Point Pleasant

Some people ask me what I do during the day. Sometimes I can give them pretty strait forward answers. Today may not be one of them.



I had a service call in Gallipolis, Ohio; which is right across the river from Point Pleasant, West Virginia. I've done several ramblings about "The Mothman" and Point Pleasant, but I had never actually been there. Well, I had an hour I had to kill for lunch and considering it was less than 5 minutes away I decided "What the hell...”

So I jumped on the highway, went over a bridge, went around a turnabout and came up onto a second bridge. The second bridge is the one that put me into Point Pleasant.

The first thing I noticed, because I have a tendency to watch for the unusual; I don't know, maybe it is part of writing, maybe it's just i like to keep my wits about me, but the first thing I noticed coming across that bridge was a man.



Now, normally seeing a person walking across a bridge is not a major deal, but this person kind of set the tone for my trip into Point Pleasant. Obviously a human. Well, what else would you expect in the middle of the day around lunchtime on a weekday? But there was something odd about him and as I looked at his face I realized that almost half of it hung slack from his skull, as if some sort of birth defect or maybe an injury, maybe that part of my mind that likes to come up with the strange and unusual; a mutation. So I proceeded over that bridge and found myself heading down the main drag. It's part of a Us Highway so it is fairly easy to find. So once heading down that drag I found a McDonalds.



Now I had originally considered just going to some small little cafe in Point Pleasant to sit down and have lunch, but i decided that was not a good idea. I had a hunger for fish. Now normally fish is one of those things I can take or leave; I like it, but I do not go out of my way to find it. Then I thought i would stop and have fish at a local cafe. Well, I remember while driving down the street that we were less than five miles from a nuclear power plant on the downstream side. I thought about it and the more I thought about it the more I understood about that part of me that is there for self-preservation. I decided against the fish. I figured my best bet was a chain fast food place like a McDonalds, because their food would be shipped in from outside the area. Less chance of something strange. I know, I am being overly paranoid, but when dealing with things like this, having read the amount of things i have about dealings with Point Pleasant and The Mothman, I figured going there by myself was enough of a chance; I shouldn't set my self on fire as it were.



I got a couple of fish sandwiches from McDonalds and I pulled into the historic district. I sat the and observed down the street as I stuffed my face with the multiprocessor corporate aquatic life form. Something odd struck me about the town, but I didn't know what it was. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It's not odd as in an "everything was painted in 60's psycodelic colors" or "it's odd because the buildings are all built with a right hand slant and angled windows." No, this was more of the kind of odd you pick up on in an H.P.Lovecraft novel. One of those times your senses are warning you and the hair stands up on the back of your neck kicking in that part of you that tells you "your not in the place you should be..." So I decided that was enough of a motivating factor to get out of the car.



I walked down the main drag of old Point Pleasant; the old historic district, the part of town that would have been there in the 60's when the bridge collapsed and the spotting of Mothman took place. I was overwhelmed by senses one does not usually find while standing one small block away from a major us highway at lunchtime on a week day, that runs through the center of a town between two major cities. Traffic was fairly heavy; yet, being one block away you could hear the sound of the store signs creaking in the wind overhead. The sky itself today was a little strange. It is a bluish purple. This is not that strange for wintertime in the Ohio Valley. What makes it odd is the temperature is 71 degrees, it's January 13th. This is supposed to be winter, the time of cold and snow.



I wasn't really worried about coming across the real Mothman in downtown Point Pleasant. A couple things I felt were on my side:

1: He has never been know to frequent a McDonalds

2: It was broad daylight

From all the descriptions I have ever read he has only been seen at night and from the description of how he looks, it makes sense. He's got large eyes, daylight would probably hurt him. But today is not overly bright, and sometimes, I am not either. So, I decided to take a walk. I walked about a block from the car and went by an old movie theater I saw. Now, I am one of these people who have a love/hate relationship, in a sense, with old movie theaters. I love them because of the films they have shown. the places inside are much more than the sterilized modern 64 screen megaplexes. There is something unique about each one, even when there are 2 on the same city block. but as I walked up to this one I made not of a couple of things. In the marquis where they hang the poster, where you would expect to see the poster for some second run movie. One that had already made the circuit, been on cable and regular TV, and could be leased for $20.00 to show in a theater like this. There wasn't what I expected. There wasn't "Cannonball Run II" or "Matrix Revisited", something that has come and gone everywhere it would make money, now just to be used as a honey to bring flies into some small town theater. No, in these were something a little bit different. They were vintage movie posters from the 1950's, old B movies. Three color posters; outlines; to movies I have heard of, I myself have never seen. It was strange. Inside the ticket booth was a small sign that said "Showing: Mothman 5:00PM". I wasn't going to hang out there till 5pm cause I had to be back.



I started thinking more and more and I noticed that a scent started to assail me. Not one of those scents that you catch on the wind that bypasses you and its gone. This is one of those ones that crawls up your nose lays both of its grimy little hands, hard, nails first into your sinuses. It was a smell of mold and mildew. Its the kind of smell you get when you go into a basement that hasn’t been opened in 50 year, that has been flooded and drained all on its own. Memories and pieces of time gone by, rotting. The whole city had that scent to it; it took a while. I walked about another block past a large number of closed stores. What I found interesting was every store that was closed was actually open, in a different building, a few blocks down. Nothing new, just everyone moved around. Not like they really had anywhere to go, but more the act of moving was important. It was a strange thing to see. I decided I was about to turn around and head back to the car so I would have enough time to get back to my appointment, and there, on a small side street i saw something I never thought I would see in Point Pleasant: The Mothman.



No, not the Mothman of the books or the movie, nor was it something that really should not have been there. It was a statue, someone’s impression; an artist gone wrong with an arc welder and a torch. The eyes were huge, as one would expect, and a mouth with fangs. But I never remember fangs in the descriptions nor do I remember claws, but they were there. There he was all in brushed steel. Large ovoid glass, deep amber colored and a mouth, open, bigger then my fist with fangs the size of my fingers. I looked at him and said to myself "So, this is what has happened to you. You’ve become nothing more than a tourist trap prop."



Now maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not. But you can't tell. Strange things happen in these hills and maybe he's out there, maybe just waiting, waiting for dark on another cool night to go scare a couple other people. Or maybe he's just here to keep an eye on us. Maybe once Point Pleasant improves, he will go away. I have put together before the conclusion about the mothman existing in multiple places in the world. I took note of the times he was seen and more often that not it was when the weather was cooler. So I started to wonder, maybe he only comes to Point Pleasant during the winter time, like Canadians going to Florida and the rest of the year he lives further north, maybe, somewhere around Toronto or Ottawa, who knows? You can't tell when your dealing with Canadians. Heck, he may even be a Canadian citizen, who just happens to have a small out of the way place in Point Pleasant , West Virginia.