"We're gonna need a bigger lamp": the search for meaning in Mothman

Paranormal phenomena are so widespread, so diversified, and so sporadic yet so persistent that separating and studying any single element is not only a waste of time but also will automatically lead to the development of belief. Once you have established a belief, the phenomenon adjusts its manifestations to support that belief and thereby escalate it. If you believe in the devil he will surely come striding down your road one rainy night and ask to use your phone. If you believe that flying saucers are astronauts from another planet they will begin landing and collecting rocks from your garden.

John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies

On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge that spanned the Ohio River between Gallipolis, Ohio and Point Pleasant, West Virgina collapsed in the middle of rush hour. 46 people were crushed or drowned, including two who were never found. As always happens with disasters, people were left seeking some sort of explanation or meaning for the suffering. Local folklore had an answer: the Mothman, a mysterious winged figure that supposedly had been haunting the backroads and abandoned places of West Virginia for thirteen months before the bridge collapse, and theorized by some to be a harbinger of disaster. In the years since, the legend has only grown, aided greatly by John Keel's 1975 non-fiction book The Mothman Prophecies (a more grotesquely hilarious collection of paranormal crankery you'd be hard-pressed to find) and later its 2002 film adaptation of the same name, starring none other than Richard Gere. The Mothman now exists somewhere between folk devil, monsterfucker bait, and a cuddly creature to be commodified and sold to the type of people who wear T-shirts of Pikachu wielding a lightsaber. How did we get here?

This essay originally began with the intent to review Keel's book; but as I read it, I realized that I was reading the words of a crackpot. He frequently derided "UFO enthusiasts" as cranks while at the same time breathlessly writing about his own ideas of a "superspectrum," a sort of Unifying Theory of the Paranormal that seeks to explain all paranormal incidents as artifacts of an ancient terrestrial force existing outside of time. He is in fact partly responsible for the modern paranormal enthusiasts' movement, as he spent much of his career as a journalist tracking down the strange or unusual and writing about these incidents as if they were true examples of paranormal activity. So in my view, he is a crackpot, who resolutely believed himself to not be a crackpot, even once infamously saying, "belief is the enemy."

XKCD #258, "Conspiracy Theories,"
by Randall Munroe

Belief in conspiracies and the paranormal is a lot like belief in religion; they operate on the same circuits, and indeed, a high-demand, high-shame religious environment, such as an Evangelical Christian community, is quite often a petri dish for some of the most paranoid and damaging conspiracy theories. These are often self-reinforcing belief systems that do not collapse in the face of contrary evidence but instead are strengthened; you cannot reason someone out of something they did not reason themselves into. Likewise, during periods of social strife, economic struggle, or in the aftermath of terrible events, church attendance goes up, cults begin to pop up, and belief in the paranormal and the paranoid sees a resurgence.We're all searching for meaning in life; we flock to churches and cults and UFO contactee forums because they provide answers, structure, and community, particularly when it seems like the world has gone mad; cults were widespread in the 1920s, following the Great War and the mass death it caused; the first UFO craze of 1947-1957 was rocket-powered by the Cold War and fears of nuclear annihilation. But it was in the 1960s that the modern paranormal movement as we understand it today began, with a great deal of overlap with hippie culture, who themselves had plenty of reason to distrust the government: the Vietnam war, widespread social unrest, a massive jump in violent crime, a changing culture, and all the other upheavals of the decade contributed greatly to the spread of cults, communes and crackpots. After all, it made a twisted kind of sense that the same forces that hit civil rights protestors with firehoses would also be the one destroying all evidence of an extraterrestrial race that wants to bring peace to Earth. Throw in something about psychic dolphins and revolutionary nuclear warfare and you've got yourself a cult. (And, because history frequently rhymes, a lot of those same hippies went on to found the wellness industry that helped undergird QAnon.)

But today's Mothman craze doesn't really seem to have much connection to more traditionalist paranormal belief. Instead, it's become a cartoon character, a safe and cuddly red-eyed creature you can buy in the form of stuffed animals and other commercial products. It appears in memes, it's sometimes treated like it's West Virginia's state bird, and there's even a statue in Point Pleasant, near a Mothman merch store, and Point Pleasant has hosted an annual Mothman festival since 2006. Somehow, the Mothman has become America's favorite cryptid, beating out old standbys like Bigfoot and the Jersey Devil. The difference seems to largely have to do with the Mothman's association with a real-life tragedy, thereby making it seem more "real" and not just something that only exists in folklore or grainy handheld camera footage. Which of course has only served to expand on the existing legend: Richard Hatem, screenwriter for the Mothman Prophecies movie, has stated that stuff he made up for the movie is now considered a vital part of Mothman lore.

