Mysterious Mothman Legend

[Weird Tales]

Mysterious Mothman

Think you know the whole story? Think again...

West Virginia Mothman: Strange Forces, Strange Beasts

The place is Doddridge County, West Virginia. The date is November 14th, 1966. It is 10:30 at night as Merle Partridge watches television with his young son Roger. The rest of the Partridge children and Merle’s wife have turned in for the evening. Suddenly, the TV set starts to act up. The picture blanks out and interference causes the screen to develop a herringbone pattern. The TV set blanking out was not unusual when one lived in rural West Virginia in the 1960s. This was well before cable channels and satellite dishes. Most TV reception in farm areas came pretty much as the crows fly. Picking up favorite shows depended upon how deft you were at turning your roof top television antennae to stations in Clarksburg, Wheeling and Pittsburgh. Consider yourself lucky if you got all three.
Otherwise, it was an ordinary night. But what happened to Merle Partridge next was very much out-of-the-ordinary. The television set whined loudly, like a generator winding up. At this point, Bandit, the Partridges’ pet dog howled eerily. As Partridge peered outside, he saw that his German Shepherd faced the hay barn -- about the length of a football field away from the house. The family dog barked at the dark doorway of the barn extremely agitated.
Merle Partridge grabbed his flashlight and went outside. Bandit had disappeared although Partridge heard the dog wailing in the area of the barn. As he shined his light in the direction of Bandit, it caught two red circles or eyes that looked like bicycle reflectors. Merle was later to describe the red eyes in an interview with writer John Keel, “I certainly know what animal eyes look like... These were much larger ...still those eyes showed up as huge even for that distance.” (In a 2006 recent interviews, Mr. Partridge clarifies what he saw in 1966 as somewhat differently than what John Keel initially reported in his book “Mothman Prophecies” and said that to him the red orbs look more like “red, rotating lights.”)

In an attempt to describe the dread he felt, Partridge added, “It was an eerie feeling like the sort I’ve not felt before... It was as if you knew something was really wrong but couldn’t place just what it was.” A snarling Bandit came into focus. He bolted toward the barn. A cold chill swept over Merle Partridge. He hurried inside the house. He would sleep little that night keeping his shotgun beside his bed. The next day, he and his six-year-old searched for their pet. They went to where the dog was last seen. The barn had a dirt floor. Partridge found the dog’s tracks, but not Bandit. “Those tracks were going around in a circle” as if the dog had been chasing its tail, “But Bandit never did that,” added Partridge. And then there were no more tracks as if the dog had been lifted up and carried away by something much larger and much stronger. Bandit, the family pet, was never seen again.
Daughter Mary Partridge Stover, a child at the time, remembered going into the barn the next day as well and spotting the huge, clawed tracks left into the mud from their previous night visitor. When seeing the famous Mothman statue in the public square Point Pleasant years later, she remarked that the claws were not as large as the ones she saw, nor were the talons or toes spread apart as much as the ones she remembered from the prints left in their barn.
But the weird tale did not end there for Merle Partridge. The following night Mr. Partridge was unable to sleep and was watching television around midnight when he heard a loud knocking at his door. As he opened it he found a man in obvious distress standing there. The man explained that he had just run his jeep into a ditch after something gigantic had swooped in front of his windshield (the Partridges lived in the small rural community of Center Point between West Union and Salem).

Trembling and upset, the man explained, “But this is not what I am worried about. I cannot find my six-year old boy. He has disappeared from the car.” Alarmed, Merle Partridge grabbed his flashlight and rifle and went with the father looking for the boy, to no avail. After about a 30 minute hunt, the men returned to the house and called the police. The policed arrived a short time later and began their search which took another 30 minutes. By this time, an hour and a half had elapsed and the father was frantic.

After another search, they suddenly saw the young boy walking up the road in an opposite direction from where the wrecked jeep was. The child was completely in a daze.

When asked where he had been all of that time, the boy could not remember any of it. Years later, a middle-aged man would visit Merle Partridge in his New Martinsville home to tell him that he was the small boy who was lost and how he still had no memory whatsoever of the time spent that night.

The period of November 1966 leading into 1967 marked a peculiar time for West Virginians. During these days, the state was swept up by numerous sightings of a pale, gray, flying creature that was reported by witnesses as close to seven feet tall. Motorists told stories of driving along country roads late at night and hearing a whooshing sound above their vehicle. As the drivers slowed down to look, they saw a large gray creature with glowing, red eyes and a wingspan of about ten feet. Even more strangely the creature seemed to want to race people’s cars by flying parallel to the vehicle. Other witnesses who encountered the Mothman claimed that if you made the awful mistake of locking eyes with the creature, you would become paralyzed for seconds or even minutes.

Reports of the Mothman, alone, were bizarre enough to make state and national news. However, during the time of Mothman sightings, there were also hundreds of eyewitness accounts of UFOs and Men in Black throughout the state and the Ohio Valley region. Although descriptions differed, and witnesses all thought at first the Mothman's eyes actually looked like "lights" most agreed he was a creature of some sort, if not from our own earth, then one from some alternate realm of existence.