A bonus episode arrives ahead of the Season 8 finale, which heads into eastern England's A1075 for years of reported beast sightings there. It got us thinking that cryptids aren't just a British story, so this one leaves the UK behind for one of the best documented cryptid cases anywhere: The Mothman of Point Pleasant.
Four young people described it first, on a freezing night in November 1966: six or seven feet tall, grey, wings folded against its back, and eyes that didn't reflect the light but burned. It made the front page of their local paper by the next morning, and what followed over the next year ended in tragedy, inspired a Hollywood film, and left a small town on the Ohio River with a legend it's never shaken.
Two young couples driving past an abandoned wartime munitions site watched the creature rise vertically off the ground and keep pace above their car at over a hundred miles an hour. Within two days, two more separate groups nearby described the same grey, winged, red eyed figure, including one that followed a young mother onto her porch. A local reporter took five hundred phone calls in a single weekend, and thirteen months later, tragedy struck the town in a way nobody has ever fully explained.
The episode follows the sightings, the writer whose own life turned strange while chasing the story, and the folklore, including the legends wrongly attached to Chernobyl, that grew up around Point Pleasant afterwards. A bonus episode to hold you over before Season 8's last case drops. Listen now.
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