders for his credibility either).
Even if the story of the Veggie Man is nothing more than an Appalachian tall tale, that hasn’t stopped it from being enshrined in a local Veggie Man holiday in nearby Fairmont in 2024, as well as being featured in Fallout 76.
The White Things
As I mentioned above, the Sheepquatch may be just one out of a group of strange creatures said to be lurking in West Virginia’s thick and mountainous woodlands. Sometimes also known as Devil Dogs and White Devils, their descriptions vary, with some appearing more canine, some more feline, and others more humanoid. Everyone who’s seen them agrees on some standard features: white hair, large and razor-sharp fangs, and a scream that sounds eerily humanlike. When they attack, the bites and scratches are as painful as any normal animal attack, yet once the White Thing withdraws, there isn’t a scratch anywhere on the victims. Some say they are fond of cemeteries, and are thus omens of death.
One legend tells of a woman who was riding home from church one Saturday night when she heard an unearthly scream, which sounded like an agonized human female. The beast that uttered the cry, which the woman described as a hairy, white, four-legged creature, somewhere between a dog and a horse in size, with large teeth, burst out of the woods and gave pursuit. The woman was so terrified that she didn’t even bother to tie up her horse before she ran into her house. When she checked on the horse the next morning, most of its flesh had been stripped away, and a look of abject terror was permanently etched into its face.
A more concrete sighting report comes from Frank Kozul, a Croatian immigrant living in the Fairmont/Rivesville region, who was walking home from his shift at the Morgan 93 mine one night in July 1929 when he was pounced on by a white creature the size of a large dog with a bushy tail and sharp teeth. Kozul tried beating the beast off with his lunchbox, but the object simply phased through the creature as if it wasn’t even there. Kozul managed to escape his mauling by running to a nearby cemetery, where the beast seemed reluctant to follow. He was astonished to discover that the monster hadn’t left a mark on him, despite him feeling the claws and fangs digging into his flesh.
Indeed, while the White Things seem to have no trouble tearing apart livestock, like sheep and horses, they seem to prefer inflicting pain on humans only as some sadistic prank. Let’s hope it stays that way.
And so we come to the conclusion of our discussion of West Virginia’s extra weird menagerie of hidden animals. Next up on my nationwide cryptid hunt will be Virginia, but that’s not gonna be for a while. First, I’ve got several animation-related projects to take care of.
I’ve got the 1001 Animations Christmas special to prepare for. I also still haven’t completed my best animated films or TV shows of 2024 lists yet, even though it’s November of 2025 right now, so I should probably get back to those sooner rather than later. Finally, the last two entries in my Jurassic Park retrospective cover the animated series Camp Cretaceous and Chaos Theory. I’ve no idea when those are coming out, but hopefully I can take care of them after the 2024 lists are complete.
For now, though, I’ll probably be a little busy preparing for the coming holiday season (decorating for Christmas and having Thanksgiving dinner, etc.). I’ve also successfully applied for a learner’s permit at my last DMV appointment, which was a pleasant surprise, and got my first online therapy appointment on December 4th. I may do a quick update post afterward to tell you guys how that went. Let’s hope it’s worth my while.
And that’s all I have for this essay. Remember to stay safe, stay away from any weird creatures you don’t recognize (especially all you West Virginians out there), and I wish safe travels and a blessed Thanksgiving to all who celebrate. Bye!
