Mothman Sightings: From The First Encounter To The Latest Reports

A Full And Complete Timeline Of Mothman Sightings From The Beginning To The Present Day

Something has been watching from the dark for nearly sixty years. Wings folded. Eyes glowing red. Waiting.

Before the Legend Had a Name

Most people believe the Mothman story begins in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in November 1966. But the legend may have roots that stretch back further, to a winter evening in 1957 in Braidwood, Illinois, where a hunter named Gerald Turrise was tracking game through a forested area near dusk.

Turrise looked up from the treeline and saw something that stopped him cold. A winged creature with the body of a large man, approximately six to seven feet tall, was soaring silently above the treetops. Its wings, spanning roughly ten feet, appeared to have no visible feathers. The form was humanoid yet deeply unnatural.

Turrise reported the incident to local authorities, who dismissed it as a probable bird sighting. He disagreed, and went to his grave insisting otherwise.

Nobody knew it then, but Turrise may have been the first person in modern times to encounter what would later become America’s most enduring cryptid legend.

Part One: The Point Pleasant Flap (1966–1967)

The True First Sighting

November 12, 1966, Clendenin, West Virginia

The first officially recorded sighting of what would become known as the Mothman did not happen in Point Pleasant. It happened sixty miles away, in a small cemetery near the town of Clendenin, West Virginia.

On the afternoon of November 12, 1966, five gravediggers, Kenneth Duncan, Robert Love, William Poole, Andrew Godby, and Emil Conley, were at work among the headstones when something caught their attention overhead. A massive, dark figure was moving rapidly between the trees, soaring above them with a wingspan that dwarfed anything they recognised as a bird.

The form was distinctly human-shaped but enormous, the size and silhouette of a man, except it was flying.

Duncan, the group’s spokesperson, reported the sighting to the Mason County Sheriff’s Department. The men were experienced outdoorsmen. They were adamant it was no bird they knew.

No glowing eyes were reported in this first encounter, that detail would come later, but the humanoid shape and the silent, effortless flight would define every sighting that followed.


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The Newell Partridge Encounter

November 14, 1966, Salem, West Virginia, 90 miles from Point Pleasant

Two nights after the cemetery sighting, something arrived at the rural home of Newell Partridge, a building contractor living in Salem, ninety miles from Point Pleasant. It arrived, characteristically, without warning.

At 10:30 p.m., Partridge was watching television when the screen went dark, filling suddenly with strange geometric patterns. Simultaneously, he heard his German Shepherd, Bandit, barking frantically from outside on the porch.

Partridge grabbed a flashlight and stepped out into the dark. He swept the beam toward the field where Bandit was barking and saw them immediately: two glowing red lights hovering in the darkness of the hayfield, at roughly the height of a man.

He later described them as resembling “bicycle reflectors”, circular, steady, and deeply wrong.

Bandit bolted toward the lights. Partridge followed, calling the dog back, but found only the dog’s pawprints going in circles before vanishing entirely into the dark.

Bandit never returned.

Partridge later connected the incident directly to the Mothman sightings that exploded across the region in the days that followed, believing the creature had taken his dog. He never got another explanation.

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The Scarberry-Mallette Sighting

November 15, 1966, circa midnight, The TNT Area, Point Pleasant, West Virginia

This is the sighting that started everything. The one that made the front page. The one that gave the creature its name.

Shortly after midnight on November 15, 1966, two young couples, Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette, were driving near an abandoned World War II munitions plant known locally as “the TNT Area,” located about seven miles north of Point Pleasant on State Route 62.

The area had been decommissioned after the war and left largely to nature: hundreds of acres of overgrown vegetation, crumbling igloos and bunkers, and a creeping sense of wrongness that locals had always associated with the place.

As they drove past the abandoned power plant building, they saw it.

Standing at the side of the road was a figure that Roger Scarberry later described simply: “It was shaped like a man, but bigger. Maybe six and a half or seven feet tall.”

It was grey, humanoid, and impossibly broad across the shoulders. Its wings were folded tightly against its back. Most terrifying of all were its eyes, two enormous glowing red orbs positioned near the top of the shoulders, not the face, since witnesses could discern no distinct head.

When the creature moved toward the plant entrance, the couples panicked. Roger Scarberry floored the accelerator.

What happened next is what cemented the story in American folklore.

The creature spread its wings and rose from the ground. It followed the car.

