"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?

True Crime and Punishment: Truman Capote and "In Cold Blood"

 

In the wee hours of November 15, 1959, two men broke into the home of the Clutters, a well-to-do farming family in rural Kansas. They were searching for a safe rumored to contain upwards of $10,000. When the safe failed to turn up — Mr. Clutter did all transactions by check — the family were all executed by single shotgun blasts to the head. The murderers made off with little more than about $40 cash, a radio and some binoculars.

The resulting media frenzy attracted the attention of one Truman Capote, accomplished author, soft-spoken dandy and self-aggrandizing fixture of the New York City social scene. Deciding apparently on a whim that he wanted to write about the Clutter family murders, he traveled to Kansas with his friend Harper Lee (yes, that one) in tow. After the killers were caught, he developed a rapport with them, becoming in effect their only friend in the world, for the sole purpose of getting them to tell him what happened that chilly night in 1959. The resulting book, In Cold Blood, published in 1966 (a year after the killers were executed on the same night in April 1965) was a smash hit, more or less inventing the modern true crime genre. Fast forward 55 years later and white women thirst over notorious serial killer Ted Bundy because of a hot actor who played him on Netflix. How did we get here?