The Silver Bridge: The Classic Mothman Tale

by Gray Barker

  As the pavement ended, and a graveled road continued, gutted by mud puddles, I seriously considered turning back, for I felt I might be on the wrong road. I noted with disquiet that my gas was low, for I understood the witness lived a short distance off the main road and had neglected filling up before leaving Clarksburg.

  Seeing a light to my right through the downpouring rain, I stopped the car and ran over to the building. It was a new house in its final stages of construction, yet apparently already occupied. There was no front entrance completed, but I banged on a window and somebody opened it and poked his head out. The resident assured me I was on the right track and that indeed there actually was a Newell Partridge, who lived “quite a spell” down the road.

  His “quite a spell” developed as no great distance, yet it included a frightening mountain, with narrow muddy roads. The downpour worsened and I envisioned becoming stuck or running into the ditch. Since turning off the main highway I had encountered no traffic, and I probably would be stranded all night, before help could be obtained.

  The depressing and disquieting condition of the road, along with the utter weirdness of the case I was investigating, made me jumpy. I tramped my brake pedal and almost skidded into the ditch to avoid an animal, limping and waddling in a kind of sidewise motion on the road ahead of me. Inching ahead, I followed it, obviously a fowl of some sort. It was too large to be a chicken; evidently it was a goose or turkey. Instead of getting off the road it continued to limp ahead of the car. Now and then it would falter, and flap desperately, before arising to continue its tortured journey. Finally the animal, apparently incapable of further movement, came to a dead stop in front of me. I stopped the car and investigated. It was a large turkey gobbler, with a broken leg and bleeding from the head. Its feathers appeared waterlogged, mixed with mud and filth of the road. I decided to put it into the station wagon with the hope of drying it out and splinting its leg at the Partridge residence; but as I picked up the dripping, almost disgusting black mass, I could tell, in the mud-stained light from my headlights, that the bird had expired. I held it for a moment, and then threw the pitiful thing over an embankment.

  This incident added to my depression, and moment by moment I was convincing myself that the road would end in some mule trail, and that there Mothman would stand, staring at me with fiery eyes.

  At the bend, however, my spirits lifted; for there stood a neat farm house, its upstairs not yet finished, with a jeep in the yard and the light in front, just as Partridge had described it on the phone.

  Partridge came out onto the porch and motioned for me to park in the driveway. Cautiously around him peered little faces, three of his six handsome children. He gave me a warm welcome, and Mrs. Partridge, an attractive woman who appeared to be in her thirties, told me she was making coffee.

  As I looked about the house I noted it was in the final stages of remodeling. Partridge, a building contractor, had bought it at a very reasonable price, was busily improving it.

  The six children, four boys and two girls, crowded around, raptly gazing at my tape recorder, which I employ during interviews for accuracy and to free me from taking notes.

  Again I noted the attractiveness of the children, all neatly scrubbed, very polite, and ready to be sent off to bed. One of them, a boy of about six, caught my particular attention. He was staring at me with large, blue luminous eyes, all the while staying at a more discrete distance than the other, more extraverted kids. More lightly complexioned than the rest, he presented an almost spectral appearance.

  Knowing that I had a way with kids, and acting on an impulse, I suddenly fixed his gaze in mine, opened my mouth wide, displaying my teeth, in a short, but (I am sure) terrifying grimace. The boy’s large eyes popped even bigger; then, breaking his deadpan expression, he cracked a big grin. He advanced toward me cautiously, and I smiled, grabbed him, and set him on my lap.

  Once again his face became expressionless, and that strange haunting look came into his eyes.

  He looked me straight in the eye.

  “Old Bandit’s gone!” he said.

  I didn’t quite know how to reply.

  “Mister,” he added, “do you think you can bring him back?”

  Again, I was unable to answer his piteous remarks.

  Partridge relieved my discomfiture by lifting the boy off my lap, and with a sharp but painless slap on the buttocks, said “Off to bed with you!” The child ran to the top of the stairs and paused, smiled, then returned the face I had made at him.

  After the usual amenities and my assuring Partridge that I would write a fair report about him, I put a tape on my recorder and my host began to relate the series of circumstances that he could not explain, the gripping fear he had experienced for the first time on the night of November 15, 1966.

  “There was a movie on TV, a dog movie; ‘Missouri Champion’ was the name of the dog,” he began slowly, masking his reluctance to talk about the matter by timing his conversation with the slow refilling of his pipe.

  “It was about 10:30 or twenty-five ‘til eleven that night, and suddenly the TV blanked out. A real fine herringbone pattern appeared on the tube, and at the same time the set started a loud whining noise, winding up to a high pitch, peaking and breaking off, as if you were on a musical scale and you went as high as you could and came back down and repeated it.”

  Partridge was certain the color set had not picked up any ordinary interference, for he considered himself an expert electronics technician, though he no longer followed the trade. “There would have to be a powerful electronic blanket of almost unbelievable degree present to cause those effects.”

  “It sounded like a generator winding up. It reminded me of a hand field generator that one might use for portable radio transmission in an emergency.”

