The Mothman Cometh

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

Gadzooks, Naughty Varlet: the Michigan Renaissance Fair

A few weeks ago, we went to the remnants of the Michigan State Fair. I remember state fairs. They took place in large fields, where the grass was trampled flat on the hardened summer earth. There was corn-dogs and cotton candy and rides and enormous pigs and cattle and even larger pumpkins and marrows and loud-hailers making announcements about lost children and tug-of-war competitions and blue ribbons for everything.

Then they started to lose money as the countryside depopulated. In the interest of community togetherness and ‘giving something back’ corporations offered to bankroll the state fair. With that blindness to things that are banal and rubbish, these large, gray, complacent organizations decided that the State Fair should be moved to a suburb a stone’s throw from Detroit, and held in a cavernous aluminum warehouse with concrete floors, surrounded by strip-malls and lit with fluorescent tubing. Suburbanites drank Starbucks coffee as their children stared at somnolent rabbits dozing in cages. Commercial stalls are everywhere, selling those stupid gadgets you see on the shopping channel or emblazoned with advertisements for health insurance and iPhones. It was a terrible disappointment and a dismal shadow of what had once been a sunny day out on the farm. It wasn’t that something was missing. Nearly everything was missing: the only thing that was left was the pigs.

Hippies are real conservatives. They actually conserve things, and don’t allow market forces to strip-mine, privatize, bundle, short-sell and liquidate everything that isn’t nailed down. And the only real Mecca for hippies in these dark times is a Renaissance Festival: an irony-free zone where people who just like things: melodic metal, dressing up in robes, D&D, wenches carrying flagons of ale, tattoos in Sindarin Elvish, amethyst jewelry, and things written in olde tymey skrypt can come to indulge their simple pleasures. The huge popular success of Tolkien and ‘Game of Thones’ in recent years has undoubtedly had a rejuvenating effect on the Renaissance Fairs. Kids are lining up to get their photos taken kicking their heels on a replica of the Iron Throne of Westeros, though I’d be surprised if they’re allowed watch the show: all that brutal violence and sexposition. 

It’s about two in the afternoon and most events are in full swing. There is a lot of buying and selling going on, but the stalls all seem to be independently run and owned by the sort of artisans who travel from art-fair to festival around the country flogging their fares: pewter goblets writhing with sculpted dragons and snakes, fantasy art depicting bosomy barbarian women and pec-tacular barbarian men comparing chest measurements, flower fairies peeping out of cowslips and more dragons: scarlet, gold, emerald, onyx and copper. There are a lot of dreamy-looking girls selling handmade jewelry and candles, and some serious artisans selling hand-crafted (and wildly expensive) fantasy leather-work, boots and shoes. One full suit of molded leather armor costs $1500. The boots are knee-high, slightly kinky and run to over $200.

The armorers are doing a roaring trade in weapons that can’t really be called replicas, since these fantasy weapons were never swung by any soldier in history. Nor can they be classed as fake; they are expertly cast in flawless oiled steel. Burly men test their strength just hefting the larger battleaxes and war-hammers, and the counter is littered with daggers, poniards, maces, glaives, falchions, flails and even an few nasty looking sets of knuckledusters. Their craftsmanship is reflected in their costliness: the larger weapons run to hundreds of dollars, but it’s hard to see what you might do with them once you have them, bar hanging them over your mantle. It’s obvious that the buying power is considerable: the best weapons, leather-work, costumes, jewelry and art are astronomically expensive: luxury goods for the discerning barbarian marauder or Elf Queen. For those who are less picky about their rings of power and instruments of death, there is a pirate auction being held next door: a buccaneering fellow with a carrying patter is selling off lucky bags: you place your bid and, if you win, you might walk of with something shiny and razor-sharp at a knock-down price. He loudly warns us not to unwrap any of the parcels until we have left the fair: we can’t have impromptu duels starting: not with all this beer flowing.