Roger pushed the vehicle past 100 miles per hour on Highway 62, and the creature, gliding effortlessly, barely moving its wings, kept pace. It pursued them to the city limits of Point Pleasant, swooping low over the car with a screeching sound witnesses compared to a “high-pitched phonograph record,” before vanishing into the dark.

The four witnesses drove directly to the Mason County Sheriff’s Office and reported what they had seen.

Deputy Sheriff Millard Halstead later said he found them in a state of genuine distress he’d rarely witnessed. He returned to the TNT Area with them. Nothing was found.

Roger Scarberry’s own words, reported to the local paper the following day, summed it up:

“If I had seen it while by myself, I wouldn’t have said anything. But there were four of us who saw it.”

The next morning, the Point Pleasant Register ran the story on its front page under the headline: “Couples See Man-Sized Bird… Creature… Something.”

A newspaper editor, noting the creature’s winged appearance, reached for a reference from the popular Batman television series and called it “the Mothman.”

The name stuck permanently.

The Marcella Bennett Sighting

November 16, 1966, circa 9:00 p.m., TNT Area, Point Pleasant, West Virginia

The day after the Scarberry-Mallette sighting made the front page, a 24-year-old woman named Marcella Bennett had what many consider the most psychologically harrowing encounter of the entire Point Pleasant flap.

Bennett had driven to the TNT Area with family friends Raymond and Cathy Wamsley to visit another friend, Ralph Thomas, who lived in one of the housing units within the old munitions site. She arrived carrying her infant daughter, Kristina.

As she stepped out of the car, something rose up from the ground behind the vehicle.

Bennett would later describe it:

“It rose up slowly from the ground. A big gray thing. Bigger than a man, with terrible glowing eyes.”

In her shock, Bennett dropped her baby.

She quickly scooped Kristina up from the ground and ran for the house, stumbling and nearly falling. The group made it inside and locked the door.

The creature did not leave.

It moved to the windows of the house, peering inside, watching the huddled group, before eventually disappearing.

Marcella Bennett was deeply traumatised by the encounter. She later required medical treatment for the psychological effects. She never recanted her account, and it became one of the most frequently cited testimonies in the entire Mothman case, described in John Keel’s landmark book, and featured decades later in Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries: The Mothman Revisited.

The Airport Pilots Sighting

December 4, 1966, 3:00 p.m., Gallipolis Airport, Ohio

One of the most striking Mothman sightings in the original flap involved five pilots, Everett Wedge, James Thompson, Carl Rogers, William Davis, and Frank Harris, at Gallipolis Airport in Ohio, directly across the Ohio River from Point Pleasant.

At 3:00 p.m. on December 4, in broad daylight, the five men observed a winged humanoid moving near the airport.

The daytime conditions made this encounter particularly compelling: these were trained aviation professionals with experienced eyes for aircraft and aerial phenomena.

They watched the creature disappear over the treetops in the direction of the Kanawha River. All five men were adamant about what they had seen.

The 100+ Sightings

November 1966 to November 1967

In the thirteen months following the Scarberry-Mallette sighting, paranormal researcher and author John Keel documented more than 100 eyewitness accounts of the creature across the Point Pleasant region.

Based on the accumulated testimony, Keel compiled a composite description that remained remarkably consistent across all witnesses:

Height: five to seven feet tall, wider than a man

Eyes: set near the top of the shoulders, glowing red

Wings: bat-like, which glided rather than flapped

Flight: capable of ascending vertically, “like a helicopter”

Skin: grey or brown, described as murky

Sound: a humming when airborne, a high-pitched screech when provoked

Speed: matching vehicles travelling at over 100 miles per hour.


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Notable Sightings During This Period

January 11, 1967

Mabel McDaniel, Linda Scarberry’s mother, saw a creature flying low overhead. She initially thought it was an airplane.

“I realized it was flying much too low,” she said. “It was brown and had a wingspan of at least ten feet.”

March 1967

An Ohio man reported his car was pursued by a flying creature while driving near the West Virginia border.

November 2, 1967

In what appears to have been one of the final pre-Silver Bridge sightings, Mrs. Ralph Thomas, connected to the earlier Bennett encounter, heard what she described as a “squeaky fan belt” sound outside her home and looked out to see a tall grey figure moving among the concrete domes in the TNT Area.

The Silver Bridge

December 15, 1967

On the evening of December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge, a suspension bridge built in 1928 connecting Point Pleasant, West Virginia, to Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed during peak evening traffic.

