Point Pleasant, West Virginia, is a handsome little town teetering on the banks of the Ohio River. You come to it suddenly, over a massive iron bridge; the effect is of arriving somewhere slightly different, slightly other. There is a fine Main Street, of the classic type, with a grand hotel, an American Legion building, and a deco post office with an empty flagpole. Many of the shop-windows are empty, with the ghostly remnants of a former prosperity still visible: a dressmakers; a barber’s with bolts in the floor where the chairs used to stand; a ticket-office enclosed in dusty glass in front of which which children once jostled and lied about their ages.
At the colonial graveyard, there is a large cast-iron sign alerting us to the graves of the courageous dead and that of the doctor who performed the first caesarian section in the United States. Many of the gravestones are little more than crumbling stumps; some of the smaller ones have been knocked over and the one large monument is drifting apart, with crevices opening along its sandstone seams. The grass is trampled flat and yellow, sodden with recent thaws. Two flaking clapperboard houses look on sightlessly. Technically it’s spring, but the trees are still stark and naked.
As soon as we cross the bridge, I lose my phone signal. Huh, that’s weird. It’s also weird that we came here accidentally but this is the comforting weirdness of a heady deja-vu; or the ordinary weirdness of very identical twins.
Because Point Pleasant is Mothman country.
For the benefit of the uninitiated, Mothman is a cryptid, which is a fancy word for an animal that does not, or cannot be proved to exist, like Chupacabra or Nessie. It’s reputedly a very tall humanoid, about seven feet high with spreading wings and eyes that either glow or reflect light reddishly. For fans of weird tales, Mothman dovetails quite nicely with the creepy extraterrestrials of Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness, to whom the tale may owe a debt. It started showing up in the late ’60′s (which is hardly surprising when you come to think about it,) and continued to be sighted throughout the ’70′s, an excellent decade for people who wanted to muck about with infra-red cameras and tape recorders.
Mothman flaps about after dark, spooking the unwary in lonely spots, and getting blamed for all manner of disturbances: howling static, flickering lights, cold spots and things that go bump in the night. Sightings were said to have intensified in the weeks before the collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 16th 1967, in which 46 people died. There were no sightings immediately afterward, resulting in rumors that Mothman is a harbinger of doom. Skeptical killjoys say that it just a large crane that got swept off course. Credulous fun-seekers like me know that it is part-alien, part-ghost and is totally real. Like all local phenomena, sightings multiplied and spread until virtually everyone had seen Mothman or knew someone who had.
Today, Mothman is a small local industry: there is a museum and a festival on the third weekend in September. There is a big stainless steel statue of Mothman just off Main Street, with spread wings and big red glass eyes. You can cower between his outstretched claws for a photo. So whatever it is, it’s a good, persistent story, and a story is like a cold: sooner or later, everyone catches it. Even scoffers like to hear them and Mothman is good for business, like that groundhog in Punxatawny, only freakier. You can blame Punxatawny Phil for the cold weather, but you can blame Mothman for anything.
Now as soon as I realized where we were, I messaged a friend and she tried to ruin it for me by telling me one of several perfectly rational explanations for the strange phenomena that put Point Pleasant on the paranormal map in the late sixties. None of that, please. There’s little enough folklore in the world these days so leave the few spooky ideas we have alone. No, I do not mean urban folklore, which is mostly just gossip and third-hand exaggerations, or the increasingly tedious world of online hoaxes. I mean good old fashioned ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ rural tales. Strange lights in the woods; weird chanting; mutilated livestock. In a world of glowing surfaces and short-attention span, there’s not much time or space left for glimpsing things in the darkness.
Released in 2002, The Mothman Prophecies is based on a book written in the seventies by parapsychologist John Keel. It’s a fine chiller for fans of The X-Files. Efforts are made not only to update the story but to give it some contemporary resonance. The central character, played by Richard Gere, is now a nineties political journalist named John Klein. He is seen walking about a wintry DC and being interviewed on a chat-show. This seems intended to confuse him with Joe Klein, a serious Beltway correspondent and Clinton biographer. On television, the fictional Klein is seen discussing a recent election::
‘I think that these parties are demonizing each other. They’re projecting our own personal fears and anxieties onto the national stage.’
As in so many thrillers, Klein is a happy, even complacent man about to move into an expensive new home with his beautiful wife. They even have sex on the floor, which sounds embarrassing for the realtor but hold on: if every bit of nookie resulted in a sale, I’m sure she’d be delighted. On the way back, lovely wife sees something uncanny and there is a minor accident. A hospital stay reveals something seriously wrong with her brain. She draws compulsively, wanders in thought, and dies. Klein is inconsolable and sits on icy benches looking at the freezing mall.
The exhausted Klein takes a trip to Virginia to interview the governor, suffers an attack of wooziness behind the wheel and suddenly finds himself hundreds of mile off course on the Ohio border. Point Pleasant, to be exact. Although he’s new in town, people have seen him before. Standard tropes follow: he becomes obsessed, is warned off by a previous investigator, falls in love with Laura Linney and gradually comes to realize that a major calamity is imminent.
What I continue to admire about The Mothman Prophecies is the neat confrontation between Gere’s smooth urban dweller, and the rural working people of small-town Virginia. There are no stupid hicks in this film, only decent folks played with grace and dignity by skilled actors like Linney and Will Patton. The script may irritate some, since it doesn’t strive for any concrete resolution. Instead, it conjures an atmosphere of decline and wrongness that seems both personal and national. The scenes following the death of Klein’s wife are excellent, filled with the suffocating impotence of sudden death. Elsewhere, there is a sense of national malaise and impending disaster that seems reflected in the wintry marble of DC and the rusting bridges of Virginia. Part of this is just the old, vast terror of America as a chaotic force: the pilgrim fear of the wilderness. But there’s also a sense of national betrayal, abandonment and neglect: a dread that seems ever more prophetic in the years since its release.
The Mothman Cometh
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