Every Day Is Like Wednesday

This week I received an early Christmas gift from my co-worker, the talented artist (and fellow cryptid enthusiast) Gillian DiPofi. 

If you're reading this blog, then you are almost certainly an adult, in which case you are not the target audience for writer Heather Alexander and illustrator Sam Kalda's Haunted USA: Spine-Tingling Stories from All 50 States (Wide Eyed Editions; 2025). But if you, like me, appreciate great art and spooky stories, you will probably enjoy flipping through it and reading the entries that strike your fancy. 

As the title says, it's a collection of scary stories from each of the 50 states (plus one for Washington, DC), presented in two-page spread, a three-to-five paragraph story on one page, a gorgeous illustration of that story by Kalda on the facing page. Most of these are ghost stories, an aspect of the paranormal which I am not particularly interested in, and that includes the Ohio story (That of a "Racer Boy", a ghost said to appear on the tracks of a roller coaster at Kings Island).

 A few of the stories involve cryptids though, a subject which I am quite interested in. What grabbed my attention was the appearance of Mothman in the upper left corner of the cover. 

(You can't tell by looking at a picture online, but the cover has shiny silver elements on it, including the creators' names, the spots on Mothman's wings, the cat's whiskers and so on).

The story of Mothman is the West Virginia's entry in the book. Alexander's five-paragraph retelling includes the first sighting as that of the gravediggers who saw something large with wings and the most famous one, that of the Scarberrys and Mallettes in the TNT area, which lead to the newspaper report that seemingly kicked off the flap of sightings and its media coverage. 

The only mistake I noticed was in this sentence: "Some locals wondered if the Mothman was living in the nearby nuclear power plant, but police found no evidence of the creature or anyone there." West Virgina does not actually have any nuclear power plants, nor has it ever. Alexander probably meant the TNT area, a series of World War II-era concrete, igloo-like structures in which explosives were once stored. It is now the McClintic Wildlife Management Area, a locale Alexander mentions when telling the story of the Scarberry/Mallette sighting. 

But what we're most interested in here is the image of Mothman. As you can see, Kalda leans on the "moth" in the name, as so many artists do. Note the moth-like wings and the long, fuzzy antennae-like structures on its head. In this, Kalda seems to be following in the footsteps of Frank Franzetta, who painted a moth-man of a Mothman on the cover of High Times, and sculptor Bob Roach, who created the shiny statue of the cryptid that now stands in Point Pleasant.

No witnesses actually reported anything moth-like about Mothman, of course, aside from wings and nocturnal habits. Despite the spots, Kalda does get the creatures two most notorious features into his image: Big, black wings and staring red eyes (I like also the way he depicts Mothman as essentially face-less, no witness ever being able to articulate what its face might have looked like).

I also like how Kalda gives his Mothman such long, creepy fingers...and even long toes. It's a really gorgeous image.

The other handful of crytpids covered, each of which is also beautifully rendered, are Alaska's humanoid otter creatures the Kushtaka (Alexander's clever title? "Otterly Terrifying"), Massachusetts' Pukwudgies, a handful of different lake monsters from Michigan and Missouri's hairy humanoid Momo (who looks a bit like a cross between Chewbacca and Cartoon Network's Brak, I thought).

The Pukwudgie image is particularly potent, and I can imagine it scaring the hell out of me had I encountered it as a little kid, monsters scraping their claws on my bedroom windows being a particularly vivid fear of mine (elicited by the sound of utility wires creaking against the tree branches outside my window).

Perhaps also of note is Iowa's chocolate-eating ghost, star of an urban legend in which, if one leaves a candy bar on a particular bridge at a particular time, the chocolate will disappear, leaving only an empty wrapper. Though presumably a ghost, Kalda's brilliant illustration suggests a sort of red-eyed giant monster...while simultaneously looking like it might just be the shape of the trees and shadows on the bridge. 

Anyway, next time you're in the library, do take the time to check this book out. You can see more of Kalda's work on his website and his Instagram account. 

 

 

This is the right half of one of the illustrations in Tove Jansson's picture book The Dangerous Journey (recently released in North America by Drawn and Quarterly). In the story, a young girl puts on a mysterious pair of glasses that changes her ordinary world into an extraordinary one, and the text accompanying this illustration includes the words "The sky was full of red hot clouds. Birds flew without a sound."

I was struck by how...familiar those birds looked. In the distance, we see some cranes, but flying roward the reader are what look like red-eyed, white owls that look an awful lot like a particular Ohio Valley cryptid. Did the little girls (sandhill?) cranes morph into a flock of Mothmans...?

This illustration of Mothman comes from Linda S. Godfrey's book American Monsters: A History of Monster Lore, Legends, and Sightings in America (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin; 2014). I scrutinized every corner of the book to see who the artist who provided the illustrations-which appear at the beginning of every chapter and thus give form to so many of the monsters mentioned within—but couldn't find a credit for the illustrator, who signed his or her work, but whose signature isn't quite legible. I then wondered if Godfrey herself provided the illustrations, and the signature does indeed seem to say Linda S. Godfrey, when one reads it with that in mind. So I'm 98% sure that the above is Godfrey's own drawing of the Mothman (I wish I knew Godfre illustrated the book herself while I was reading it, as I think that may have made me look a bit closer at the pictures).

How does her Mothman rate? Well, at first glance, it's obviously a rather silly-looking Mothman, much more "man" than anything else. He is apparently wearing some form of clothes, and what appears to be a bag over his head. The tight-fitting outfit, mask and posture made me thing most immediately of a professional wrestler, which gave the image a great deal of charm. Her Mothman has quite a bit of detail visible, including a few details that seem original to Godfrey's illustration—that is, not taken from any sighting literature—including the long, claw-like nails on the creature's five-fingered hands and five-toed feet. Actually, the existence of toes of any kind is something I don't recall ever being reported on at all.

Regardless, I think the image Godfrey provides could work as an illustration of the creature responsible for the sightings. Imagine that particular creature there in a very, very dark setting, so that all one could see was his silhouette. Now imagine his arms by his sides, and his wings folded closer to his body, so that the outline of the wings would absorb all the other details—what you'd be left with is the basic, heart-shaped black shape with red eyes seemingly coming from somewhere between its broad shoulders, and the mere suggestion of legs.

As well-lit as he appears in this drawing, that doesn't seem to be a very convincing Mothman, but in a darker environment, it works. And, as always, it's fascinating to see the different ways artists render this most mysterious character. Godfrey's take is definitely among the more unique ones we've seen so far.

