Clyde Lewis and filmmaker Seth Breedlove trace Mothman from Point Pleasant's Silver Bridge collapse to CERN, ancient demons, and a 2017 Chicago flap.
At a glance
Guest: Seth Breedlove, documentary filmmaker with Small Town Monsters
Topics: The Mothman of Point Pleasant · Silver Bridge collapse · CERN and the bottomless pit · Chicago sightings · Cornstalk curse
Also discussed: Loren Coleman · Marcella Bennett · Lawrence Gray · Linda Scarberry · Anthony Patch · John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies · Stephen King's The Mist
A Shape Outlined in Green
A caller tells Clyde Lewis about the night twenty years ago when he was six years old, lying in his mother's bed next to his sleeping brother, and something appeared at the foot of the mattress. "It was completely black, dark, but like the darkness had a density to it," the caller says. "And it was completely outlined in a bright green light." The thing climbed onto the bed. He felt the mattress compress under its weight. It bent down until its face was level with his, and he screamed until his mother opened the door and hit the light. The mattress, he says, bounced back up the instant it vanished.
Lewis does not rush past a story like that. He holds it up against the frame he has built all night: that winged things have crawled out of deep places before, and ancient writers tried to warn us. He reads from Revelation 9:11. "The bottomless pit is ruled by the dark-winged angel, Abaddon or Apollyon," he says. He argues that CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, sits on ground the Romans called Apollicum, where a temple stood to Apollyon, the angel of destruction. He points to the Shiva statue on the CERN campus. "Is it any coincidence that Lord Shiva is on the campus, which is also considered a god of destruction?" he asks. Mainstream physics describes the Large Hadron Collider as a research instrument, and no evidence supports the portal claim. Lewis says it anyway, and then he brings in the Mothman.
Thirteen Months in Point Pleasant
The Mothman fits Lewis's frame because the creature already carries the role of harbinger. Reports place 26 sightings around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, between November 1966 and December 1967. Witnesses described a figure seven feet tall with glowing red eyes and a wingspan near ten feet. Some called it Birdman; the newspapers coined Mothman later, off the Batman craze. Then, on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge fell into the Ohio River during rush hour and killed 46 people, and the sightings stopped.
Lewis argues the pattern repeats wherever disaster gathers. He cites reports of a winged creature over Chernobyl before the meltdown, and the story of the Shrieker, a beast miners reported outside a Freiburg, Germany mine in 1978, an hour before an explosion tore through it. He claims a trucker saw a black, moth-like shape pacing the trucks on a Pennsylvania freeway shortly before Flight 93 went down nearby on September 11, 2001. These accounts remain unverified, and Lewis treats them as pieces of one puzzle rather than proof. His question for the night: is the Mothman one of the creatures of the abyss, let loose ahead of catastrophe?
A Filmmaker Among the Witnesses
Seth Breedlove comes to the conversation with a different kind of evidence. His Small Town Monsters crew spent months in Point Pleasant shooting The Mothman of Point Pleasant, a documentary built around the tagline "13 months that change history." Loren Coleman, the dean of American cryptozoology, called it "the benchmark by which all other Mothman films will be judged," a reaction Breedlove admits he did not expect. He paid for production himself and ran a Kickstarter for post-production, where animators and illustrators drove costs up.
The film turned up material no one had seen: the Wamsley family gave Breedlove never-before-shown 8mm footage of the bridge collapse itself. He wanted an archived interview with Linda Scarberry, one of the first 1966 witnesses, but the licensing fee ran too high. What he got instead was time with people like Lawrence Gray, who woke one night in his early twenties and, in Breedlove's telling, "literally sees the Mothman standing at the foot of his bed." Gray shook on camera reliving it, Breedlove says, and still has nightmares. Marcella Bennett told him the creature came onto her porch the night she dropped her baby in fright; her daughter Tina said the moment marked the family for life. Bennett also passed down her uncle's account of watching the Mothman fly down the Ohio River and over the Silver Bridge the day before it fell.
