The Flatwoods Monster: West Virginia's 1952 Close Encounter

Long before the Mothman made Point Pleasant famous, West Virginia had a monster that looked like it came off the cover of a 1950s pulp magazine. On September 12, 1952, around 7:15 p.m., a group of kids in Flatwoods, Braxton County, saw a bright object streak across the sky and come down on a local farm.

Up the hill

Brothers Edward and Fred May and their friend Tommy Hyer ran to tell Kathleen May, the brothers' mother. She led a small group up the hill on G. Bailey Fisher's farm to look, along with local kids Neil Nunley and Ronnie Shaver and Eugene Lemon, a West Virginia National Guardsman.

Nunley reported a red, pulsing light. Lemon pointed his flashlight into the dark and caught a tall figure for a moment. It hissed and moved toward them. Lemon screamed, dropped the flashlight, and everybody ran.

What they described

Accounts collected afterward described something about ten feet tall with a big pointed hood around a round, blood-red face, glowing eye-like features, a dark body, small claw-like hands and folds like clothing. The head was said to look like the ace of spades.

The group reported a pungent mist. Some felt sick afterward, and Mrs. May said the boys had an oily film on their faces and swollen throats. A doctor found no clear cause. The sheriff's office searched and found nothing, but a local newspaper editor reported skid marks and a gummy residue in the field the next day.

The skeptic's version

In 2000, investigator Joe Nickell laid out a down-to-earth explanation. A meteor was seen across Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia that night. The pulsing red light could have been an aircraft beacon. And the monster, he argued, was most likely a startled barn owl on a tree limb, with brush below it making the "skirt." Frightened people in the dark fill in the rest. Another skeptic noted a local man admitted driving his truck around the site, which could explain the tracks.

The legacy

Flatwoods didn't run from it. The town sign calls it the "Home of the Green Monster." There's a Flatwoods Monster Museum in Sutton, monster-shaped chairs around the county, and a Flatwoods Monster Convention every year since 2019. The creature even shows up in Fallout 76.

Owl or not, seven people ran down that hill convinced of what they saw. That's the part that makes a legend.