Point Pleasant, a small West Virginia town, has a population of just 4,000 — and I’m rounding up to be generous. But every year, as the summer turns to fall, its population temporarily explodes as an additional 20,000 folks flock to the small town to celebrate an urban legend: The Mothman, a cryptid who’s become synonymous with fellow mythical American beasts Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, and the Chupacabra.
Only the Mothman can boast about having a massive cultural arts festival in its name that draws in thousands of artists, cosplayers, and cryptid fans, though. It’s Point Pleasant, West Virginia’s annual Mothman Festival, and according to an NPR report, it sounds like a blast.
In the 1960s, Point Pleasant gave the world a creature that’s part moth, part man, part ominous warning of tragedies to come. I hold a flashlight under my chin as I tell you that, as the legend goes, on a cold night in 1966, two couples, the Scarberrys and the Mallettes, encountered a giant humanoid with wings and glowing red eyes.
After a harrowing chase down a back road near a “TNT Area,” an old WW2-era ammunition manufacturing facility, they fled to town and told their story. A year later, the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46 people and making some locals wonder if the Mothman had something to do with it.
There was no evidence that a monster wrecked the bridge, but when a bridge that had been working fine for years suddenly collapses during rush hour, people will turn to anything, even the preposterous, in search of an explanation when not immediately provided with one.
That story, turbocharged by John Keel’s 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies and its later film adaptation, officially cemented the Mothman and the American cryptid pantheon.
Today, Mothman transcends folklore. It’s YouTube copypasta fodder, and you can kill one in the game Fallout 76.
The Mothman Festival is a convergence of the different facets of its cultural impact —cosplay, capitalism, and community all at once. Tourists dressed as the Mothman (Moth Ma’am, for the ladies) stroll past haunted hotels and vendor booths selling Mothman merch, everything from Mothman-branded potholders to “Moth Floss,” which is just delicious cotton candy sold under a deeply unappetizing name.
It’s like Comic Con, the world-famous convention where comic book and anime lovers converge to celebrate their unique pockets of fandom, but everyone agreed to come as Goku.
Inside the Mothman Museum, because the town is home to a Mothman Museum, you’ll find a growing line of people trying to get selfies with the town’s famous stainless steel statue of the Mothman. Attendees are always sure to take a picture of its front, but also its back, since it has a surprisingly shapely metal ass that folks have nicknamed the “Shiny Hiney.”
Of course, it all helps bring in some much-needed tourist dollars, so much so that the town’s tourism director told NPR that the festival is akin to Christmas for Point Pleasant.
The Mothman isn’t real, but that doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. The Mothman festival is a celebration of the fantastical, of the mysterious, of the unknown in a world where our 24/7 connection to the known real-world horrors leaves us all knowing maybe a little bit too much.
The post West Virginia Is for Cryptid Lovers: Welcome to the Mothman Festival appeared first on VICE.