Connor Fox and Jewel Staite in a scene from the 2010 SyFy original movie Mothman. Not pictured: Mothman

Like the 2002 Richard Gere vehicle The Mothman Prophecies, this 2010 made-for-cable TV horror movie plays very fast and very loose with the real story of West Virginia monster made famous during a 1966-67 flaps o—or at least "real" as presented in John Keel's ostensibly non-fiction book the Gere film is named after.

Despite the fact that it's named after the monster rather than the Keel book, and that it doesn't put forth even an extremely truncated and bowdlerized version of Keel's theory of "ultraterrestrials," Mothman is in many ways a lot more accurate and true to the source material.

In modern-day Point Pleasant, WV—well, modern-day as in the year 2000—a group of attractive graduating high school seniors lead by actress Jewel Staite (from popular nerd show/cause Firefly) are out camping by a river and stuck babysitting one of their number's younger brothers. At one point, they try to spook him by telling him the story of the Mothman, who here is "buried under the incinerators at the old mill," rather than making his home in the spookier, more atmospheric "igloos," the abandoned TNT storage facilities he supposedly haunted in real life (The film only had a budget of $2 million, which seemed to dictate a lot of creative choices). He can escape his grave via the river, one of the older kids tells the younger, and, when he defiantly says he's not afraid, they all go swimming, and the older kids take turns pulling him underwater.

He accidentally drowns to death, and the kids all make a I Know What You Did Last Summer-style pledge of secrecy. Ten years later, Staite's character, who was the most resistant to the cover-up, has moved to Washington D.C. to become a reporter and try to forget about her past, but her editor sends her back home to cover the tenth annual Mothman festival, which is a totally real thing (And a thing I find pretty fascinating, particularly if the events described by those who saw Mothman during the original flap were really true and those witnesses, some of whom are still alive today, were genuinely traumatized by it. Seeing Mothman cosplay during a small-town festival has gotta be pretty damn weird to those folks, right?).

The night she arrives just so happens to be the night that her former friends all gather to drink a toast to the memory of the poor dead kid brother, and she reluctantly reunites with them for the occasion, starting off a horrifying chain of events in which the titular monster starts picking them off, one by one.

Staite's character and the handsomest and unmarried of her former friends (Connor Fox) must unravel the mystery of the Mothman and how to escape him before he kills his way to them (Unfortunately, the lovely Jessica Erin Sylvia, "aged" ten years by putting on a pair of fetching glasses, doesn't live as long as either of 'em). They get most of their intel from Jerry Leggio's blind old man, who has been studying the Mothman his whole life, and knows his origins, modus operandi and has a few ideas on how to kill him.

As the film is set in the present day, it keeps the real-world history of Mothman in tact (Mothman Prophecies moved the events of the late sixties into the 21st century; Mothma sets new 21st century events 40 years after those events), including the Silver Bridge collapse.

It also keeps one of Mothman's popular possible origins intact—that he was a sort of spirit of vengeance summoned by the horribly wronged and murdered Native American chief Cornstalk, who cursed the land with his dying breath. But in Mothman's telling, Cornstalk seems to start transforming into the Mothman himself, his eyes glowing read, and the white men who were in the process of torturing him finding their bullets were unable to kill him.

So, in the movie's telling, they chop him up and bury the pieces of his body in a mirror-lined coffin. Ever since, the Mothman can only appear through reflective surfaces, like mirrors (Yeah, obviously that doesn't jibe with, like, any sighting from the literature), which he does to avenge wrongs kept secret by conspirators (which you wouldn't think there'd be all that much of in a small rural town in West Virginia). He kills by taking and/or eating the eyes of his victims (another thing unique to the film), and he can only kill someone once he's locked eyes with them, according to the now suspiciously blind man.

The Mothman as mirror-travelling creatures is pretty bizarre, partly because there are whole other horror movies in which mirrors are kinda there thing, partly because it's such a random detail to attach to a story that already has plenty of weird, specific details attached to it (Like, Mothman traveling through electricity or sound or pone lines makes a lot more sense than Mothman traveling through mirrors, you know?). So to is the Mothman-as-avenging-angel-with-a-very-specific-set-of-criteria, but I guess it's one way to make a modern horror movie of the kid-killing variety with Mothman in it.

As for Mothman's appearance, they certainly moth him up quite a bit. There are lots of CGI made-up moths, with red "eye" patterns on their big black wings, fluttering around. And the creature itself is big and black and spindly. It's torso is human, with the black flesh pulled tight around skeletal ribs. It has long, spindly arms and legs, the latter bent in a goat-like, insectoid shape, with almost bird-like feet with two big toes in the front, one in the back.

It seems to have two sets of wings, which are neither leathery like a bat's, nor feathered like a bird's, nor gossamer like an insect's, but made of a net-like, tar-colored material. It's most striking feature is its glowing red eyes and it's head and face. This Mothman does indeed have a head, but it's smallish and set into the shoulders with a small-to-non-existent neck. It has a huge—like, comically large—gaping, always open mouth that looks an awful lot like the mask that the killers in the Scream franchise wear, only it's all black, and the eyes glow special-effect weird.
It's not a great design, really—if they lost the mouth, it'd improve immensely—but it works in that it differs from many other Mothman designs, it's not overly insectoid or moth-like, like a few of the more striking but not based on the record or folklore designs (like famous Frank Frazetta image, or the Point Pleasant statue), and it looks like the sort of creature that could conceivably have inspired the reports of Mothman, had witnesses seen this guy lurking around in the shadows or whizzing through the air in the 1960s.
Many of the events of the film are cliche and rather rote, but it has a few inspired moments—the existence of a particular weapon that can hurt the Mothman is kind of neat (it's a bone knife made of one of the few parts of Chief Cornstalk that didn't transform into the creature), and the scene set on the Silver Bridge, in which the POV points down at a convertible car full of guilty parties that the fast moving black aerial object makes disappear one by one is a pretty great film image.

It's perhaps not as good a film as the not-very-good Mothman Prophecies, but it is a much more standard model and more enjoyable horror film and, as I said, it hews much closer to the "real" Mothman and his story—despite its own out-of-left field innovations—than the feature film.

Oh, here's the cover for the copy of the DVD I found at a library:
I don't understand the DVD cover at all. The figure on the cover is not the Mothman as depicted in the movie, he's not the human villain, he's not the hero or any character in the film. I honestly don't know what the hell that image is supposed to represent, or what it has to do with the film. (I've seen a few more DVD covers online that do better reflect the film itself, however).

This one's a painting—well, a photo of a painting—created and shared with me by EDILW reader and frequent commenter, David Rhay Patty.