The strangest moment of the shoot belonged to Breedlove's own mother. She filmed inside the TNT area, the overgrown wartime munitions complex where sightings clustered, and watched the seconds tick by on her phone. When she reviewed the file, the video was gone. "Instead there's just a single image of a very bright white light," Breedlove says. "We still cannot figure out what happened there."
The Phones Light Up
Judy from Kentucky grew up in a West Virginia holler, and in the summer of 1966, when she was eight, she, her sister, and her father watched two huge winged things come out of it at night. "They were like a cloud of white," she says. "I thought they were angels, but up in the holler I was from, they were calling them gargoyles. And they had bright red eyes." The creatures, she reports, were killing dogs up and down the valley, and she has wondered ever since whether the digging up of two graveyards for a dam project stirred them.
Matt from West Virginia calls in with his family's bridge story. His great-grandfather set out for the Silver Bridge that December day and turned back. "He had some type of weird premonition, vision, telling him not to go back across the bridge," Matt says. "And probably about five minutes later is whenever the bridge collapsed." Matt, a former radio man from Charleston, invites Lewis to the Mothman Festival that September, and Lewis sounds tempted. A caller named Garrett offers that the Mothman is "almost telepathic," that "it almost gets into your mind," and says the first time he told his mother the story she dreamed that night of the thing crawling under her door. Breedlove says this case, of all the ones he has investigated, got into his own dreams too.
The Warning Nobody Can Read
Lewis closes the loop the way he opened it. The winged creature, he argues, shows up in every ancient record, from the Mesopotamian demons Pazuzu and Anzu to the locusts of Revelation, and something in us knows to be afraid of it. "Just the idea of something winged and menacing, that's very demonic, in my opinion," he says. Ken from Oregon ties the town's troubles further back, to 1774 and Chief Cornstalk's dying curse on Point Pleasant after the battle there, a curse Lewis says ran about two centuries and burned out near 1976 with a hostage crisis at the Mason County Courthouse.
Nobody on the air resolves the tension at the center of the night. If the Mothman warns, it warns in a language nobody learned to read in time: not for the 46 on the bridge, not for the miners at Freiburg, maybe not for whoever it visits next. The sightings in Chicago that spring of 2017, a black shape with red eyes over Calumet Park and the Little Calumet River, hang over the conversation's end without an answer. Lewis leaves his listeners where he likes to leave them, listening for wings.
Questions this episode answers
Is Mothman a harbinger of doom?
Lewis argues the Mothman appears ahead of disaster, citing the Silver Bridge collapse and reports of winged creatures before Chernobyl and a 1978 German mine explosion.
"It is a harbinger of doom," Lewis states on the episode. He points to the 26 reported sightings around Point Pleasant that ended the day the Silver Bridge fell, December 15, 1967, killing 46 people.
Lewis also recounts the legend of the Shrieker of Freiburg, a creature miners reportedly saw outside a German mine in 1978 roughly an hour before a deadly explosion, and claims witnesses saw a winged figure over Chernobyl before the meltdown. These stories come from fortean tradition and remain unverified; no evidence connects any creature to any disaster. Lewis presents them as a pattern, not proof.
What is The Mothman of Point Pleasant documentary about?
Breedlove's film covers the 13 months from November 1966 to December 1967, beginning with the first Mothman sightings and ending with the Silver Bridge collapse.
Breedlove calls the Mothman "the granddaddy of all small-town monsters" and says the film's tagline is "13 months that change history." Loren Coleman, according to Breedlove, called the documentary "the benchmark by which all other Mothman films will be judged."
The director funded production himself and used Kickstarter for post-production, which he says ran expensive because of animators and illustrators. The film premiered around the Point Pleasant Mothman Festival before reaching iTunes and Amazon.
What new evidence does the documentary include about the Silver Bridge collapse?
Breedlove says the Wamsley family provided never-before-seen 8mm footage of the Silver Bridge collapse for the film.
He had wanted an archived interview with Linda Scarberry, a foundational 1966 witness, but says the licensing fee was more than the production could pay. The Wamsley footage gave the film unique visual material instead.