  Puzzled by the interference and oddly frightened by it, Mr. and Mrs. Partridge waited a couple of minutes, hoping it would go away. Then the dog, outside, on the porch, began howling.

  “It was a kind of wolf howl,” he told me. “I remember that as children we would say a dog was ‘singing’ when it howled like that. Sometimes when you hit a high note on a guitar or accordion, apparently this would hurt the dog’s ears and it would start howling like a wolf. Then you’d say, ‘I’ve got a singing dog.’ ”

  Believing the whining sound was causing the dog to howl, and finding it uncomfortable to their own ears, they turned the set off. Yet Bandit still continued the strange “singing”. Partridge got a flashlight and went out onto the porch to investigate.

  “The dog was sitting on the end of the porch, howling down toward the hay barn in the bottom. I shined the light in that direction, and it picked up two red circles, or eyes, which looked like bicycle reflectors. Still there was something about those eyes that is difficult to explain. When I was a kid I night hunted all the time, and I certainly know what animal eyes look like—such as ‘coon, dog and cat eyes in the dark. These were much larger, for one thing. It’s a good length of a football field down to that hay barn. Probably around 150 yards; still those eyes showed up huge, for that distance. They must have been much larger than bicycle reflectors.”

  From my conversation with him, I gathered that the eyes, in themselves, had peculiarly disturbed him. He said that they made “cold chills run over” him. Partridge didn’t mention until later in the evening that he was disturbed and frightened from the time the interference first appeared on the screen. He also said there was a peculiar form to the almost undefinable shadows in the pattern. “I can’t express what these things might have been—maybe they were just suggestions of things that were very repulsive,” he tried to explain. I gathered that the images must have really shocked him, for he refused to go any further in trying to interpret them, as if the very thought of them was painful.

  Almost at the same moment the light from the flashlight reflected in the eyes, Bandit charged, violently but silently, toward them, his habit when attacking wild game. Partridge didn’t “sic”
the dog; in fact he yelled, probably because of his intuitive fear, for him to come back.

  That fear must have been great, for he had no desire to follow the dog, as he usually would have done. A transcript of the tape recording is interesting on this point:

  Barker: Would you say you were frightened?

  Partridge: Well, I don’t know. I didn’t want to go out the door very bad.

  Barker: But didn’t you want to walk down to the barn to see what had happened?

  Partridge: No, I don’t think I would.

  Barker: If it had been a bear down there, would you have walked down there?

  Partridge: If I had ny gun in my hand, I would.

  Barker: Did you go inside and get your gun?

  Partridge: Yes, but I didn’t go down there. In fact I slept with that gun loaded beside the bed all night.

  Though greatly concerned about his pet, Partridge was beginning to forget about the interference, the eyes and his unearthly fear, when he picked up the Clarksburg Telegram two evenings later and read about the Mothman sightings by two young Point Pleasant couples. When he saw their report of the dog’s carcass apparently connected with the bird creature they sighted, he immediately connected that event with his experience.

  “I shouldn’t have called up WBOY-TV, in Clarksburg,” he said, “for that is how the news of my dog’s disappearance came out. After they broke the story, other kids began teasing our kids at school, and I received crank telephone calls. Sometimes they simply said, ‘I’m Mothman,’ or something similar; then some of the calls consisted only of strange beeping noises.”

  He had the habit of telephoning the station when he needed information, for they were more “accommodating” than the local newspapers, and would go to considerable lengths to look up and give him information. Because he was in the building contracting business, he had in the past mostly called about the weather.

  He knew he could get the details on the Mothman and dog story if he could reach Pete Lyman, the commentator on the evening news programs, who usually was at the station between his 6:30 and 11:00 P.M. newscasts.

  “Hello, Partridge,” Pete spoke to him in his friendly manner. “What can I do for you this evening? You want the weather report?”

  Partridge explained that he was interested in the Mothman report, even though he felt embarrassed about asking, for he didn’t want to reveal why he was interested.

  Pete excused himself, soon returned with all the wire stories and read them to him. Perhaps it was the tone of Partridge’s voice or Pete’s uncanny sense of a news lead which led to the latter’s question.

  “I don’t want to pry, Newell,” Pete told him, “but my nose for news is itching. You haven’t seen anything unusual down in your area, have you?”

  Pete had read the stories in a serious tone, and had always been helpful and friendly. Before he could give it a second thought, he told him about the eyes and the disappearance of Bandit.

  “Gee, I’d like to send our reporter out there, if you wouldn’t mind,” Pete begged. “He’s just returned from Point Pleasant, and though some of the boys here tend to laugh at the story, Bill is really convinced that those two young couples were telling the truth. He’s dead convinced it wasn’t a sandhill crane they saw—as that university professor claimed.”

  After they hung up, Partridge realized he hadn’t made a really good investigation, if any at all. In fact, he had never gone down to the barn to look for any evidence which might be there. Perhaps the dog had encountered some wild animal and had been killed—though he could scarcely imagine any animal roaming locally which would be large or strong enough to seriously harm the 110-lb. dog.