His Mothman certainly fits the witness descriptions of the creature, and has has a ghost-like, not-quite-there quality to it. In this image, Mothman seems to be abandoning the carcass of a dog as a car approaches, sort of filling in the blanks between a couple of sightings (The farmer whose German shepherd Bandit disappeared after it chased a pair of big, red, reflector-like eyes into a field, the dead dog on the side of the road that the couples in the first publicized Mothman sighting saw as they sped into town to seek the police).

Here's a sketch Patty did while preparing for the painting:
Obviously the sketch is much more abstracted, but I like the cloud-like quality of this one, with the specks of black informing the shape, as if Mothman is a composite entity formed by a swarm of regular-sized moths.

They Came From Ohio... might have made for a more accurate title, as writer James Renner's book contains 13 stories of monsters, UFO encounters and similar strangeness from my home state (and, incidentally, would have differentiated it from the R.L. Stine biography with the same title), but then, It Came From Ohio... is a better, snappier-sounding title, and the pronoun could be referring to the book itself, not the stories the book contains, or the creatures and characters that are featured in each of them.

Let's start at the beginning. No, let's start before the beginning, with the cover.

It Came From Ohio...: True Tales of the Weird, Wild, And Unexplained (Gray and Company; 2012) is a very attractive little book. It's a slim volume, just over 100 pages, and higher than it is wide—a thin rectangle of a book that could almost but not quite fit in one's back pocket, or inside coat pocket, like a guide book might.

The almost bright black of the cover sharply contrasts with the green of the title and the figure in the middle, a green which just as sharply contrasts with the sickly yellow of the image's background and the author's name. A few bits of red in the creature's eyes and the beam of light seeming to shoot from its finger draw the eye and add an additional level of complexity.

The cryptozoologically inclined among you, those with an at least passing interest in Ohio's many, many monsters, or readers of this blog with a photographic memory will probably recognize the creature as The Loveland Frog.

The image is by artist Todd Jakubisin, who provides an illustration for each chapter of the book (which we'll look at some more examples of below). Each chapter opens with an illustration facing it, all in roughly the same shape and proportions, and in stark black and white; the cover image is taken from the third chapter, "The Ballad of The Loveland Frog."

There's a block-like simplicity to Jakubisin's illustrations, all of which strive to capture essential elements of the stories, but to present them in ways that are decorative and evocative more than representational. That cover image, for example, isn't a drawing of what the witnesses described seeing so much as it's a cool drawing of a frog-like bipedal creature.

In addition to the Loveland Frogs, other famous Ohio monsters who have their stories told here include the Lake Erie monster AKA South Bay Bessie, the Melon Heads of Kirtland (the next city over from where I currently work and reside, though I'm not brave enough to walk around the woods with a flashlight at night), The Mothman (whom we share with West Virginia; although Point Pleasant, WV is his/its home, the Silver Bridge terminated in Ohio, and there were plenty of sightings of it on our side of the river), and, of course, the omnipresent Bigfoot (The hairy humanoid discussed in the chapter "Bigfoot's Lair" is in Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County).

The other monsters included were new to me. That, or else ones I had read about previously and forgotten having done so.

There's a werewolf from Defiance said to have used a two-by-four or club on a few victims (What's scarier than a werewolf? A werewolf with a two-by-four. Funny how if you add the words "with a two-by-four" to the name of just about anything capable of holding a two-by-four, it becomes scarier. Try it.)

There's a camp ghost nicknamed "Red Eyes," a name it shares with one of the state's many famous Bigfoots.

And then there's a ghost in a house near the university of Akron. (I've read quite a few books on ghosts in Ohio, but few of the stories really stuck with me, as I'm not terribly interested in ghosts; certainly not as much as I'm interested in monsters).

Two pretty famous UFO incidents are included, the 1966 incident in which police officers chased a relatively low-flying, slow-moving UFO along highways for the better part of a night, producing detailed sightings from multiple police officers (This is an incident written about extensively in Jerome Clark's UFO encyclopedia, a book I'd recommend if you're at all interested in the subject), and another particularly credible sighting involving a helicopter full of military men, flying back and forth between Cleveland and Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton (which Clark also covered).

The remaining stories are more along the lines of general weirdness: A chapter on the Toynbee tiles found around the region, the "WOW" signal from space that an Ohio State University professor temporarily picked up and lost and the goings-on of mysterious and super-exclusive rich-person Lake Erie hangout Rattlesnake Island.

Depending on how many other similar books one has read before, Renner's book is either full of quite interesting stories, or a pleasant enough re-telling of some familiar ones (Six of the 13 were new to me). The chapters are all very short, no more than 10 pages at the longest, and thus there's not a whole lot of room for detail. That makes it something like a Weird Ohio 101, introductions to various incidents and creatures one can read more about elsewhere.

Unfortunately, Renner's book doesn't include any notes or even a bibliography, so it doesn't really function as a stepping stone, so much as it might send one seeking a stepping stone. As someone interested in Ohio's monster populace, for example, I very much would like to learn more about the two-by-four toting werewolf of Defiance, Ohio, but I wasn't given anywhere else to look for. Nor can I check his sources for various bits of the Mothman story that seem to contradict other tellings.

(I was interested and confused, for example, by a sentence reading, "Others say the Mothman was an ancient harbinger of doom, the kind seen by prophets in the Old Testament." I don't recall any thing in the Old Testament at all resembling the weird-ass Mothman, and a Bible passage from the Book of Daniel quoted in sidebar in is prefaced by the vague "Some have noted the similarities between a biblical beast...and the Mothman", quoting the following line from Daniel: "After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which had upon its back four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads." Doesn't sound much of anything like the two-winged, headless, owlman-like Mothman, does it?)

Also, I would kind of like to learn more about this crazy paragraph:Renner is the first to suggest, at least in my reading, that the Coyne Incident (the UFO sighting by the guys in the helicopter) might have been the result of the government testing some sort of psy-op on their own men.

There seems to be a bit of first-hand reporting involved in some of the stories though, even if there are a few cases of sources simply being identified as "Some" or "Others."

In his chapter on the 1966 UFO chase, for example, Renner talks to the son of one of the officers involved in the chase, and reveals some crazy, spooky details about the man's death.

And in the chapter on Mothman, Renner quotes Hazel DeWitt, who appeared in the documentary Eyes of the Mothman, who now serves a Mothman burger in Point Pleasant's Harris Steak House (It's an eight-dollar "charbroiled patty covered in pepperjack and Mothman sauce, whatever that might be.") It's weird how scary the Mothman sightings were in the context of John Keel's original Mothman Prophecies book were, and how silly they seem now that the town has embraced Mothman as a tourist attraction—how credible is a Mothman sighting coming form a lady selling you a Mothman burger, for example, or a tale of a visit from a Man In Black from someone working at the Mothman Museum?

