The Mothman Legacy

Fear is a funny thing.

Where it begins and where it ends is never a certainty.

Fear can form seemingly out of nowhere

and then disappear just as quickly

and we might never really know why.

Some fears develop over days, weeks, or years,

sown from the time we're young,

eventually bursting forth from the seeds

that were planted when we were children.

But where did the seeds come from?

Who first planted them?

Were they simply groomed over centuries,

or are they unique to each generation?

A story is a powerful thing,

it can move us in unexpected ways.

It can inspire hope or create a sense of longing.

A story can manifest sadness or depression,

laughter or tears.

And yes, a story can instill fear.

The question we might begin to ask ourselves

is not who put the fear there orwhy,

but what if the stories

that instilled it to begin withare true,

not simply fables, but somethingmore,

something primal and ageless.

A something whose very survivaldepends

on our telling of tales.

- Well, when the Silver Bridge collapsed

in December of 1967, everybody'sattention immediately went

to the recovery effort, the rescue effort.

People weren't really interested in lookin' for UFOs

or Mothman, even though they did.

But it was such a horrible tragedy

that the local population was grieving

and mourning the loss of, you know,

family members and friends and things like that.

So the attention went from the weird stuff in the sky

or the Mothman sightings to recovering bodies and cars

from the Ohio River.

- You know Main Street used to be very hustle and bustle.

And after the bridge fell in the'60s,

that kind of broke off that connection

and so a lot of businesses started to close

and it became kind of a ghost town

until basically the museum and the festival took off.

And then, you know, during the Mothman Festival

you can't hardly move there's so many people.

You'd bring in like eight to 10,000 people to a town

with a population of less than 5,000.

Between the years of 1966 and1967,

sightings of a red-eyed monster, dubbed the Mothman,

helped put the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia

on the map.

However, it was the collapse ofa bridge

spanning the Ohio River in December of 1967

that brought the town to a tragic sort of prominence.

Since that time,

this sleepy hamlet on the banks of the mighty Ohio

and the Kanawha Rivers has adopted a strange fame

bolstered by their mostrenowned resident, the Mothman.

Now over 50 years

since the Silver Bridge tumbled into the icy waters

and took with it 47 lives,

Point Pleasant has begun to rebuild.

- Life here in Point Pleasant is laid back.

I mean, you know, it's not yourhustle bustle of a big city

and I think that's why a lot of people choose to stay here.

My dad is is Jeff Wamsley,

the owner of the Mothman Museum.

So basically from my young adulthood up,

Mothman pretty much surrounds a lot of my life.

- You know, it's just a little Main Street town

that just happens to have a monster in it's history

and it's a nice calling card.

- Mothman became something they fell in love with

and then it was the town they really fell in love with.

And I ultimately believeMothman is what gets them here,

but it's Point Pleasant that brings them back every time.

- West Virginia is a jewel in the rough, I always thought,

because you know the landscape and the beauty.

You've got all kinds of different areas

like the mountains, the streams, the river towns,

the ski lodges, all kinds of different things

and I think they've done a pretty good job

as far as capitalizing on the tourism aspect.

- West Virginia is rolling hills and beautiful creeks

and green pastures and football Friday night.

Isolated, at times boring.

It's very beautiful.

Not much happens,

which allows being tuned into certain things

and also noticing things maybe

that people in other areas may not notice.

It's a quiet, placid kind of upbringing.

Very beautiful, beautifulmountains and trees and streams.

So that part is of course, excellent.

- Point Pleasant sits on the edge

of what is known as Appalachia.

The Appalachian Mountains are arange

that stretches from Canada, all the way down to Alabama.

Rugged and rural, with a landscape defined by jutting rocks

and dense forestry.

The mountains are an essential part

of the Eastern United States.

Appalachia derives its name from the local inhabitants,

as well as the mountains.

It's a cultural statement

as much as it is a geographicalone.

A culture informed

by the people who journeyed through these lands

and who settled these lands,

not to mention the lands themselves,

from Scotch-Irish immigrants to the First Nations tribes

who occasionally traveled

through what is now known as West Virginia.

These places are still alive with a history

that is passed down from generation to generation.

- The Scots-Irish settled West Virginia.

So about 250,000 of them

got on a boat

and came over to the United States.

Once they got here,

the colonies were kind of already established

and these were sort of outsiders,

so they started to push them closer to the mountains,

the Appalachian Mountains.

Technically the English didn't want anybody

moving past the mountains

because there was an agreement with the French.

But we started chipping away atthat

and that ultimately led to the French and Indian War.

- Well, the Natives were kind of frightened

of West Virginia.

They thought West Virginia was cursed

and they only used West Virginia mostly as hunting.

So the Shawnee were here quite abit.

The Saponi were kind of like in the mountains

is where the Blackfoot Saponi Indians were all

in the southern part of the state, down into Virginia.

- When we started pushing into the region

across the Appalachians,

the Natives chose to fight on the side of the French.

When the English colonists werecoming in, it was a threat,

so the Native sided with French.

Well, ultimately that did not gowell

and the French left the region,

leaving the Natives kind of on their own.

The different tribes tried to get together

to form alliances to fightagainst the English if need be.

- The Confederacy's made up of many, many tribes

and they were all in and out of West Virginia

throughout the years.

The Shawnee were big here, the Cherokee were here,

Lenape, Ojibwe.

There were many, 31 tribes.

There were villages, there werefamilies.

Once the French left,