The Silver Bridge: The Classic Mothman Tale

by Gray Barker

  Scarberry had hit the brake when he saw the apparition the second time. He didn’t know why, except that again the eyes had demonstrated a hypnotic effect, which held him “in its spell”. Upon the creature’s takeoff, however, the spell was broken, but supplanted with indescribable fright.

  He tried to drive the gas pedal into the floor, as the car quickly picked up speed and the wheels screamed on curves. As the road straightened he became aware that the speedometer was hitting 100, then 105. He didn’t know the old car would do it, but at the moment that didn’t impress him. He only knew he wanted to get out of there, and back into town. Linda clutched at him, sobbing.

  “Can’t you go any faster?”

  “I’m doing all this old car will do!”

  In the back seat, Mary screamed.

  “I see it, I see it!” It’s after us!”

  Clutching and tearing at the wheel, Roger saw the dark shadow, subtle and indistinct in the moonlight. Along with the shadow was the feeling that something was stalking them. He knew it was up there, following them, at incredible speed.

  The huge hulk of a trailer truck loomed suddenly; Roger swerved and screamed around it in a tight curve, careening almost into the ditch to avoid an oncoming car with its brights up.

  “I just had to get away from that thing,” he told us. “It’s a wonder we didn’t crack up!”

  He became a part of the speeding and complaining machinery that was the ’57 Chevy. Linda now gripped him like a madwoman. From behind, Steve leaned forward, grabbed his shoulders and shook him.

  “Get out of here! Get out of here!”

  Steve’s fingers, in terrified frenzy, dug into his shoulders. Then he pounded at him, and at the front seat.

  “I know it’s after us! Let’s make it! It’s keeping right up with us!” Mary cried.

  “I know my hair stood on end,” Steve declared, “and I was pushin’ and poundin’ at old Rog to make him go faster, and all that time that old junker was doin’ all she would do. I don’t know what came over me. I’ve been scared before, but nothing like that.”

  Ben asked Steve to describe his fear, but he couldn’t.

  “Seemed like you could feel it all around you; seemed like it left my mind a blank till we got to where we could talk about it. All I could think of was getting away from it.”

  “Really though,” Roger chimed in, “I don’t think any of us really felt we had seen it until we got down the road and got to talking about it and knew all of us had seen the same thing.”

  “It was kind of like a dream—a bad dream,” Mary added.

  The gathering clouds had blocked out the moon, and no longer could they see Mothman’s shadow, though they could still feel the presence, hovering above them.

  On December 15, 1967, exactly one year and one month from the advent of Mothman, another kind of darkness would descend upon Point Pleasant. People would gather in little groups and murmur about what had occurred:

  “We drive up there and it’s barricaded. I wish we could get rid of it. If we didn’t have the barricade, people would drive up there and go into the river. We’ve got to build a new street or a memorial of some kind up there.”

  And meanwhile there would be boats, dozens of them, plying the muddy waters, searching, dragging for bodies.

  “One woman’s husband ran off, and he’s no doubt over in Cleveland, Ohio. But she stands down there on the river bank, hoping they’ll drag him up. People are strange. She’d rather have a dead husband in her arms, all still and cold from the bottom of that river—rather than know that he was alive, and embracing that bitch from Cleveland!”

  CHAPTER 4

  LIKE A BIG FAT BIRD

  For John Peters the proud bravado of the Fifth Symphony, the sobbing of Tchaikovsky, the “Te DUM DUM DUM!” of Aida’s Grand March, and the subtle nuances of Debussy, had been stilled. WPDX, Clarksburg’s powerful daytime radio station, had abandoned its more dignified programming, and had gone “all country”, as the trade papers described the burgeoning of total country and western music programming among many stations. South of the Mason-Dixon line many small broadcasters, unable to show a profit in competition with the established “hard rock” stations, had taken advantage of the resurgence of the often-nasal, more often dulcet and sad, airs of the Nashville establishment. And some of these stations were making money for the first time since Uncle Milton Berle had peered out at America through the ghostly phosphors of the TV screen.

