10 Horrifying Facts About The Legend of the Mothman: The Harbinger Of Doom From The 1960s
By | August 31, 2022

Keel, who had a history of fascination with the supernatural, arrived in Point Pleasant in December of 1966, about a month after the sightings began. His investigation involved interviewing witnesses who claimed to have personally encountered the creature. According to Keel, there were at least one hundred witnesses between November 1966 and November 1967. They described the creature as between five and seven feet tall with human legs and bat-like wings. It made a sound which one witness described as sounding like a woman’s scream. In addition to the witness accounts of mothman sightings, Keel also collected reports of phone and television disruption, poltergeists, and UFO sightings, all of which he believed to be connected.

While the Point Pleasant sightings gave the mothman its name, it wasn’t the first time the creature had been spotted. In January 1926, a creature referred to locally as the “man dragon” was witnessed hovering over Xiaon Te Dam in Southeastern China. The dam later collapsed, and 15,000 people were killed.




After disappearing from Point Pleasant, mothman sightings began to spring up across the world and seemed to be in some way connected to tragic events, though no one knows if it causes the events or merely appears as a warning. In one case, its appearance actually saved lives. It was September 10, 1978, in Freiburg, Germany. A group of miners were blocked from entering a mine by a creature with glowing red eyes and large black wings. It came to be known as the “Freiburg Shrieker” due to its screech that chased the miners out of the mine, which collapsed an hour later and would have most likely killed the miners had the creature not prevented them from entering.
In the year before the Chernobyl incident, there were numerous claims of a creature matching the mothman’s description flying around the plant. There were also reports of witnesses plagued with strange phone calls and nightmares. After the explosion on April 26, 1986, several people claimed that a “huge black bird” was flying around the smoke.

The creature allegedly appeared once again on September 11, 2001, flying near the Twin Towers. Witnesses claim it could be seen flying parallel to the second plane as it hit the building. These witnesses claim to have been silenced by “men in black” who warned them to keep quiet about what they saw.
The mothman has resurfaced again during the years since. In 2007, it once again accompanied a bridge collapse, with sightings beginning one month before the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on August 1. Ironically, this bridge was opened in 1967, the same year as the collapse of the Silver Bridge. In 2009, a similar creature was spotted in La Junta, Mexico, shortly before the swine flu outbreak. In 2011, it was seen by Marcus Pules near the Fukushima plant in Japan shortly before an earthquake triggered an explosion there.


The thing about the Mothman legend is that it's incredibly similar to ancient stories of demons that have occurred throughout time, even stories that we hear today. The glowing red eyes and distorted human body oddly parallels stories of sleep paralysis, where people see horrific visions of creatures stalking them in their bedrooms
Could it be that people who've seen the Mothman are experiencing a kind of walking sleep paralysis? Stranger things have happened.

Sightings of the Mothman have pretty much died out since the 1960s, but every once in a while they pop up before a huge disaster. If this creature is an inter dimensional cryptid hell bent on being a harbinger of doom it makes some kind of paranormal sense that it would flit in and out of our dimension changing shape and personality to suit its means. Or maybe the whole thing was one mass delusion. We'll truly never know.