Perhaps the most intriguing stories Renner shares, however, are personal ones, given in the short introduction in which he discusses his fascination with such weirdness. One is about a childhood experience in which he and his friend encounter some weird aerial phenomena and some strange animal or insect life (an incident that takes place at Camp Manatoc, home to the Red Eyes discussed in one of the chapters), and then there's this:

My aunt tells the story—I kid you not—of seeing the Easter bunny in the furry flesh as a child. She has become convinced over the years that what she actually saw was an angel pretending to be the Easter bunny to please her child mind.

That's a story I'd really, really like to hear more of—how big was the Easter bunny? How humanoid and how rabbit like? Was it walking upright? Carrying a basket? (My mom once saw Santa Claus' sleight through her window as a child on Christmas Eve, but only from afar).

Despite some disappointments, mostly of a nature that are particular only to me or someone at least mildly obsessed with some of these subjects, I found the book to be a lot of fun, and a good starting point for explorations on a few interesting topics (And, at $7.99 it's extremely affordable—less than the cost of two issue of The Avengers!)

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Let's take a look at a couple of Jakubisin's illustrations, shall we? I'm just going to limit them to three, but if you're as interested in how different artists choose to depict the same subjects, it's probably worth flipping through one of these to see how he decided to draw, say, the Lake Erie monster.

First, here's his Bigfoot:Note the posture and the walk, and how it looks a bit like his own, skinny, almost Muppet-like version of Bigfoot loping Patterson-Gimlin style through the woods.

There's a little sidebar in that chapter in which Renner writes that the Patterson-Gilmin film "remains the best evidence for the existence of Bigfoot." I don't know, is that true? If so, Bigfoot is totally not a real living, breathing animal because I'm on the "Dude, That Shit Is Fake As All Get-Out" side of that particular debate.

There's a nice quote about Bigfoot hunting from an Ohio expert and hunter Don Keating about the best way to go Bigfooting: "Don't go out there trying to find Bigfoot hiding behind a tree...Go out and enjoy nature. And if you see it, consider yourself lucky."

Sounds like good advice.

Here is Jakubisin's drawing for the Melonheads chapter, "Dr. Kroh's Home For Peculiar Children":Rather than drawing a live Melonhead, feral macroencephalic children, Jakubisin draws the aftermath of one of their possible origin stories, in which the home they were living in burned down, leaving only their skeletons for him to draw in the front yard of the burning home.

And as The Mothman is such a repeated subject of interest here at EDILW, I would be remiss if my mission of collection Mothman depictions if I did not include Jakubisin's illustration for the Mothman chapter, "The Mothman Cometh":Unfortunately, he doesn't offer a depiction of the Mothman, but instead focuses on the beginning of the Neil Partridege sighting, in which his dog Bandit chases a pair of giant red eyes that shine like bicycle reflectors and then disappears.

He distills the scene into a single, circular image, with parallel beams of light framing Partridge and Bandit. But there's no Mothman, which kinda boggles my mind, given how much fun Mothman is to draw.

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Speaking of Mothman, Partridge and Bandit, here's my version of the story, as presented in my The Mothman Comics mini-comic which is, of course, still available for purchase:

I saw this cookie at a local coffee shop earlier today. I imagine it's supposed to be a bat, since it was one of many Halloween-themed cut-out cookies in the display case, although I'm not sure, seeing as it doesn't have pointy ears, and pointy ears seem to be kind of essential in depicting a bat. Without the ears, and with the piercing, blank red eyes, it naturally reminded me of Mothman.

Oh dear Lord what is this thing here? Oh, nothing much, just the culmination of my lifelong fascination/obsession with The Mothman, the mysterious, red-eyed, winged creature that was the focus of a bizarre monster flap in West Virginia and parts of southern Ohio in 1966-1967, a creature best known for inspiring one of John Keel's books and for harassing Richard Gere.

My imaginatively entitled new mini-comic The Mothman Comics is a 23-page black and white (and red!) gag comic featuring short strips (between one- to five-pages in length) mostly extrapolated from the real reported sightings of the creature. I've printed a fairly limited number of copies (having learned my lessons regarding just how great demand is for paper comics written and illustrated by me last time), and if you would like to purchase one, I would be happy to sell you one.

To order a copy of The Mothman Comics, please send $3 cash, check or money order (Ha ha, no PayPal! Because I am an Old!) to:

Caleb Mozzocco
7950 Mentor Avenue B102
Mentor, Ohio 44060

Be sure to include your address, so I'll know who to mail it to. If you live in Canada, add one dollar, for a total of $4. If you live in any country other than the United States of America or Canada, holla at me via email and I'll, I don't know, take one to the post office, have it weighed and shipping guestimated, and then get back to you, I guess.

Now here is a two-page preview, because it is my understanding that previews on the Internet is how real comic publishers manage to sell so many of their comics:
So, um, yeah. It's eight more comics kinda like that. Order now, while supplies last!

America's Very Own Monsters is a 1982 illustrated prose non-fiction book for young readers. It runs just 48 pages, devoting a few pages each to ten folkloric monsters who live, or whose stories are set, in the United States.

Mothman is, of course, one of these ten, and you can see artist Tom Huffman's depiction of him on the cover; that's him in the middle. Huffman's black and white art is quite moody, and fits the tone of the book quite well. Writer Daniel Cohen doesn't write much about each beast—he can't, really, given the audience and the small amount of space he has to work with—but Huffman tells a bit of their stories through his artwork, and, more importantly suggests possible stories for the creatures to star in, giving young readers enough clues to let their imaginations run wild with them.

I loved the artwork as an adult; I would have been fascinated and terrified by it as a child.

Each of Cohen's chapters is made up of short, topical paragraphs devoted to the highlights of each monster story's body of lore, told in short, declarative sentences.

The "Mothman" chapter, for example, begins like this:

Point Pleasant is a small town in West Virginia. Something scared a lot of people there. The "something" was about six feet tall. It looked like a man. But it had huge wings. It coulf fly at 100 miles an hour.

People called it Mothman.

Cohen goes on to tell the story of the initial 1966 Scarberry/Mallette sighting and the dramatic Wamsley sighting at the Thomas house, in which the Mothman climbed onto the porch and peered through the window, but only vaguely, and the only witness named is Connie Carpenter. He also briefly explains the equivocal resolution of the flap of sightings: Some scientists thought it was a bird that people were simply misidentifying, some people thought it came from a UFO, but we'll probably never know for sure what it was.

