7 Chilling Mothman Encounters

Mothman is a cryptid that often is forgotten. There have been numerous sightings, and many try to dismiss them by saying it was just a giant bird. Is it possible that everyone saying they saw him confused it with a bird each time? Well, that seems to be the debate. It is said that he is the harbinger of horrible situations and catastrophic events. 

However, not every Mothman sighting has resulted in mayhem and destruction. Some have seen him from afar. Either he doesn’t cause bridge collapses and earthquakes, or maybe people took his warning seriously. Therefore there was no destruction and death. These stories will press the boundaries of your imagination and possibly your fear. 

Those brave souls may perhaps find these tales to be entertaining and maybe questionable. Whatever it is that you choose to believe, it’s likely that you’ll find these stories to be entertainingly spooky or interesting at the least. It’s up to you to decide if Mothman is here as a warning or if he’s the bringer of doom. Ultimately it’s up to you whether he even exists. Dim the lights and cuddle up with a blanket so the Mothman can’t get you!

Chernobyl

A horrid humanoid with enormous wings, a black headless body, and red glowing eyes that sent a message of doom to anyone who saw it rose above the horizon of Chernobyl and Pripyat. Several employees in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s control room in the days before the disaster claimed to have seen the being known as the Blackbird of Chernobyl. 

This nuclear power plant is located in northern Ukraine. Those unlucky enough to witness the creature reportedly experienced terrifying dreams and ominous phone calls. Others maintain that the Chernobyl Black Bird was a variation of the mythical Mothman, whose appearance always precedes the impending catastrophe. 

The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was brought on by a defective reactor design operated by unqualified staff. The radioactive reactor core caused at least 5% of radioactive materials to be released into the environment because of steam explosions and fires, which led to the deposition of radioactive materials across Europe. If Mothman is real, he didn’t cause this, but he sure showed up for it. 

Silver Bridge 

In reality, the first of several strange sightings occurred about 85 miles away from Point Pleasant in Clendenin, West Virginia. After hearing rustling in the trees above them, five grave diggers looked up and saw what they believed to be a flying man directly above them. More reports began to trickle in over the coming days. 

A “large bird with red eyes” was described by two volunteer firemen. Between November 1966 and December 1967, Point Pleasant was the subject of at least 100 reports from people of all ages describing a monster that could soar straight into the air “like a helicopter.” Every witness told the same bird-man with bat-like wings and glowing, hypnotic red eyes. 

Over 500 phone calls were made to Mary Hyre, a reporter covering the Mothman sightings at the time, about this enigmatic creature, strange skylights, electrical interference, eerie humming noises, and UFO sightings. A year after the Mothman sightings started, tragedy struck. In 1967 the Silver Bridge collapsed during the heaviest traffic, killing 46 people, and the Mothman vanished, or perhaps went on to watch more chaos.

Mothman Saves Lives

What if Mothman is trying to save people? What if his appearance is a warning to prevent the chaos he foretells? In 1978, a group of miners in Freiburg, Germany, came face to face with an object blocking the entrance to the mine that appeared to be headless and had glowing red eyes on its chest. 

They initially believed it to be a man wearing a trench coat, but they soon realized it was a set of enormous black wings that had spread out. The miners remained at the mine entrance, dumbfounded and staring at the creature until it let out a spine-tingling screech that caused them to rush outside. 

The men witnessed a seismic rumble and a dust plume shooting from the mine as it collapsed an hour later. Most of the men would have perished if they had arrived at their station in the mine as usual. They believed the “Freiburg Shrieker” may have saved their lives. Can Mothman be helpful to those who believe the lore? 

Swine Flu

Some people think the fabled Mothman was the large, hairy, red-eyed creature in La Junta, Mexico; residents started spotting it stalking the area in 2009. The sightings happened just before Mexico experienced its 2009 swine flu outbreak. 

The creature’s screeches could be heard coming from an apple orchard close to Miaca Cemetery. Two witnesses, Angela Mendez and Viviana Ledezma, were filled with utter terror as they heard it. On the seoevening of March 6, 2009, a student claimed that the Mothman chased him for fifteen minutes. 

Local authorities made every effort to track down the entity, but they could not locate any signs of it. This doesn’t seem to fit into the situations that Mothman usually appears in, but he’s not exactly an easy creature to get to have a conversation with to verify.

Other Encounters 

There isn’t enough information on each of these encounters, but many people have said they saw them. Some other events that are claimed  to have Mothman appear days or weeks before the catastrophic events are:

• Several people reported seeing a black-winged creature flying close to the Twin Towers in the days preceding the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Witnesses saw a creature flying parallel to the plane during the attack as the second plane crashed. Then, in the days that followed, those who reported seeing the beast allegedly encountered “men in black” who warned them to keep their stories to themselves.

• Beginning in early January 1926, reports of sightings of a figure resembling the Mothman flooded a region in Southeast China. The mysterious, menacing figure, known to the locals as the “man dragon,” was hovering over the Xiaon Te Dam. Then a 40 billion gallon flood struck the nearby farming villages, bringing disaster. Fifteen thousand people died from the dam’s collapse.

• Japan experienced tragedy in March 2011. A devastating tsunami battered the coastal Tohoku region of the country’s eastern coast. It left death and destruction in its wake was caused by a powerful magnitude-9 earthquake that tore through. As if the strong quake and waves weren’t bad enough, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant suffered extensive damage. It experienced one of the worst nuclear meltdowns ever, poisoning the environment and its inhabitants and leaving behind effects that continue to this day. It is said that there were reports of Mothman sightings. 

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