Mothman at 60: A Packed Festival, a Ballet and the TNT Area’s Past

Sixty years after two young couples said a winged figure with glowing red eyes chased their car near Point Pleasant, Mothman is having one of its busiest autumns yet. In the space of a few weeks, the small Ohio River town in West Virginia hosted its annual festival, a Charleston ballet company prepared a world premiere built around the legend, and a regional outlet revisited the World War II explosives plant where the story began.

A festival that outgrew its town

The 2026 Mothman Festival filled downtown Point Pleasant on September 19 and 20. Reporting for WOUB Public Media, Emily Votaw described thousands of visitors packing Main Street despite heat and rain, with costumed fans, artists’ booths, live music, speakers and tours out to the TNT area. Paranormal researcher John Frick, who attends with his brother Timothy, put the weekend crowd at about 30,000 and recalled that the first festival, in 2002, drew only a couple hundred people. Organizers had only projected tens of thousands of visitors, so Frick’s number is an informal estimate, not an official count.

Not everyone came far, but some did. Allison Roberts, 25, told WOUB she had driven about 13 hours from Liberty, Mississippi, for her first festival and was having “the best time ever.” The Frick brothers helped build the zip-line Mothman that swoops over the festival hayride, a tradition WOUB dates to 2004. John Frick described the creature as “neutral, neither good nor evil” – a mild verdict for a figure often tied, in local lore, to disaster.

That tie is the Silver Bridge. On December 15, 1967, the bridge linking Point Pleasant to Ohio collapsed into the river during rush hour, killing 46 people. Some later writers, most famously John Keel in his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies, folded the sightings and the collapse into one story. As WOUB noted, any connection between the two remains a matter of debate; investigators traced the collapse to a failed eyebar in the bridge’s suspension chain, not to anything supernatural.

Before Mothman, a TNT plant

The place most fans want to see is the TNT area north of town, and on October 13 West Virginia Explorer’s David Sibray published a detailed history of what was there first. The West Virginia Ordnance Works was established in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, and held an opening ceremony on October 12 that year attended by roughly 1,000 workers. Its commanding officer, Col. A. W. Ford, said the area had been “transformed in a few brief months from agricultural industry into chemical industry.” Employment peaked at an estimated 3,500, and on August 15, 1945, after Japan announced its surrender, the Point Pleasant Daily Register reported that TNT production had stopped on War Department orders.

Sibray notes that sources disagree on the plant’s size – contemporary reports said about 9,000 acres, later ones about 8,320. What survives is mostly concrete. Chris Riser of the Mason County Convention and Visitors Bureau estimates that about 104 earth-covered “igloo” bunkers once used to store explosives remain, roughly half of them open to visitors, plus a cluster of pillars locals call “Stonehenge.” Much of the land is now the McClintic Wildlife Management Area. Wartime manufacturing also left contaminated soil and water; federal investigations began in 1981, and the site was later placed on the EPA’s Superfund list. Riser told the outlet that after the war the plant “just sort of faded, and trees started growing, and everyone forgot about it.”

Then came November 15, 1966. That night Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette told police that a large, winged, humanlike figure had appeared near the abandoned works. The Point Pleasant Register carried their account the next day, and more reports followed over the next year.

On stage in Charleston

The legend is also heading for the ballet stage. The Charleston Ballet opens its 2026–27 season with the world premiere of The Legend of Mothman at the West Virginia Culture Center Theater, with a story by Deborah Novak, music by Matt Jackfert, choreography by artistic director Kim Pauley and projections by Carol and Mike DelGrosso, according to the Herald-Dispatch. Novak told the paper she remembers the original news reports and set out to capture the emotional side of the story, which she sees as ballet’s strength.

Demand appears to have surprised even the company. As of mid-October, its ticket page listed the Friday, October 23 evening show as sold out and showed a 2 p.m. matinee on Saturday, October 24, added because of high demand, alongside that evening’s performance.

What the sightings were

None of this settles what the Scarberrys, the Mallettes and later witnesses saw. In 1966 West Virginia University wildlife biologist Robert L. Smith told reporters the descriptions fit a sandhill crane, a tall gray bird with a red patch on its head that could have strayed off its migration route. Investigator Joe Nickell later argued for a large owl, whose eyeshine in headlights can look like glowing red eyes. No physical evidence of an unknown creature has ever been produced. What is beyond dispute is the legend’s staying power: a sighting near a wartime ruin now fills a town, a theater and the TNT area’s bunkers with visitors every fall.