The Silver Bridge

by Gray Barker

  On November 18 two Point Pleasant volunteer firemen, Captain Paul Yoder and Benjamin Enochs, reported seeing a large bird fly across their car “like a white shadow”. They were in the picnic area of the T.N.T. grounds at the time. “I’d say definitely this was a large bird of some kind,” Yoder reported.

  Kenneth Duncan, of Blue Creek, near Charleston, told The Charleston Gazette that he and some other men were digging his brother-in-law’s grave on November 16 when something that “looked like a brown human being” flew by. “It was gliding through the trees and was in our sight for about a minute,” Duncan declared.

  Nor had sightings of bird creatures been confined to the Ohio valley area. Twenty-three-year-old George Wolfe, Jr., of Beaver Falls, Pa., said that while hunting in Enon Valley during the Thanksgiving weekend he had seen a “seven-foot tall bird that looked something like an ostrich”.

  He saw the bird in a cornfield seconds after he had fired at a pheasant which his dog had flushed.

  “The bird ran. It did not fly,” he told an investigator of the Congress of Scientific Ufologists. “I could see it dodging in and out among the trees. It didn’t leap over the brush like a deer would do, but just zig-zagged through the trees, in a strange kind of sidewise motion.

  I was so startled I didn’t take a shot at it. It had a long neck and a round body with a plumed tail that reached high above its body.

  “It had a grayish color and looked about seven feet tall. It was only about 50 feet from me when it stood up and began to run. My dog ran after it, but when Old Ringo caught up with it, he let out a howl. He ran back to me with his tail between his legs and he was howling and whimpering.”

  “I told Ben that Dr. Kenneth Parks, curator of birds at the Carnegie museum in Pittsburgh, said Wolfe’s description of the bird led him to believe it was a Sandhill crane, which probably had escaped from a zoo, and had had its wings clipped while in captivity.

  “Dr. Parks, we must admit, agrees with the opinion of Dr. Roger Smith of West Virginia University, who read the Point Pleasant reports and pointed to the Sandhill crane as the culprit.”

  “At least,” Ben replied, “I think we’ve well established widespread sightings of a bird or birdlike creature. But still it just doesn’t seem to involve something natural. The reports usually have ‘side effects’, as I call them, such as UFO reports accompanying the Mothman accounts; and weird stuff like the hangings on the houses and the beeping noises—and, of course, annoyance of witnesses by unknown visitors.”

  We left the restaurant and walked toward the parking lot, where I would pick up my wagon which I had left there to ride in Ben’s car.

  He grabbed my shoulder.

  “Don’t look just now, but there’s two people you should see.”

  I turned slowly toward the street.

  Advancing toward the intersection was a tall, emaciated man, and a cheerful, short woman, both, I would say, in their late sixties or early seventies. They first appeared to be holding hands, but as they came closer I could see that they jointly held onto an object which they raised into the air between them.

  “Don’t laugh at them,” Ben begged. “Although admittedly they are sort of odd, they are, I would say, two of the finest people in the area. I think you should meet them if only to see their weird ‘scepter’.”

  They advanced to the intersection and suddenly the object they held shot up into the air, and they drew back to the curb. After a car went by, they spotted Ben, waved with their free hands, crossed the street and advanced toward us.

  “This is William James Bateman, and his wife, Martha. I want you to meet Gray Barker.”

  Mrs. Bateman took the “scepter” as her husband shook hands with me. The object was indeed unusual. A long plastic stem which served as its handle culminated in a glass or plastic ball, about three inches in diameter. To this apex had been glued or somehow attached pieces of cut glass, dime store jewelry and objects appearing to be marbles.

  “Tell Gray about your scepter,” Ben urged the man.

  “For years,” Bateman began, “I have been in close contact with myriads of God’s angels. Lately they have officially made Mrs. Bateman and me angels ourselves. They taught us how to make this scepter. It is a kind of 4-D television camera, and they can monitor its signals and look through it and see everything we can see, and experience everything we can experience. They deeply enjoy doing this, and they tell me that, for the first time, they can really see what is going on in the world.”

  The scepter, he claimed, contained “seventeen imported crystals”, and was the only one like it in the world.

  “Anywhere between five and seven thousand angels, both good and bad, participate in everything pleasurable with my wife and myself, such as movies, television, and our favorite hobby, bingo games.”

  “Wait a moment,” I remarked. “You mean you let the evil angels look through this thing too? Don’t the good angels object?”

  “Oh no. An unlimited number of angels can use it. At first we did not allow the evil angels, or devils, to enjoy it; but then so many of them begged us to let them look through that we finally assented. Then more and more of them asked to do so. They said they didn’t realize that the world was so beautiful and that so many people were so good.

  “Many of the devils, “ Bateman explained, “live deep in dark caverns underneath the earth, and seldom see the light of day. They have been told that all the people on the surface were selfish and warlike and were great enemies of theirs. When they look through the secpter they change their mind.”