image c/o u/MrCapricorn404
on Reddit's r/Weird forum

There's something perverse in all this. The original Mothman sightings of 1966 were likely artifacts of rising anxieties in a decade of great social change, and West Virginia is a haunting place: largely uninhabited, full of old forests and older mountains. It's not completely insane that someone driving through the dark would encounter something strange that they don't immediately understand, but is almost certainly something perfectly normal. Most of the Mothman sightings were likely birds or distant lights; likewise, there are plausible explanations for all of the related phenomena that occurred in that thirteen-month span and beyond. The Mothman legend took off as people latched onto it for an explanation for the deaths of 46 people, just as they might otherwise have gone to church more, or switched political parties. That this very same tragedy is now what drives sales of Mothman Squishmallows is... I don't really know how to feel about that.

The irony is that if asked what my favorite cryptid is, I have to answer, "the Mothman." It's a question I've been legitimately asked before, and I find it as strange as being asked who my favorite Beatle is (which has also happened; my reply, much to the asker's annoyance, was "Bob Dylan.") Nevertheless, my answer is honest, because as much as I do not really think about cryptids (I prefer urban legends) I nevertheless have the most connection with the Mothman; I saw the 2002 film when it was new and it left a profound effect on me. While I don't understand why they saw fit to change the action from the late 1960s to the contemporary period, it nevertheless is a frightening yet sad story about obsession and unresolved grief. The book, which I actually read first, is radically different: it's mostly a collection of anecdotes about alien visitations, strange phenomena, mysterious encounters with seemingly inhuman strangers, and a recurring pattern of interference with electrical devices and even the mail. In short, it's crankery; the film takes this crankery and, miraculously, puts together a coherent story that nevertheless manages to convey some of the more unsettling tones of the book.

The Mothman Prophecies
(2002, d. Mark Pellington)
image c/o FILMGRAB

In the film, John Klein (Gere, playing a thinly-veiled yet not biographical version of Keel) is a Washington Post reporter who struggles to move past the death of his wife, who apparently saw some kind of winged figure just before the car accident that led to her hospitalization and subsequent diagnosis of a preexisting terminal brain cancer. Two years after her death, he finds himself in Point Pleasant, where a rash of paranormal phenomena (including how he came to Point Pleasant in the first place) has been occurring. Seeking answers both in his capacity as a Washington Post reporter and out of a desire to understand the apparent connection to his wife, he begins to grow obsessed as a mysterious voice on the telephone harasses him and gradually drip-feeds him information on upcoming disasters. It's a beautiful film, one of the most Silent Hill-coded movies I've ever seen, and a Christmastime favorite of mine. The Mothman is never actually seen; there's a lot to suggest that there are rational explanations for everything in the film. But, and this is the important lesson Klein has to learn in the film's final act, not everything has an answer or an explanation, and we're just going to have to live with that.

That's probably the real lesson of the Mothman: that our lives are going to be full of unsolved questions. "What if?" is a magical phrase that causes madness, the kind of thing that makes a person quit their job, abandon their family, and move to a UFO commune in Arizona. As film character Alexander Leek (a much more biographical stand-in for Keel himself, played by the late great Alan Bates) asks, what's more important, having proof, or not being alone?

"Love me?"

59 years ago next month a bridge collapsed and sent 46 people to a cold, terrifying death. The actual cause of the disaster was shown to be a critical structural failure in one of the massive chains of eyebars that stretched across the river and from which hung the bridge; one of the eyebars cracked and broke, and without enough redundancy planned for a bridge that was never expected to see heavy 1960s traffic, the whole thing dropped into the drink in the span of less than a minute. The actual flaw in the eyebar was such that it would have been impossible to plan for in the 1920s, and equally impossible to inspect for in the 1960s. So we have an answer for who's responsible for the collapse, and it isn't the engineers, who were just making bridges with the best knowledge of the time; it isn't the builders, who could not have known that one of the eyebars was faulty. It's certainly not the Mothman, whose only crime was living in West Virginia. The official report blamed precisely nobody for the collapse. Maybe not the answer people wanted, but it's the only answer we're going to get. Bridges collapse. Earthquakes happen. Planes crash. People we know and love are going to die, and there's nothing we can do about it. You want meaning in Mothman? There is none. So go buy that Squishmallow, because at the end of the day, the only truth is that we are on this Earth to give love.

-june❤