Huffman draws two images of the Mothman. Each chapter opens with a small drawing above the title/monster name, and is followed by a larger, more dramatic image.

This is Huffman's drawing of the Mothman above the chapter heading:
Regardless of how "accurate" it is, it's a very nice image. Note the way Huffman uses the sketchy little lines to suggest darkness or fogginess or simple blurriness. The image is indistinct, and the reason it's indistinct is itself indistinct. But it's nice-looking, and there's a suggestion of the moon and a shape that's vague enough that it could be a winged humanoid, or a large bird or even a giant moth. It might have arms, or it might just have wings of varying degrees of darkness. The eyes can't be seen at this angle.

Huffman gives the reader a clearer look at his Mothman in a spread on the following pages. Here is the right half of it:
It's an even nicer image as it appears in the book, as the four paragraphs of prose are integrated into the image, appearing in the white space Huffman frames as the light coming from a lamp hanging from the ceiling in the inside of the Thomas home (here simply referred to with the words "a family"). We see a curtain rod, curtains and the walls, all rendered in the delicate crosshatching that makes up Huffman's illustrations.

As for his Mothman, well, it looks decidedly off-model, looking more like a bat-winged Nosferatu than the picture of Mothman that emerged from witness reports. Huffman's Mothman clearly has a humanoid head, a nose, a mouth, a chin, a neck and even ears and, as a result, doesn't seem quite as mind-bogglingly weird as the creature of indeterminate appearance that's usually reported.

I like how Huffman depicts the brightness of the eyes without the use of color though, the pure, line-less white the same as that he uses on the moon and the lamp-light on the opposite page: They must be shining with light, as everything else rendered in that manner is (save, perhaps, the window pane, although it is on the inside of the house, where the lights are on, rather than outside the house, where it's dark).

The simple juxtaposition of the dark, strange human-like creature with the mundane, domestic window and curtains, and the scant protection the latter offers from the former is a very effective scary image though, isn't it?

I didn't scan anything else from the book, but Huffman has a lot of fairly effective drawings in here. The small, above-the-heading images generally show equivocal evidence of the creature, and then the larger illustration shows it in all it's glory. So, for example, Bigfoot opens with a drawing of a footprint, and you turn the page and see a drawing of a huge hairy humanoid striding away from the reader and, on the next page, a close-up of Bigfoot's face. The chapter on Goatman opens with a drawing of graffiti on a brick wall reading "Gotaman was here," and the next image is that of a shadowy goatman holding a hatchet and charging into the bright, white-space headlights of an oncoming car.

In addition to Mothman, Goatman and Bigfoot, Cohen covers (and Huffman draws) The Skunk Ape, Washington's Demon Cat, The Flatwoods Monster (another really great illustration), The White River Monster, The Beast of Busco (that's the giant snapping turtle said to live in a lake in Churubusco, Indiana), The Thunderbird and Lake Champlain's Monster.

The Monster's Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes (St. Martin's Griffin; 2011) is a prose anthology edited by Christopher Golden containing 19 short stories from different writers.

One of these is "Rattler and Mothman," written by Sharyn McCrumb, an author probably best known for The Ballad of Frankie Silver and She Walks These Hills. As the title indicates, Mothman is in it.

The story is told in the first person, presumably from the point of view of the title character, and old, loner type who lives far away from civilization, resents city folks and apparently has some sort of extraordinary ability to communicate with the dead and/or paranormal entities.

One night, while Rattler is sitting in his front yard, looking up at the stars, he sees a large shape circling him, and he signals for it to land. It turns out to be the Mothman, although Crumb is somewhat coy in actually using that name, holding off for a few pages.

The being is described as being seven fee tall, with leathery wings. Here's how McCrumb envisions her Mothman:

He was roughly human shaped, standing upright on long legs that ended in bird claws. Those red eyes flashed and glowed, seeming to take in everything around him. They were set far apart, on the outer edges of a round face with a sharp beak of a nose and a lipless mouth that made me think of a cave entrance: Just a way into darkness. I was wondering if he had teeth, and not particularly eager to find out.

The whole cast of his countenance would cause you to think "insect," by way of classification, except that his expression and bearing said that there was somebody at home. He was a lot smarter than a housefly. You could tell.

His body was covered with a fine fluff (Gray or blue—I couldn't tell in the dim light)—that might have been fur or the sort of down feathers you see on baby birds.

McCrumb's Mothman talks, and quite intelligently, "in a guttural voice with an accent I couldn't place."

The nature of the creature begins to emerge during the course of their conversation. Both the narrator and Mothman use the word "garuda" when describing Mothman, a garuda being a mythological, divine giant bird or bird-man creature in Eastern religions Hinduism and Buddhism. John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies and the creatures #1 press agent, used the term to refer to Mothman repeatedly, often referring to the creature's 13-month flap in West Virginia as "the year of the garuda."

In this story, garudas like the Mothman are powerful beings that live outside of time and protect the land upon which they dwell, by destroying the "nagas" that threaten it ("Nagas" being snakes, again in Eastern mythology).

Rattler pieces together that this particular garuda has been around the area that is presently West Virginia for millions of years, and is at least partially responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs (dinosaurs being the "naga"). It would periodically go to sleep for millions of years and awake to find its land different and populated by different creatures, some of which it would kill as well.

The garuda have a sort of mind-reading technique and, if it feels or "hears" enough human beings all expressing the same fervent wishes or prayers, it acts upon them, as it did on behalf of the Native Americans a few times. The Silver Bridge disaster was one such answer to one such prayer, which may not sit well with my fellow Ohioans.

"Okay, tell me about the bridge," I said. That's almost all anybody remembers about Mothman: That in December 1967 he was seen in the vicinity of the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, and that a short time later, the bridge collapsed, killing forty-six unfortunate people whose cars ahd been crossing over at the time.

"It was a small gesture," said Mothman.

Well, I guess it was, compared to wiping out dinosaurs and sending the Ice Age mammals into extinction, but I was still wondering why he'd pick on a bridge.

He heard my question in his head. "Because...that bridge led to a land of nagas."

Oh. Right. Sure, it did. Ohio.

Hey, who are you calling a naga, Mothman?

Unfortunately, the book isn't illustrated, so the only pictures of the various monsters are the ones the writers form in the heads of the readers.