  He then came up with a staggering statistic (if only for its alleged conciseness!). There were, he said, 8,509 devils in our solar system. He and his wife deeply believed that by offering little kindness to the devils, ceasing to speak badly about them, and by showing them the advantages of changing and being good, they could make “good angels out of them”.

  “I know this may be contrary to your religious teachings,” Bateman again addressed me, “but really it is not contrary to God. Jesus, while living here on Earth, was more concerned about the ‘lost sheep’ than he was about the people who had repented. If you’ve read your bible, you’ll know that between the crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus went down into Hell, where the devils live, deep in the bowels of the earth, and preached to what the bible refers to as the ‘lost sinners’ there.”

  The devils constantly demonstrated their appreciation of the concern the Batemans held for them, and for the privilege of looking through the scepter. Whenever there was danger about, or when the couple was about to step into dangerous traffic, the scepter, Bateman declared, would jerk up and down violently.

  “When the green light comes on, or when the danger is over, the scepter gently pulls us forward.”

  We watched them as they departed, still jointly holding the weird device. They walked up the steep incline of the pedestrian walkway of the Silver Bridge, gradually vanishing into the fog which had lifted and obscured only the towering part of the structure. It almost seemed they were rising into the spiritual world of their strong convictions.

  Once again we walked toward our cars.

  “You know,” I told Ben, “the average person would call these friends of yours religious crackpots. I know they’re odd, and I wouldn’t want a steady diet of this sort of thing. But I believe they’re more truly religious than most people. After all, why be so rough on the devils? You can always accomplish more with gentleness and love than you can with vituperation and negative thinking. If one were fairly decent to the devils, maybe he could convert them, as the Batemans are trying to do.”

  Ben smiled and laughed, and I could see he was both amused and impressed by my statement.

  “Of course, this would be bad for the churches,” I continued. “They’d go out of business if there were no more devils, and…”

  “STOP!” he cried. “Let me tell it this time. This is what I’ve been forgetting every time I started to mention it.”

  I ha
lted my religious harangue.

  “ ‘The Curse of Cornstalk’. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  His tone grew more serious.

  “I related to you how chief Cornstalk and his son were murdered in cold blood, after he had been largely responsible for maintaining peace in the valley. A rare historical document relates that before he died he put a curse on the town. Just what sort of curse, the account does not state. But it does add that the curse was to last for two hundred years—approximately, that is, because he set the time in his own idiom, in terms of seasons, moons and so on.”

  “Do you think that these weird events—the Mothman sightings and the strange poltergeist-like phenomena—could be a part of the curse?” I half asked him, half asked myself.

  “I don’t know about that, and I really don’t believe in curses—except perhaps for cases where the accursed deeply believes in the alleged spell and helps to bring the effects upon himself by his own negative actions.

  “Still,” he continued, “there are some facts which tend to back up the curse. For years the town was impoverished by disastrous floods, until the flood wall finally solved this problem. Even since then, however, the town has never prospered, while other communities up and down the river, with similar geographic and economic opportunities, have flourished.

  “And I must level with you on one other idea of mine, which has haunted me ever since I heard about the curse from the Ohio University professor who came here to do research on the Indian wars.

  “It’s really against my better judgment, but I still have this premonition. The feeling that, if there really is a curse, it has just about run its course. After that, everything will be all right for Point Pleasant. Still, with this feeling comes another—that of foreboding: that the Curse of Cornstalk, though the dead warrior’s anger has been almost satiated, has one last great hurdle to go. Sometimes I awaken during the night with the premonition of an impending catastrophe, though I have no clue as to what it will be. This would complete the curse, and finally, for all time, expiate the great wrong and the foul murder of the valiant man. At last, Cornstalk could rest in peace.”

  CHAPTER 14

  THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT

  Jennings “Red” Beckley realized that his friend was “real weird”, just as the other kids put it, yet he found the older man fascinating to talk with. He was a nearby Ravenswood building contractor with whom Red became acquainted when he worked for him briefly the past summer.

  Also, he admired his friend because he lived alone and could have things pretty much as he pleased, including a sports car, ham radio equipment, a tape recorder, a stereo outfit and the like. He began visiting him frequently, and occasionally stayed over with him on weekends, not so much because of his interest in the gadgetry and being allowed to drive the car occasionally, but because of an unusual revelation the man made one night. Red noticed the flying saucer books and other unusual literature around the apartment, but was only mildly interested until his friend confided that he had not only seen the saucers, but actually had contacted and talked to their pilots. They took him for a ride in a saucer and flew him over all the Ohio river valley.

  Red took one of the books home and it opened a new world for him. If there were people here from outer space, he thought, one ought to get to know them, for certainly they must be very highly advanced. And he was fascinated by the prospect of riding in one of the disc-shaped objects pictured in the book.

  During his next visit he prevailed upon the man to reveal his method of contacting the space people. At first he refused, explaining that Red did not yet possess the “high spiritual vibrations” needed for such contacts. He did consent, however, to inform him further about the nature and philosophy of the space people, and to give him a brief description of their planet. Among many details, he related that they were vegetarians and that he himself was seriously considering abandoning meat altogether so that he could better communicate with them and see them more often, though his doctor insisted on his having a high protein diet “to build up my system”.