  “The next day I began thinking about this,” he told me. “Though the reporter wasn’t coming until three o’clock that afternoon (Thursday), I got to thinking about my wife and kids and the Mothman business, decided to cancel a couple of appointments with clients, and come home early and investigate.

  “I walked out to the barn, looking for tracks. Here and there I could see Bandit’s paw prints. These were rather easy to find, for he was a heavy dog, and the area was muddy, with remains of only sparse grass. Cattle had been fenced in the area, and their trampings had killed off most of the grass.”

  Partridge then noted an unusual development. He discovered a great number of Bandit’s tracks concentrated at the very spot where he had seen the huge reflecting eyes.

  “Those tracks were going in a circle, as if that dog had been chasing his tail—though he never did that. And that was that. I couldn’t see them go off anywhere, though I did see a series of fresh tracks which apparently led from the porch to the spot where he ran in circles. There were no other tracks of any kind.”

  “Had the dog been baying an animal—say a bear or deer (the two were occasionally seen in the area)—what would the dog have done under these circumstances?” I asked.

  ‘That dog would have attacked it. He would attack any wild animal because he repeatedly killed wild game. He never even fought smaller game: he just slit their throats and that would be the end of it.”

  “Would Bandit ever run around an animal and bark at it before attacking?”

  “No, he was a smart hunter. I’ve watched him kill: he usually would slither on his belly like a snake until he was in springing distance; then he would give one leap and slit their throats. He never made any sound when he was after something.”

  “That would account, then,” I remarked, “for his silence that night?”

  “When my light picked up those eyes,” he told me, “his hair bristled straight up on his back, and he was really moving when he took off. He even flipped the sod up behind him. He was really moving. He was on a straight course for it, whatever it was.”

  “What animal would be capable of killing a dog his size?”

  “I don’t know of any animal capable of killing that dog, because I know I have tried to hold his head between my hands; and Roger, my oldest boy, and I, have both tried to hold that dog on the ground while playing with him, and both of us together couldn’t hold him down.”

  At that moment, as I was looking directly at my host, my eyes caught something at the window a few feet behind him. Whatever it was, it appeared there only momentarily after I had spotted it—definitely a face of some sort, barely illuminated by the lights of the room. I started visibly. From Partridge’s facial expression, I could somehow feel (though this is difficult to explain) that he not only knew I had seen it, but that he would rather I didn’t verbalize about it; so I didn’t. Probably it had been some curious neighbor trying to find out who his visitor was—though the nearest house was a considerable distance away.

  My momentary reaction probably reflected the peculiar undertone to the whole affair, a suggestion of some abnormal, unnamed fear. Partridge had partly expressed this in noting his unusual emotional disturbance when the television acted in such an abnormal fashion. He summed it up well, it seemed, when he remarked, “I think that the hardest thing to explain is the feeling involved.”

  “Could you try to explain it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know quite how to do so, except to say it was an eerie feeling. I have never had this sort of feeling before. It was as if you knew something was wrong, but couldn’t place just what it was.”

  “Do you have any idea as to what possibly killed your dog?”

  “No, I don’t have any ideas, except it was something that took my dog off. This Mothman—I don’t know quite what to believe about that. I don’t think there is a bird big enough to carry off that huge dog. But I do know the feeling that was here that night. It wasn’t like an animal feeling.”

  “What do you mean by ‘animal feeling’?”

  “You can tell if there’s an animal prowling. That night the dog commotion was different. The way that dog was acting, there was nothing connected with anything animal. Bandit never howls at animals. You hear one growl, he tears the animal’s throat out, and that’s all there is to it.
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  “One night, for example, when we were just going to bed, we heard the awfulest commotion out there in the yard, and Bandit sounded just like he was tearing the side of the house out. I grabbed the gun and ran out there barefooted, and he had already taken off up the hill, after whatever it was. But he chased it to the edge of the woods and came back. Of course that was an animal; you could tell that it was. It likely was a big ‘coon or ‘possum or something like that. But the other night it was entirely different. It wasn’t any animal. He didn’t act like it was an animal; he acted more like it was somebody prowling around, except for the howl. I have never heard him howl like that.

  “I don’t think that anybody could explain the feeling we had, other than to experience it for himself. I don’t scare easily; I’ve stayed out in the woods all night by myself, and I wouldn’t be afraid to go up there in the woods and sleep all night. But that night it was different: the queer patterns on the TV that reminded you of something unmentionable, though you couldn’t quite identify it; that unearthly noise of the interference, Bandit’s howling; and most of all, those red eyes.”

  I had a final cup of coffee, and against the protestations of the Partridges, told them I must go. Among the country folk of central West Virginia it is a custom to protest a guest’s leaving, even thought the departure may represent some relief. It is reciprocally polite to offer many excuses for departing.

  “Come back and see us,” Mrs. Partridge said, and I could tell this was a genuine invitation, beyond the protocol of civility.

  “I hope I can,” I promised.

  Partridge accompanied me to the car.

  “Mr. Partridge,” I asked, “what do you really think it was? What do you really think you saw. What do you really think happened?”

  He thought silently for a few seconds.

  “I don’t know. I only know that my dog’s gone.”

  He grew even more silent.