Well, those and the ones on the cover. I'm not sure if they match, one for one, the monsters that star in the stories in the book, but there is a monster on that cover with pretty big, moth-like antennae, so I suppose it's possible that is meant to be Mothman (although it's lack of wings or red eyes makes me think that's probably not the case).

I didn't read the other eighteen stories, as they did not appear to be about Mothman, but the names of some of the contributors should be familiar to some comics readers, including David Liss (Black Panther: The Man Without Fear, Mystery Men), Kevin J. Anderson (JSA: Strange Tales, Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi) and Jonathan Maberry (Black Panther, Doomwar, Captain America: Hail Hydra).

And now here's a crappy sketch I did of the Mothman, as described in the passage above by Rattler:

ComicsAlliance regularly highlights the work of particular artists by posting galleries of their work, and this week Caleb "The Other Caleb" Goellner featured the work of Dave Stokes. Among his pieces was the above, a commission of the X-Files' Mulder and Scully encountering The Mothman.

The wings are a little too mothy, but Stokes' design of the creature's head, with an apparent lack of neck, looks pretty true to the reported sightings and resultant sketches of the "real" Mothman.

By the way, Mothman never appeared in The X-Files itself, but in the 1997 fifth season episode "Detour," the agents encounter an invisible, red-eyed killer creature in the woods of Western Florida. The creature reminds Mulder of the Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and in a couple lines of dialogue he cites the Mothman and its hometown by name ("I've got an X-file dated back to 1952 on it"). Apart from having red eyes, the creatures don't really resemble the Mothman in either appearance or behavior.

Take a closer look at this gorgeous painting by artist Jason Rosenstock.

I stumbled upon it while Googling for the site of an artist by that name, as I wanted to link to the homepage of the artist who drew some of the art in The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (discussed here). I have no idea if this artist named Jason Rosenstock is the same artist named Jason Rosenstock whose illustrations can be found in the Origami Yoda book, but regardless, this artist named Jason Rosenstock is a hell of an artist, with some beautiful paintings devoted to some outre subjects, like dinosaurs and fantasy and alien creatures and landscapes. (UPDATE: This Jason Rosenstock is the Origami Yoda Jason Rosenstock, according to author Tom Angleberger in the comments)

The first thing I thought when I saw the un-labeled image above was, "Say, I wonder if that's supposed to be Mothman," and, to my delight, when I yanked it from the page to set on my desktop, I saw it was labeled "Mothman.jpg."

Aside from the considerable virtues of the piece as a digital painting, including its use of light, the suggestion of the subject matter by the number of moths fluttering about, and the way the moths seem to be attracted to the luminescent monster that bears their name and the way it regards them in return, I think it's a pretty tremendous depiction of the creature.

Firstly, it looks rather moth-like, mostly due to its coloration and, to a lesser extent, its shape, but unlike other depictions of the creature to take the name literally (Frank Frazetta's famous image used as the cover of The Mothman Prophecies, for example, or the Robert Roach-sculpted statue that commemorates the legend surrounding the bizarre 1966-67 events in Point Pleasant, West Virginia), this moth-like Mothman actually looks like, were it real, it might be able to generate the types of witness accounts that we have.

Yes, the bulk of the witnesses described the creatures as gray, brown or black, but at least one person said they saw a white creature, and, in darkness, it's easy to see how a creature with this coloration could be mistaken to be a darker color (And, in the dark, the striping might not be apparent). Additionally, in pitch-black, all a witness would see would be the glowing red eyes, if that's what are atop of this creatures' head, which, because of the odd shape suggested by the wings—this Mothman does look rather like a couple of blankets thrown over a chair in form, doesn't it?—could be perceived as being embedded in its chest or shoulders. Certainly, if someone saw this Mothman, it would be easy to understand descriptions referring to a headless or faceless monster, or one bearing an indescribable face, or a "science fiction-like" face."

What a great image: accomplished and beautiful as an image and, intended or not, a smart illustration of the Mothman folklore, reverse-engineered from reported sightings.

This is the cover of The Mothman's Shadow, a 2011 prose fiction book for young readers written by Jason Strange and published by Stone Arch Books. That cover image was created by artist Serg Soleiman. The design recalls the Frank Frazetta version of Mothman or the Mothman depicted in Robert Roach's stainless steel statue in Point Pleasant, rather than the historical, eye-witness descriptions of the creature.

Which is fine in the context of the story, which has next to nothing to do with the historical/folkloric Mothman. It's the story of incoming high school freshman Noah Stiles, his older brother and a carload of his friends driving out to a cabin in the woods of Hidden Lake (not Point Pleasant, West Virginia). There Noah sees the title monster and no one else believes him, until a dramatic reveal in which they all see it—although this Mothman is quite different from the inscrutable and mysterious "real" Mothman. This one's more of a were-moth...? I think...?

Anyway, here's interior illustrator Phil Parks' version of this version of Mothman, first scene through the curtains of a cabin window: And here's another, this one revealing Mothman in all his glory at the climax. Note the eye-patterns on the wings, like the defensive coloration of some moths, and the sensible slacks he's wearing:

The above image is the cover of Mothman (Kidaven Press; 2010) by Q.L. Pearce, part of the a "Mysterious Encounters" series for young readers (the slim hardcover is 48 pages long, consisting of four chapters, with big words like "conspiracy" and "prophecies" and "okapi" in bold, with a glossary at the end defining them. The interior images are limited to a low-angle photo of the statue of Mothman in Gunn Park in Point Pleasant, and a goofy-looking rubber model from the Mothman museum.

The cover image is the only original illustration of the subject, given a ginger bread man-like trunk and legs, big black insect-like wings that are as dark and solid as the creatures body, and shining red eyes that seem to either be reflecting the light of the headlights or being lit from within. The figure blends in to the shadows surrounding it so well, you have to kind of tilt the cover a bit here and there to see the details, although the scanner makes the image a lot more clear than it appears in person.

1.) There are two images of Mothman in author Judith Herbst’s Monsters (Lerner Publications; 2005), a slim, heavily-illustrated, 50-page volume devoted to introducing young readers to a handful of paranormal entities.

Here’s the first: The credits say that the image, which is obviously a reconstruction based on one of the famous witness drawings of the creature, is by Raymond Buckland and from the Fortean Picture Library.

It’s quite similar to William Rebsamen’s depiction for the cover of Loren Coleman’s 2002 Mothman and Other Curious Encounters.

The following page features an original illustration by Bill Hauser:He draws an especially insect-like Mothman, in the act of pursuing the Scarberrys and Mallettes during their encounter with him in November 1966.

It’s not as accurate an image as the above one, but its an evocative one. The wings are gigantic; the right one stretches over onto the previous page.


