The Wings in the Dark: Mothman, Chicago's Phantom, and the Creature That Won't Stay Buried

Night owls,

Pull your chair a little closer to the dial tonight. I want to talk about something with wings.

Not angels. Not demons, at least, not the kind with names you'd find in scripture. I'm talking about something that's been spotted over Lake Michigan as recently as last summer. Something that stood in the headlights of a Chevy on a November night in 1966 and stared back at two terrified couples with eyes like burning embers. Something that, according to some, tried to warn us before 46 people died on a bridge that shouldn't have fallen.

I'm talking about the Mothman.

And before you click away thinking you already know this story, let me ask you something: Did you know there have been over 175 documented sightings in the Chicago area since 2011? That airport employees at O'Hare have reported seeing a massive, winged humanoid figure while on shift, and stayed quiet about it for fear of losing their jobs? That Netflix just released a new episode on this thing in July 2024?

The Mothman isn't just a relic from small-town West Virginia. It's still here. It's still being seen. And if the old stories are any indication, we should be asking ourselves: Why now?

Let's get into it.

The Night It All Began: Point Pleasant, 1966

The official story starts on November 15, 1966, just outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Two young couples, Roger and Linda Scarberry, and Steve and Mary Mallette, were driving near an abandoned TNT plant when they saw something standing near the road.

It was tall. Somewhere between six and seven feet, they said. Gray or brown. And its eyes, they described them as bright red, reflective, about six inches apart. When the car's headlights hit those eyes, the creature didn't run.

It spread wings that stretched ten feet across.

And then it followed them.

According to the Scarberrys and Mallettes, the creature kept pace with their car as they hit speeds of 100 miles per hour trying to escape. It didn't flap its wings. It just... glided alongside them. They made it to the Mason County courthouse and reported what they'd seen to Deputy Millard Halstead, who later told reporters he believed them. These weren't the kind of people who made things up, he said.

But here's the thing, this wasn't the first sighting.

Three days earlier, on November 12, 1966, five men working as gravediggers in a cemetery near Clendenin, West Virginia, reported seeing a brown, human-like figure take off from the trees and fly directly over their heads. They were adamant: this was not a bird. It was something that looked like a man. With wings.

The Point Pleasant Register ran with the story. The wire services picked it up. And thanks to the popularity of the Batman TV series at the time, they gave the creature a name that stuck.

Mothman.

What followed was 13 months of chaos. Over 100 witnesses came forward with sightings. Cars were followed. Houses were watched. Strange lights appeared in the sky. And then there were the phone calls, weird electronic voices, predictions that sometimes came true, and a figure that haunted the town's nightmares.

His name was Indrid Cold.

The Grinning Man: Indrid Cold and the Stranger Element

On November 2, 1966, before the Scarberry sighting, before the gravediggers, before any of it, a sewing machine salesman named Woodrow Derenberger was driving home along Interstate 77 when something blocked the road.

He described it as a craft shaped like "an old kerosene lamp globe, having a flat bottom and a dome-like top." A man emerged, about six feet tall, olive complexion, dark hair, wearing a glossy dark blue coat. And he was smiling.

Not a friendly smile. A fixed smile. His mouth didn't move when he spoke.

Because according to Derenberger, the man communicated telepathically.

The stranger told Derenberger his name was Indrid Cold, and that he came from a place called "Lanulos." He was courteous, almost unsettlingly so. He asked ordinary questions about the area. And then he left.

Derenberger held a press conference the next day. He became locally infamous. And over the following months, he claimed Cold continued to visit him, sometimes in person, sometimes through strange phone calls.

This is where journalist John Keel enters the picture.

Keel was a New York journalist and ufologist, he's actually credited with coining the term "Men in Black." He arrived in Point Pleasant to investigate the Mothman sightings and interviewed over 100 witnesses. What he found disturbed him. This wasn't a simple monster case. The phones lines were acting strange. People were having prophetic dreams. And Keel himself claimed to receive calls from Indrid Cold, including, allegedly, a warning to leave town before something terrible happened.

That warning came before December 15, 1967.

The Silver Bridge Collapse: Harbinger or Coincidence?

At 5:04 PM on December 15, 1967, 13 months to the day after the first widely-reported Mothman sighting, the Silver Bridge collapsed.