Some folks are splendidly outfitted in rigs that must have run to hundreds of dollars; others are in aluminum foil and duct tape. Every little girl has a tiara and fairy wings, and every little boy has a sword, or vice versa: no oppressive gender norms in Fantasyland, thank you. Nearly everybody’s dressed up and I feel a bit grumpy that I hadn’t packed anything that clanks or swishes. I don’t even have a staff. But we’re not the only ones and you never feel that you’ve failed, or that people are looking at you funny.

This lack of disparagement is something that creeps up on you. As a society increasingly defined by dissatisfaction, we are so accustomed to thinking that you have to look a certain way at a meeting, at the beach, at a party or at the gym, that to enter an arena where that expectation is completely absent is initially disorientating. The only people who are getting pointed at are the ones who look particularly amazing: moving theater-sets and creations worthy of Jim Henson or Stan Winston: stilt-walking Ents, tattooed shamans, knights in full plate-male and wizards with real waist-length white beards that would put Saruman to shame. The children are literally squealing with delight, surrounded by adults who not only know how to play make-believe, but who know that the real secret to make-believe is that you have to take it seriously. Enjoyment is pervasive; mockery has taken a holiday.

The food is great, as long as you don’t mind getting a bit boozy and very greasy. Huge broiled turkey drumsticks are the snack du jour, with a long line at the barbecue. Near to the stall selling the amazing Barbarian Burgers (two-handed BIG, made from scratch ground-chop, and served on a proper crusty bread roll,) one of those wonderfully drunk couples is canoodling standing up, as much from a need to provide mutual support until the field stops pitching and spinning as from tender feelings. Grinning and red-eyed, they burble sweet-nothings at each other. Hopeless romantic that he is, the dude is complaining into her hair that, for the price they paid for the bracelet the girl is wearing, they could have gotten six more beers. I have to agree: the ale here is really good: nearly all hearty brown Michigan craft stuff: not a Coors or a Miller Lite to be seen. No wonder they’re merry. He’s increasingly making sense. She seems to agree. They stagger off, presumably to find Ye Olde Pawnebrokyr.

The centerpiece of the festival has to be the tourney ground. At midday, the heralds start tooting and the bleachers fill. Peter wants to move to a spot in the stands where the sun is behind him and he can get the best shots of the jousting. I stay where I am, not so much because the view is good (which it is) but because sitting (and occasionally standing,) in front of me are four dudes emitting a pleasant, green, cowshed smell. These guys are totally engrossed what is about to go down, and are getting each other psyched up for the smiting. The stands are divided according to knightly-loyalty. We are in the green sector but my dudes have taken a look at the green knight and decided that he is a rank noob unworthy of their patronage or fealty. They have thrown in with the red knight: a swarthy fellow with a chest like an oil drum and long lank hair. They huzzah him in terms that are not precisely medieval but are unmistakably supportive. His opponent, a preening, courtly fellow in blue, they subject to bitter scorn and many objectionable comparisons. He is busy currying their disfavor by kissing his glove, smirking and addressing the crowd as ‘good people’. 

When the Queen, in full Elizabeth I regalia, appears at her pavilion, the Blue Knight grovels effeminately and spouts phony poetry. He is obviously meant to be the bad guy. Green is the inexperienced one, red is the old stalwart. The challengers mount their horses and canter about a bit before heading to their respective ends of the tilting field. There is a little preliminary showing-off with rings thrown into the air, not all of which are caught on lances, and then the joust begins. Strangely, it turns out that Sir Oily Prancelot is not in fact going to get his buttocks presented to him. The knights thunder past each other a few time, walloping at each other with their swords, then they shatter a few lances and finally dismount for a bit of fun with morning-stars, people’s helmets getting spun around back-to-front, knees in the groin and belly, and a big whack on the head with a war hammer made of thumpy styrofoam. Green goes down first and then, to the chagrin of my hairy buddies, Sir Devon the Red gets it in the crown jewels, goes all glassy-eyed and slumps over on the grassy sward.

Roars of outrage and more unnecessary glove-kissing as the knavish blue knight is declared champion. Mayhap he’ll be trounced at the five-o-clock show.

Gadzooks, Naughty Varlet: the Michigan Renaissance Fair