2.) Mothman also appears in The Little Giant Book of “True” Ghost Stories (Sterling; 1998), a fat, little 350-page, five-by-four-inch collection of short ghost stories.

In part two of the book, by writer Margaret Rau, there’s a chapter entitled “The Spectres” that contains five stories.

The first of these is “Mothman,” in which Rau offers a four-page summation of the Mothman story, beginning with the November 16, 1966 Wamsley and Bennet encounter with the creature (the story with the dropped child, and the monster on the porch, peering into the windows) and then offering a handful of shorter stories of a few more.

The book is illustrated by artist Jim Sharpe, who draws a black and white image for each of the 84 stories within. Here’s his Mothman: It’s definitely a unique take. Sharpe keeps it well within the bounds of most descriptions—big, all eyes and wings, no apparent facial features, a sort of vaguely human but essentially shape-less shape—and yet it doesn’t really look much like many other Mothmen.

The size is pretty vague too—Is he flying, or standing ?—and the outstretched “arms” could be limbs or they could be some sort of garment, like a big, flowing scarf. I like Sharpe’s linework in general, and after I got sort of tired of the ghost stories within, I still flipped through the book page by page to take in the art.

Here the sketchiness of Sharpe’s linework and the variation of width ads another layer of equivocation to the Mothman’s nature. Are its wings bare? Feathered? Covered in fur? Organic, or inorganic? Sharpe’s lines can be read as any of those options.

I'm currently working my way through Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside (Visible Ink; 2011) by Brad Steiger and about 20 or so contributors, a big, thick book of stories about various "real" monsters.

There's a chapter entitled "Mothman—Harbinger of Death" about the Mothman, and there were two different illustrations of the subject.

There are a lot of illustrations in the book, and while I'm not terribly impressed with the visual elements of the book, I remain fascinated (to the point of obsessed, I guess) with the different ways different artists try to illustrate the highly abstracted creature, which was sighted scores of time, but which we still don't have a very clear "picture" of.

Here's the first, by Dan Wolfman Allen:It's an extremely accurate depiction of the composite descriptions: No face or head, big glowing eyes that resemble bicycle reflectors, huge wings, whether or not it has arms remaining vague and so on. Pretty detailed and remarkably buff legs, though.


Here's the second, by Ricardo Pustanio:He depicts the Mothman as particularly moth-like, which doesn't really jibe with the descriptions, but I guess if those big, buggy eyes glowed it could be seen as accurate. I guess it depends on what the rest of this Mothman looks like.

In the second issue of Tim Seeley's 2011 Marvel miniseries Ant-Man & Wasp (which I discussed at some length here), the title characters journey to "The Mindscape...a pocket universe bordering the minds of scientists."

The strange space is filled with bizarre hostile creatures that attack them. Note the trio of red-eyed, face-less, arm-less winged creatures along the top of this panel: Do they look at all familiar?

Here's an artist's illustration of Mothman from Orbis Publishing's 1984 prose book about paranormal entities entitled Creatures From Elsewhere (discussed in this post from last summer): Now, was Seeley drawing those creatures to resemble that particular version of Mothman on purpose? Or did he, like the anonymous artist responsible for that Mothman, come up with the same interpretation of the mysterious creature? Or, did Mothman itself somehow communicate with Seeley while he was drawing this panel, influencing the artist to draw him into the scene, consciously or unconsciously?

This image, like the two below, were used as illustrations in the "Half man, half bird" chapter of Creatures From Elsewhere (Orbis Publishing; 1984): The book doesn't list the sources for individual images, and the image caption just reads, "Above: Mothman was said to lack any visible arms or head, to have luminous red eyes and huge wings, and to be bigger than a man." The above image is presumably a sketch based on a witness report.


Likewise, I have no idea who the artist of this illustration is, but it's one of the stronger ones I've encountered, as it manages to look scary, alien, vaguely moth-like and faithful to witness accounts: Somehow the fact that the creature is well-lit enough that we can see details on it, and see that it completely lacks all detail makes it even scarier. The little, shapely legs are kind of intriguing though; I can almost see that version of the monster dancing on them...


Finally, the chapter which includes a brief discussion of Mothman also includes a page or two on the Cornish Owlman seen in the late '70s by some English youths. The image below consists of three witnesses drawings of the creature they said they saw. Something about them, particularly the middle one, remind me of Johnny Ryan's work for some reason:

As obsessive-compulsives who actually read every word of my blog (just me, I think) no doubt remember, last month I finally got around to reading John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies, inspired in large part by the interesting cover on the copy of the book a library I visited happened to have on its shelves.

Since then, I’ve been on a casual but continuous quest to read as much about the 1966-1967 sightings of the creature popularly called Mothman as I possibly can in an effort to a) find more and more different artistic interpretations of the creature popularly called Mothman and b) figure out just what the hell Keel’s theory regarding the monster, the flying saucers, the men in black and the various strange experiences he chronicled in Mothman Prophecies was actually all is, as the book read like an investigation without a conclusion to me (As I mentioned in that original post, Keel hinted that he had some sort of understanding of it all in Prophecies, but never really shared it in the book).

I’m still tracking down various Keel-written works, but the other day I checked out High Strangeness: UFOs From 1960 through 1979 (The UFO Encyclopedia Volume 3) by Jerome Clark (Omnigraphics Inc.; 1996) because it had a healthy-sized entry on “Mothman and Other Winged Entities” (although it had no drawings save a version of the expected one).

Keel came up quite a bit, not only in the Mothman entry, but throughout the book, and Clark’s summary of Keel’s thinking—and reflections of the latter’s place in ufology in general—were pretty interesting to me. Additionally Clark summarizes Keel’s theories of UFOS and related phenomena pretty clearly, particularly in an entry entitled “Paranormal and Occult Theories About UFOS”.

(The connection to comics is coming up; be patient…or quit reading this post I guess…have you checked Blog@Newsarama yet today?)

Keel believed in a “superspectrum” which was essentially a higher plane of reality, and the beings native to it were “ultraterrestials” who, Clark writes, “cynically manipulate the human race and individual human beings.” They can make humans see whatever they want, and thus toy with humanity.

Writes Clark:

In Keel’s revisionist history ultraterretirals “posing as gods and superkings” once ruled the earth, but when democracy became a force in human affairs, these “gods” and their descendants (royal families whose ancestors had mated with ultraterrestrials in human guise) lost their power and authority. Ever since then the ultraterrestials have waged war on Homo sapiens. They have generated religions, cults and secret societies, intervened in the lives of historical figures (Thomas Jefferson and Malcolm X among others) at crucial moments, and otherwise directed human life to serve their ends. God himself is an ultraterrestrial dwelling in the superspectrum.