  John pushed the button that would put the corn remedy tape cartridge on the air. In the old days he had read “live” all the public service announcements, and the too few sponsored commercials. His artistic senses smarting, he unfolded the pay check he had just received and rationalized the situation. Recent broadcast technology had made his job easier, and he was receiving greater talent fees.

  He put on the next commercial, back to back with the preceding. With some relief he noted the management had asked Kim Smith, another staff announcer, to do that one.

  It described, in the most shocking script possible for airing, the movie that “Skyline Sam”, a local motion picture exhibitor who booked exploitation movies, was promoting. It explained that “This is an adult movie, for adult minds, and nobody under sixteen will be admitted.”

  Sam would probably have a policeman at the ticket window, early in the evening, who would identify and turn away a few teenagers, who would immediately drive back to town and spread the news. Later in the evening the “policeman” would shed his rented uniform, don his white jacket and take up his regular duties at the snack bar. The drive-in theatre would be jam-packed and Sam would buy more and more commercials.

  John’s station had retained a little of the earlier programming, including three preachers from the midwest who bought time on the station to solicit letters for free literature from local folk. One of them, though occasionally deprecating the money system, still begged “free will” donations from listeners. And the schedule was still fouled up between 9:05 and 9:10, a short segment between the news and the first preacher, which the management had been unable or unwilling to get rid of by reshuffling programs, for the past three years. They had asked John to “fill” the segment. Ordinarily an announcer would simply play a couple of records to get through the space, but John, a really fine radio man, apparently frustrated by mediocrity, found the short segment an outlet for his extraordinary wit.

  I am a school equipment salesman, and for three years have driven out of Clarksburg each Monday to call on clients throughout the state. I usually listen to the station as I go, for the Clarksburg signal remains strong for about fifty miles, and John is always pleasant to listen to as he occasionally injects subtle wit into his announcing. I don’t know how he got the idea for “Whistle Stop”, but I think I heard the first broadcast of the unique five-minute show.

  Apparently John had become bored with the usual fill in.

  That morning he began the segment with some patter, pretending he was the proprietor of a small “whistle stop” railway station.

  In the background a sound effect record provided the faint whistling of an approaching train. The whistling grew in volume, as John turned up the gain, until it became evident that the recording featured an old fashioned steam locomotive. The whistling and noise grew still louder. In a frightful puffing, clanging of bells, and rattling of wheels, the train noise welled to a crescendo, then began to diminish.

  “Well,” John said, “she went right on by!—like a big fat bird this morning!”

  Then he announced, “Let’s turn up the radio and hear a musical selection.” The patter and sound effects had consumed enough time so that he could fill the remaining time with just one record. I took to listening to the short show with a peculiar enjoyment I couldn’t explain. It was something different, I suppose—though repetitious, for the train never stopped at the small and apparently nondescript station of John’s living imagination.

  His handling of the short show probably expre
ssed his rebellion at the management which never bothered to remedy the faulty scheduling.

  When the station went “all country”, the scheduling still was not remedied, and John still rebelled. While he had previously played pop recordings, now he played a short classical selection in the midst of the wailings of the preachers and the voices of Nashville.

  As I steered my Ford wagon toward the Ohio valley to interview the Mothman witnesses, Woodrow Derenberger, and to try to track down the golden ball Mr. Universe had forged, John’s station still came in loud and clear, though now beginning to suffer interference from faulty electrical transformers along the road as the signal weakened.

  On that morning I heard the train come in, and I listened for the familiar wheels to clang past the station. But I had a real surprise. John must have found a new sound effects record.

  The train, though gaining its usual momentum with its whistle running wild, suddenly decreased in its cacophany. There was a hissing of air brakes and a creaking of slowing wheels. Couplings rumbled as the engineer tried to orient the passengers cars to the platform. Finally all was quiet, except for the “Shine! Shine! Shine!” of the steam locomotive’s air compressor.

