Mothman looks like he could tear someone in two, with upper and lower fangs, a hairy chest with six-pack abs, clawed hands and feet, and ghastly wings that rise 13 feet high.
The completed sculpture is undoubtedly monstrous. It took him about a year.īob Roach and Charles Humphreys unveil the Mothman in 2003. According to Charles, Bob built the entire statue in his garage. "And the next morning he called up and asked, 'What's that Mothman look like?'"Ĭharles's answer was to take Bob around Point Pleasant, interviewing people who'd seen Mothman. "But I knew he had an ego," said Charles. Metal Mothman, Point Pleasant's friendly greeter.īob dismissed the idea, saying that he wasn't interested. "I drove to his house out in the woods," said Charles, "and I said, 'Bob, you make that Mothman and you'll be known around the world.'" Not the real monster, but a statue of it - something permanent that would outlast any media circus and attract tourists from out of town.Ĭharles knew a guy who could build a monster: Bob Roach (1933-2015), a retired welder who made art out of stainless steel. "All at once it just hit me," Charles said.
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Four decades later, Charles had become the executive director of Main Street Point Pleasant, a group tasked with reviving the town, which had fallen on hard times.Ĭharles realized that the movie had made Point Pleasant newsworthy again, and that gave him an idea. "Until that movie came out, I just never thought much more of Mothman," said Charles Humphreys, a Point Pleasant native who had hunted the creature during its 1960s heyday. Most of the world forgot about Mothman except for John Keel (1930-2009), whose 1975 investigative book, The Mothman Prophecies, was itself nearly forgotten until it was reworked as a 2002 Hollywood film starring Richard Gere.
The citizens of Point Pleasant hoped that he'd never return. When his attacks stopped in the late 1960s, Mothman simply vanished. Half-human, half-insect, he roamed the skies over Point Pleasant, West Virginia, swooping down to frighten dogs and people, leaving only a trail of screaming newspaper headlines. In America's pantheon of monsters, Mothman is among the most celebrated and terrifying. We knew the pandemic was bad when even the Mothman masked up.