  Apparently noting the receptivity Red displayed, the man finally promised that if he would come to Ravenswood every weekend for “occult studies” he could eventually reveal the secret.

  Red took up the studies, but was amazed when he finally learned the simplicity of the contact process.

  “When you want to contact them,” his friend explained, “you can do this by thinking of orange leather. You have to imagine it very strongly. You have to almost see it. Then you create the mental attitude of actually feeling it, experiencing the smell of it; finally you imagine you are snapping it in your hands. You must do all this, however, in strict privacy, perhaps in your room at night before retiring.”

  Returning home excitedly, Red tried the process that same night. Although he got no results, he realized it might require several such experiments before he would be able to achieve the proper mental concentration. He repeated the process on three successive nights, early in the evening, before doing his homework. During two of the experiments he fell asleep and didn’t awaken until morning.

  On Friday the experiment had to be postponed, for word went around school that another “igloo” dance would take place that night in the old T.N.T. area. He must attend, if only to see the Ashley girl again. Although she had graduated the previous year, she had recently quit college, and still ran with the relatively small group that held the dances.

  He caught a ride with the Everly boy. Driving into the T.N.T. area well after dark, they parked and then sneaked into a “posted” or forbidden section of the vast area, containing parts of the widely dispersed munitions complex which had been deactivated after World War II.

  One of the “igloos”, in reality an underground concrete bunker in which explosives had been stored, had never been sealed up. It was large enough to drive several cars into, but only one was needed—a car with a strong battery, for it would provide the lighting for the dance, to the music of a local station on a transistor radio.

  Liberal amounts of soft drinks and beer provided refreshments and some of the older boys always had pints of whiskey in their jacket pockets. Though usually nothing much happened except dancing and merriment, it was an unwritten law that if a couple retreated outside to a parked car, nobody would snoop around.

  Red had a couple of beers before dancing with the Ashley girl. First they engaged in some small talk, then in suggestive banter. The Harris boy came over and offered them some orange gin. Both took swallows from the bottle. Red bought the rest of it from him at an outlandish price.

  The girl, seemingly fired up with the gin, embraced him tightly, and her ample breasts, now quite firm, pressed against him. He had been laid five or six times, with two other girls, but they never excited him like this one.

  He didn’t envision much trouble getting her out to the car, for she seemed to be as hot as he was. Five or six guys had told him that she “put out”, but always related this second hand; another friend, disappointed after a date with her, declared that she was just a “teaser”, and wouldn’t actually do anything.

  She readily assented to his suggestion that they finish the bottle in the car and “do some necking”, Once there, she giggled excitedly, then moved easily into the petting and cooperated madly in kissing. It was the first time a girl had stuck her tongue inside his mouth. At first he withdrew from it; then the second time he began to like it, and then it was maddening.

  Finally, holding her tightly, he was kissing her wildly on the neck and beginning to explore downward with his hand when she screamed loudly and tore herself from him. She pointed toward the bushes.

  “Mothman! I saw it! Get me out of here! Get me out of here!”

  He was afraid the others might hear her and think he was raping her. So he grabbed her hand, and rapidly led her back to the “igloo”. He thought it best to go along with the idea, and swear he saw the creature too, though somewhat more mildly, “only a flash of its eyes�
�.

  The Everly boy and his friend had to take two girls home early, and because that was his only ride home, Red reluctantly abandoned his intended conquest to go with them. They dropped him on their way.

  He was rather disgusted. He had been all built up, and then she had seen this damned bird or creature. Once in his room, he threw his jacket across it into a corner, sat down and vowed to do his homework.

  He pulled out the half empty bottle and began swigging at the remaining gin. He put down the homework, listened to the radio for a while, and then realizing it was very late, took off his clothes and got into bed.

  (For the sake of absolute accuracy, I will quote verbatim the following from the taped interview made with Red, rather than report it as a third person narrative, as I have done above):

  “I had just fallen asleep, when, I swear, a voice with a very odd accent boomed into my room, saying, 'What do you want?’ I sat up wide awake, turned on my light, and looked at my dog to see if he was aware of anything. He was still asleep.

  “I lit a cigarette, and was thinking it must have been a dream, or that I had too much to drink, or that my imagination was playing tricks on me. After a few more drags on the cigarette I became convinced of this.

  “Then, booming through the entire upstairs floor, the voice, still with the odd accent, said: 'Have you called us? What do you want?’ My first reaction was that I should say, ‘Shh, you’ll wake up the whole house!’ Again I looked at the dog which was still asleep; then (forgetting the reason I had wanted to see or talk to them) I replied:

  “ ‘WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU GOT BESIDES FLYING SAUCERS?”

  “I waited in vain for an answer, and deeply regretted my crude remark. Finally, I got up and wrote this down on paper, but it was really unnecessary. I should have made some notes on the accent, for the next morning I remembered everything else except the odd accent.”