I don’t even know how to wrap my head around such a view of the universe, especially since it seems like the only evidence for such a view one could provide would be experiential and not concrete, making a view that can easily be stated and, perhaps by some, believed, but not really argued for.

I was struck—repeatedly, actually—while reading about Keel in this book at how similar he sometimes sounded to Grant Morrison. Not just in the language choices and naming conventions ("Ultraterrestrials from the superspectrum posing as gods and superkings" sure sounds like a snatch of Morrison super-comics dialogue), but also in his idea of higher-dimensional beings influencing us here in the third-embedded-in-a-fourth (Think "Crisis Times Five," or All-Star Superman or Final Crisis or that interview where Morrison claimed to interact with fifth-dimensional beings) and his belief that he could actually control aspects of reality through his own writing (Keel has at least one anecdote in which he could conjure particular types of UFO events simply by making shit up and talking about it, whereas in Invisibles-era interviews Morrison talked about his ability to conjure up real people by creating them first as characters in his work).

Also of note to comics fans is the way Keel’s intellectual predecessor (to use Clark’s term) talked about the superspectrum’s ultraterrestrials, and the way they traveled to our reality. N. Meade Layne had a similar understanding of a higher plane of reality with its own entities, although he called that higher reality “the etheric world” and the entities there “etherians.”

Check out this summary by Clark:

The etheric world coexists with and interpenetrates ours. Like our world, it has stars, planets, and other familiar features which are the etheric analogues of ours. Its inhabitants are human and highly advanced. The etherians, who have our best interests at heart, must lower their “vibrational” rate considerable in order to enter our realm.

Readers of DC comics will note that such terminology echoes the way DC’s multiverse cosmology. The various DC Earths (Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-S, and so forth) all existed in the same place in space, but vibrated at different frequencies, creating parallel earths—to travel between those earths, The Flash characters would vibrate at different frequencies.
(Above: A one-panel explanation of DC's multiple earths, from 1977's Justice League of America #147 by Paul Levitz, martin Pasko, Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin)

Layne didn’t crib this theory from old Gardner Fox JLA/JSA stories, of course. Clark says Layne identified flying saucers as “ether ships” from the etheric realm back in 1947. The “Flash of Two Worlds” story that introduced DC’s dominant use of parallel Earths was published in a 1961 comic book edited by Julius Schwartz and written by Gardner Fox.

Schwartz was extremely active in 20th century literary science fiction circles, publishing one of the first sci-fi fanzines and serving as a literary agent to influential sci-fi writers. Fox was a prolific science-fiction prose writer as well as a prolific comics writer. Certainly ufology would have been something both would have heard quite a bit about over the years.

Hey, you know the difference between professional writing and stuff I write on my blog? In a case of the former, I’d start out any piece with a lede or introduction of some kind. In the case of the latter, I might ramble on at random for 1,000 words before getting to the point, which is referred to in the title of this post.

So, the reason I started typing all this—

John Keel wrote about a trend he referred to as “The Wednesday Phenomenon.” After analyzing close-encounter reports from 1966-68, Keel determined that the “greatest umber of sightings are reported on Wednesday, and then they slowly taper off through the rest of the week.”

In Mothman Prophecies, Keel wrote:

I had collected some seven hundred UFO reports from 1966 and discovered that the greatest number of sightings, 20 percent, took place on Wednesdays.

…

No one except the U.S. Air Force had attempted even a superficial statistical analysis of UFO sightings before, so my findings were greeted with howls of derision by the scientists who posed as experts on the phenomenon. Then Dr. David Saunders of Colorado University fed several thousand sightings into a computer and found the Wednesday phenomenon remained stable. That day produced the largest number of sightings, well beyond the laws of chance and averages.

According to Clark, Keel also noted in UFOS: Operation Trojan Horse that “psychic and occult events seem to follow the same cycles as the UFO phenomenon.”

Is there anything to that? Clark’s High Strangeness entry on the subject notes that when two other researchers attempted to test the Wednesday phenomenon, they came to different conclusions, and an Allen Hendry noted such studies would be meaningless due to the difficulty of screening out bogus reports from misidentifications.

But Keel himself seemed satisfied with his conclusion that, for whatever reasons, Wednesday is the day when people are most likely to encounter UFOs.

It is also the day on which new comic books go on sale each week.

COINCIDENCE?

I don’t know.


********************

Whatever Mothman really was—giant owl, CIA-controlled animatronic puppet, UFO pilot, ultraterrestrial from the superspectrum—its appearance and behavior puts him in the well within the category of "monster."

Perhaps because of that, I find mental images of Mothman behaving in ways more mundane than monstrous sort of hilarious.

The only previous example I had encountered was the one suggested by a line in Keith Phipps' A.V. Club review of the 2002 Mothman Prophecies movie. Summarizing the plot, Phipps wrote, "After making a widower of [Richard] Gere in the film's opening sequence by flying at his car, the Mothman later retreats to more subtle tactics, like prank phone calls."

Reading the book after reading that review, I'd occasionally imagine Mothman as the culprit behind all of the strange stuff Keel described, like making all those weird phone calls, opening Keel's mail, dressing up as men in black, creating UFO hoaxes, etc. I especially like the image of Mothman making prank phone calls though, since he isn't generally reported to have a mouth. Or ears. Or head.

Clark's High Strangeness has a non-Keel account of some Mothman behavior which puts him in another bizarre light.

He reports that in 1976 members of the Ohio UFO Investigators League reinterviewed some Mothman witnesses and came up with some fresh details. They found that Linda Scarberry, one of the original witnesses, had seen Mothman hundreds of times and that, for a period of a few years, Mothman followed them everywhere.

Clark quotes Brent Raynes' 1976 article "West Virginia Revisited" from Ohio Sky Watcher, quoting Scarberry:

We rented an apartment down on 13th Street, and the bedroom window was right off the roof. It was sitting on the roof one night, looking in the window, and by then I was so used to seeing it I just pulled the blinds and went on. I felt kind of sorry for it [because] it gives you the feeling like itw as sitting there wishing i could come in and get warm because it was cold out that night.

A sad, lonely puppy dog version of Mothman that is so ubiquitous that it has become something akin to weird, slightly disturbing furniture in one's life is pretty compelling. (At least read about third- or fourth-hand almost 35 years later, as opposed to being the one seeing a sad, lonely puppy dog version of Mothman following you around and looking in your window all the time).