Forty-six people were killed. It remains one of the deadliest bridge disasters in American history.

Multiple witnesses reported seeing the Mothman on or near the Silver Bridge on the same day as the collapse.

In the weeks before the disaster, there had been an escalating intensity to the sightings, alongside reports of unexplained lights, Men in Black encounters, and strange electrical disturbances across the region.

The official cause of the collapse was later identified as a stress fracture in an eyebar suspension chain, a structural failure caused by the bridge carrying vehicles far heavier than it was designed for when built in 1928.

The Mothman did not bring down the Silver Bridge.

But the timing was impossible to ignore.

And after December 15, 1967, the Mothman sightings in Point Pleasant stopped entirely.

John Keel, whose 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies became the defining account of the events, argued that the creature was not a monster but something stranger, an interdimensional entity, a harbinger, something that existed on the boundary between perception and reality.

Whether or not that theory holds weight, the convergence of 100+ sightings, unexplained phenomena, and a catastrophic disaster in a thirteen-month window has never been satisfactorily explained.

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Part Two: The Decades of Quiet (1968–2010)

After the Silver Bridge collapse, Mothman sightings did not disappear entirely, they simply scattered.

1968, Point Pleasant

A number of hairy humanoids with glowing eyes were reported along Jerico Road in the aftermath of the Silver Bridge disaster.

September 18, 1968

A reported sighting in the TNT Area. By most accounts, this was the last confirmed Point Pleasant sighting for decades.

1986, Chernobyl, Ukraine

Workers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant reported sightings of a large, dark, winged humanoid with glowing red eyes in the days before the catastrophic reactor explosion on April 26, 1986.

These accounts, known as the “Black Bird of Chernobyl,” were never officially verified but circulated widely in paranormal research circles, reinforcing the theory of Mothman as a disaster harbinger.

Whether these reports are credible or a product of post-disaster mythology is unknown.

November 20, 2016

A man driving along State Route 2 in Mason County, West Virginia, the same general area as the original sightings, photographed a winged creature jumping between trees at 7:00 p.m.

The witness, who had recently moved to Point Pleasant and was unaware of the local legend, pulled over to photograph what he described as a seven-foot-tall entity with pointed wings, long legs bent at odd angles, and glowing red eyes.

Skeptics suggested the images showed an owl carrying prey. The photos reignited significant local interest.

Part Three: The Chicago Mothman (2011–Present)

No development in the modern Mothman story is more significant or more thoroughly documented than the explosion of sightings in Chicago, Illinois, that began quietly in 2011 and reached a dramatic peak in 2017.

The Early Reports: 2011–2016

Beginning in 2011, isolated reports began emerging from the greater Chicago area describing a large, dark, winged humanoid figure gliding or flying low over roadways, rivers, and industrial zones, typically at night or in the early morning hours.

The reports were scattered and went largely unreported by mainstream media, collected primarily by paranormal researcher Lon Strickler through his Phantoms and Monsters blog.

The 2017 Flap: Chicago’s Summer of the Mothman

In the spring and summer of 2017, sightings exploded.

By the end of that year, Strickler and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) had documented over 55 individual sightings in the Chicago metropolitan area, a concentration rivalling the original Point Pleasant flap half a century earlier.

Sightings clustered around four main locations: O’Hare International Airport, the shoreline of Lake Michigan, the Chicago River, and the Des Plaines River corridor.

Witnesses came from every demographic: law enforcement officers, airline personnel, truck drivers, healthcare workers, families.

Their descriptions were strikingly consistent, a humanoid figure, six to ten feet tall, with a wingspan exceeding ten feet, covered in dark material, with glowing red eyes, capable of vertical takeoff and flight at extraordinary speeds.

April 2017

A witness near the Adler Planetarium reported a winged creature at least seven feet tall moving at “incredible speed.”

Summer 2017

Multiple sightings along the Lake Michigan shoreline and the Chicago River. Several O’Hare airport employees reported encounters while on shift, with many declining to come forward publicly for fear of losing their jobs.

Unlike Point Pleasant, no major disaster followed the 2017 Chicago sightings. The absence of a corresponding tragedy complicated the omen theory, though some researchers pointed to a series of smaller aviation incidents and infrastructure concerns in the region during this period.

2019–2021

November 2019, O’Hare International Airport

A truck driver picking up a cargo shipment from the airport’s cargo area stepped away from his vehicle for a smoke break.