  “O-hooo! She stopped!” John announced. “Now that IS something. Let’s see who is getting off! O-hooo! We see and are we edified! It’s a group of little green men, and O-hooo, there is a great bird with them, and they’re marching, and marching, with their little drums, around and around the station…”

  I gathered he was playing a record backward, probably at an exaggerated speed. It sounded like Oriental music, with bingings of cymbals, and drums sound mixed with a mad piping. I could almost see the little men marching, along with a huge ungainly bird.

  After about a minute of this, John hit the mike button to remark that a huge shipment of bird seed was being loaded aboard the express car. There was a slow, then a fast puffing, as the drive wheels spun on a wet track. Gradually the train got going, with shouts of encouragement from the announcer.

  John was evidently doing a satire on the Mothman reports. The short segment had been a work of radio art the quality of which was seldom heard in the local area, containing not only humor but a great deal of creative fantasy. I wondered if I were also getting involved in fantasy and if I were on a wild goose chase—or a wild Mothman chase!

  But the apparent truthfulness of Newell Partridge, and the sad eyes of the child who had lost his dog, still convinced me that the Ohio valley reports were worth full investigation.

  And later, as I sat around the table with Ben Franklin and the two young couples, their sincerity, also, would be impressive.

  At the National Guard Armory the lights of the city of Point Pleasant begin. At that point Mothman, according to the wives, made a final pass at the car, and they could hear its wings flapping. Apparently afraid of the lights and avoiding the populated area, the terrifying nemesis gave up the chase.

  Not until they approached their familiar stopping place, Dairy Land, did they feel the pall of fear lift. They drove in and parked. They wondered if they should tell the couple in the next car, John Perry and Ellen Lund, about it, and decided against it. They sat there and tried to collect their wits.

  One anomaly of their experience had been as strange as the thing itself. Mothman, as frightening as it had been, and as hypnotic as its strange red eyes had been, displayed yet another inexplicable characteristic. It was, it seemed, both real and unreal; both frightening and compelling; both repelling and fascinating.

  None of them knew why they suddenly developed the urge to once again face the unknown thing. The event had been so unreal for one thing, that they could hardly believe they had experienced it. Part of their fascination may have been the attempting to prove to themselves, as they later would try to prove to others, that it had all been real.

  Or it might have been some inexplicable archetypal urge, as incomprehensible as the instincts of Arctic lemmings which periodically commit mass suicide as thousands of them hurl themselves over cliffs into the ocean?

  And it may be that such urges are those illustrated in old prints which picture the damned souls of Hell, charging willingly into the immense opened jaw of a dragon which spouts venom and flame.

  Mary insisted they call the city police and ask them to go with them.

  “They’d never believe us,” Roger reasoned.

  “It would have been like the time the old Adams house burned down,” he told us. “We called the police and they thought we were pulling their legs. They said, ‘Spit on it, but don’t throw any of that booze on it or you’ll start a real fire!”

  The Lewis Gate is not some sophisticated geographic landmark, but it is widely referred to among the younger set of Point Pleasant. To them, driving their circuitous routes out of, then back into town, it is an important location. For a mile or two on Route 62 there is no place to turn a car around. But at the Lewis Gate, an old farm gate at the Lewis place, there is a spot beside the road wide enough to turn with only one back-up.

  “At the Lewis Gate,” Roger told us, “we were getting away from the lights of town, and the darkness made us ‘chicken’ once again. The girls once more insisted that we should report what we saw to the police. By that time Steve and I also were thinking better of our actions. We didn’t want to be chased by that thing again, so I broke the tie and created a majority for turning back.”

  As they approached the gate, Roger hit the left turn signal and eased the car into the familiar turn pattern.

  “What is that!” Mary cried out.