Breedlove also recounts Marcella Bennett's story of the creature coming onto her porch after she dropped her baby, and Bennett's account that her uncle saw the Mothman fly over the Silver Bridge the day before it collapsed. Her daughter Tina, he says, told him the porch incident affected the family for the rest of their lives.
What was Lawrence Gray's encounter with the Mothman?
Breedlove says Lawrence Gray saw the Mothman standing at the foot of his bed in his early twenties and shook while reliving it on camera.
Gray teared up during the interview, according to Breedlove, and has had nightmares about the encounter ever since. "Whatever he saw that night genuinely affected him to the point where he was physically shaken by it," Breedlove says.
Lewis adds that early witnesses tended to describe a dark man-like figure with wings rather than using the word Mothman, a name the newspapers coined later, riffing on Batman.
Are there modern Mothman sightings in Chicago?
Lewis reports a flap of sightings in Chicago in April 2017, with witnesses describing a black winged figure with red eyes and a wingspan near ten feet.
Breedlove says a police officer and his son reported a sighting near Calumet Park, Illinois, documented by Lon Strickler of the Phantoms and Monsters website. Other reports describe a solid black creature along the Little Calumet River and a witness over Lake Michigan who felt overwhelming dread.
Breedlove notes the timing created a strange problem for his film. "We've been accused of somehow putting together those sightings ourselves to promote the movie," he says, which he denies. No physical evidence has verified any of the Chicago reports.
Is CERN the bottomless pit from the Book of Revelation?
Lewis claims CERN may be the bottomless pit of Revelation, a theory he developed with researcher Anthony Patch, though no evidence supports it.
"CERN would be the bottomless pit," Lewis states. He argues the lab's location, St. Genis-Pouilly, was known to Romans as Apollicum, site of a temple to Apollyon, and he reads the name CERN back to Cernunnos, a horned deity.
He draws on pre-Adamic and apocryphal writings such as the Book of Enoch, which he says describe God banishing creatures like Leviathan to the abyss before creation. "It is still a history and it's still worth exploring," he says of those texts. Physicists describe the Large Hadron Collider as a particle research instrument, and the portal claim remains pure speculation, which the episode itself acknowledges.
What is the TNT area where Mothman was seen?
Breedlove describes the TNT area as a World War II munitions plant near Point Pleasant, and claims its builders later designed Area 51.
The West Virginia Ordnance Works produced explosives during the war, and its network of bunkers and igloos became the center of the 1966 sightings. Breedlove says the site still stands but has grown more overgrown, and the north power plant has been demolished.
During filming, his crew entered the area after dark. His mother recorded video that later appeared as a single still frame of bright white light, a glitch Breedlove says they cannot explain. Lewis treats the site as a natural home for something from the abyss.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Mothman?
The Mothman is a cryptid reportedly seen around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, beginning in November 1966. Witnesses described a seven-foot figure with red eyes and a roughly ten-foot wingspan. The sightings ended after the Silver Bridge collapse on December 15, 1967, and no physical evidence for the creature has ever surfaced.
What happened at the Silver Bridge?
The Silver Bridge between Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed on December 15, 1967, killing 46 people. Investigators attributed the failure to a fractured eyebar in the suspension chain. Believers in the Mothman legend regard the creature's earlier appearances as a warning of the disaster.
What is the Mothman Festival?
The Mothman Festival is an annual September event in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, drawing tourists to the town's Mothman statue and museum. Breedlove calls it one of the state's most successful festivals. The 2017 edition ran September 16-17, and caller Matt from West Virginia invited Lewis to attend on the air.
Has Mothman been seen since 1967?
Yes, reports continue. Lewis describes a cluster of Chicago sightings in April 2017, and Breedlove says he has spoken with recent witnesses, including one near the old TNT area in Point Pleasant. Skeptics attribute modern reports to owls, sandhill cranes, and misidentification, and one widely circulated Mothman photograph struck Breedlove himself as an owl carrying a snake.
Who's on this episode
- Seth Breedlove, documentary filmmaker with Small Town Monsters, director of The Mothman of Point Pleasant
Callers: Jimmy from Texas, Garrett, Judy from Kentucky, Stanley from Oregon, Matt from West Virginia, Ken from Oregon.