At the perimeter of the parking lot, he saw a tall, birdlike entity standing in the shadows outside the fence.

He described it as “a person with wings that were stretched out and flapping.”

He filed a report with Strickler’s network.

February 2020, O’Hare Airport

An airport security officer during a routine cigarette break near the perimeter fence watched a massive, black, winged creature standing in the shadows.

When it turned toward him, he saw the glowing red eyes.

The creature emitted a shriek he compared to the sound of train brakes, then launched vertically into the sky and disappeared.

September 24, 2020, O’Hare Area

A U.S. Postal Service worker of fifteen years was leaving the USPS sorting facility near O’Hare Airport at around 11:00 p.m.

She noticed a large silhouette at the far end of the parking lot.

When she unlocked her car and the headlights activated, she saw it clearly: a creature at least two feet taller than her five-foot-four frame, with wings spread, glowing red eyes fixed on her, emitting what she described as an “unsettling chirping sound.”

She drove away and did not report it publicly for some time.

2021

At least five additional Mothman sightings were logged in the Chicago area, as reported by paranormal investigators tracking the phenomenon.

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2022–2024: The Legend Spreads

June 2022, Rockford, Illinois

A Mothman sighting was reported at a canal in Rockford, described as a dark, black figure with red eyes.

The encounter was later featured in Unsolved Mysteries Volume 4 on Netflix, which dedicated an entire episode to the ongoing Illinois Mothman phenomenon.

Investigators noted that the Midwest, particularly Illinois, had become a concentrated hotspot for sightings.

Late 2023 to Early 2024, Point Pleasant, West Virginia

In a notable return to its origins, multiple sightings and investigative reports emerged from the McClintic Wildlife Management Area, the former TNT Area, describing a figure emerging from the abandoned World War II-era bunkers.

Paranormal investigators active in the area debated whether this represented a biological entity returning to original territory or a psychological phenomenon amplified by local folklore and media attention.

April 2024, Kane County, Illinois

A truck driver reported one of the most dramatic recent encounters.

Driving alone on a rural road at 2:00 a.m., he saw a seven-foot-tall winged humanoid with red eyes appear alongside his vehicle.

The creature pursued his truck at highway speed, keeping pace with him at 60 miles per hour. Its wingspan was estimated at twelve feet, its skin greyish.

During the chase, his headlights flickered.

In fear, the driver discharged a firearm at the creature. It vanished.

The incident was reported to paranormal researchers. No physical evidence was recovered.

By late 2024, paranormal researcher Lon Strickler, the primary investigative compiler of the Chicago phenomenon, had mapped 161 confirmed Mothman sightings across the Chicago metropolitan area and surrounding regions over thirteen years.

His investigation synopsis noted that since July 2024, no new reports had been submitted to his network, but stated clearly that the investigation remains active and the phenomenon unresolved.

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What Does It All Mean?

Nearly sixty years have passed since five gravediggers in Clendenin looked up from their work and saw something moving between the trees that had no business being there.

In the time since, over 250 documented encounters have described the same entity, the same wingspan, the same red eyes, the same capacity for flight no known creature can match, the same deep, irrational fear it instils in those who see it.

The sceptical explanations are well established. Sandhill cranes, great horned owls, large herons, all have been proposed as the source of the original sightings.

The cranes in particular can stand over four feet tall with a wingspan of nearly seven feet, and their red facial markings can catch light strangely at night.

Mass hysteria, media contagion, and psychological projection have all been offered to explain the wave effect of multiple sightings following initial media coverage.

But the explanations consistently fail to account for all the details.

No bird native to North America can match vehicles travelling at over 100 miles per hour. No owl has a ten-foot wingspan. No crane rises vertically from the ground like a helicopter.

And no known animal explanation addresses the consistent, unprompted, independent descriptions from witnesses who had never heard of the Mothman before their encounter.

John Keel’s final conclusion, after thirteen months investigating Point Pleasant, was that the Mothman was not a creature in any conventional sense, but something that existed at the intersection of our world and something else entirely.

Researcher Lon Strickler, after thirteen years documenting the Chicago phenomenon, has reached no definitive explanation either.

What both agree on: the sightings are real. The witnesses are credible. And something, still unidentified, still unexplained, has been moving through the dark for nearly sixty years.

Timeline: Mothman Sightings at a Glance

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