  Roger had eased the car to a stop, close to the gate; for to make the turn with only one backup (a miscalculation, and two backups could lose a Point Pleasant teenager much prestige), one had to be precise. He leaned over Linda and looked at the thing lying at the side of the car, now almost undefinable after the headlights had left it.

  “Get the flashlight,” Steve yelled, “Maybe somebody’s hurt!”

  Roger reached over Linda and withdrew the flashlight from the glove compartment. Nervously he shined it at the object.

  It was a large dog, a hound of some sort, they gathered from their quick inspection.

  “Oh, that poor thing,” Linda sympathized. “Somebody’s hit it and it’s crawled off the road to die.”

  “Get out, Steve,” Mary begged, “and see if it’s hurt badly. Maybe we can take it to a veterinary.”

  “It’s dead, I can tell,” Steve said as he shined the light on it again; “dead as a doornail.”

  “Then, from behind a tree, or from the ditch,” Roger told us, “this thing came out and jumped over the car. We got a good sight of it running through the field, still staggering sidewise like a crippled chicken!”

  Again shaken, and their anti-phobic urges dispelled by the third sighting of the creature, the men assented to their wives’ request and decided to drive back to the police station.

  “We first went to Tiny’s Drive-in. I suppose we did this in order to get Gary Northup’s reaction to what we had seen. We’ve always admired him. As we arrived, he and two employees were leaving, but we blew the horn and stopped him and told him about it.

  “ ‘Are you kids drinking?’ he asked. Then, looking at the girls, then back at us, and seeing how pale we were, he apologized: ‘I’m sorry. You look all shaken up!’ Then he went into the Drive-In and called the police.

  “The cops told us to drive back up the road and that they would follow us. We stopped at the Lewis Gate to show the officers the dog carcass, but it was gone! About a mile up the road we saw this thing again, on the left side of the road in the field. We stopped, but when Gary’s car, ahead of the police, caught up, the thing suddenly disappeared.”

  The police parked in the T.N.T. area and invited Mallette to get in and sit with them. But no Mothman. Occasionally a dark shadow would come over the building. This puzzled the officers because they couldn’t determine the source of the shadow.

  Although the obvious skepticism of the offic
ers had never been well hidden, Steve noted a discernable change of attitude, and, for the first time, a suggestion of fear in the men, when the sergeant began sending a radio report back to the dispatcher at Point Pleasant.

  During the dispatcher’s first response a strange transmission, apparently of great power, completely blotted out most of the reply.

  “What did this transmission sound like, or what did it say?” I asked Steve.

  “It didn’t say anything. It was a high-pitched noise, kind of like, I’d say, a record playing at a fast speed, but still not distinct. You couldn’t distinguish any words or anything. I heard something like that on the Adams Family TV program (he referred to a humorous horror TV series which utilized weird music and sound effects).

  “It was also like when you run under a power line that’s leaking, when the noise blots out the car radio—only in this instance the squeaky sounds came through.”

  Roger interrupted: “Have you ever heard a mouse squeak?”

  “I think so,” I replied.

  “But really loud and strong, but still like a mouse?”

  “Would it be like a transistor radio squeal, when it isn’t functioning correctly?” I countered.

  “Yes, but this wasn’t like a radio, either. I just can’t describe it. We were parked near the cruiser and everybody in my car heard it.”

  The strange transmission ceased, and was not repeated. After half an hour the police decided to abandon the vigil, and everybody drove back to town.

  “When we were going to bed that night,” Roger continued, “I swear that I heard that squeaking sound again, right over the trailer. In fact it had been hard for us to go to sleep ever since all this happened. Linda gets so frightened in the middle of the night. Sometimes she’ll get up and it will be half an hour before she gets settled down again and goes to sleep.”

  “I still get the feeling that it’s around,” Steve added. “It’s just a feeling, but sometimes you almost know it is there. You can’t see it, but you know it’s around, and that it’s watching you from the darkness!”