The bridge connected Point Pleasant, West Virginia to Gallipolis, Ohio, spanning the Ohio River. It was rush hour. The bridge was packed with holiday shoppers.

46 people died. Two bodies were never recovered.

The collapse became the first major highway accident investigation in the history of the National Transportation Safety Board. What they found was chillingly mundane: a tiny crack, just 0.1 inches deep, in a single component called eyebar 330. The crack had formed through something called stress corrosion cracking, a defect invisible to standard inspections at the time. The bridge had been standing since 1928. It failed in an instant.

President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered nationwide bridge inspections. Engineering standards changed. The Silver Bridge collapse became a case study in infrastructure failure.

But that's not how Point Pleasant remembers it.

To the residents, especially those who'd spent 13 months seeing a creature with red eyes stalking the ridges and riverbanks, the collapse felt like the ending of a story. A story they didn't understand. The Mothman sightings stopped almost immediately after the bridge fell. The strange phone calls ceased. Indrid Cold was never heard from again.

Many in Point Pleasant came to believe the Mothman was a harbinger, a warning of the disaster to come. Not a cause. Not a demon. Something that knew.

John Keel wrote about all of it in his 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies. It became a classic of paranormal literature, later adapted into the 2002 film starring Richard Gere. The book is a strange, sprawling account that mixes eyewitness testimony with Keel's own increasingly paranoid experiences. It's not a comfortable read. Keel doesn't give you answers. He gives you more questions.

And for decades, that's where the story seemed to end. A strange chapter in American folklore. A tourist attraction, Point Pleasant now hosts an annual Mothman Festival, drawing 15,000+ attendees each year. There's a statue. A museum. T-shirts.

Case closed, right?

Not exactly.

The Chicago Phantom: 175+ Sightings and Counting

Starting in 2011, something started appearing in the skies over Chicago.

At first, it was isolated reports. A dark figure over the lakefront. Something with wings spotted near O'Hare. But the sightings accelerated dramatically in 2017 and 2018, and they haven't stopped. Paranormal investigator Lon Strickler, who runs the Phantoms and Monsters website, has logged over 161 credible Chicago-area sightings on a detailed map, with concentrated activity near the airport, the lakefront, and communities surrounding Lake Michigan.

And here's what witnesses describe:

- A creature between 6 and 10 feet tall

- A wingspan of approximately 10 feet

- Humanoid posture, stands upright, moves bipedally

- Glowing or reflective eyes, reported in red, orange, yellow, and green

- Completely silent in flight

- Most sightings occur at night, often near water or in parks

Sound familiar?

In July 2024, a witness named Ryan reported seeing two bright, "laser-like" red lights on a condominium rooftop in Chicago. As he watched, he realized the lights were eyes, and they were attached to a humanoid figure backlit against the city glow. The creature unfurled its wings and flew off toward Lake Michigan.

He's not alone. The sightings extend beyond Chicago proper, forming a pattern around Lake Michigan, reports have come from every state bordering the great lake. Some investigators, including Strickler and his colleague Tobias Wayland, theorize that large bodies of water may serve as navigational waypoints for whatever this entity is.

The case even caught the attention of Netflix. The streaming service's Unsolved Mysteries Volume 4, released July 31, 2024, dedicated an entire episode, "The Mothman Revisited", to both the original Point Pleasant events and the ongoing Chicago phenomenon. Wayland and Strickler are both featured. The episode doesn't offer conclusions. It doesn't debunk. It presents the evidence and leaves viewers to sit with the discomfort.

So what's flying over Chicago?

The Skeptic's Toolkit: Owls, Cranes, and Mass Hysteria

Let's be fair to the skeptics, not because they're necessarily right, but because any honest investigation has to consider mundane explanations.

The Sandhill Crane Theory

Shortly after the original 1966 sightings, wildlife biologist Robert L. Smith of West Virginia University suggested the Mothman might be a sandhill crane, a large American bird that stands nearly as tall as a man, with a seven-foot wingspan and distinctive red coloring around its eyes.

The problem? Sandhill cranes aren't native to West Virginia. If one was present, it would have been a vagrant far outside its normal migration route, which, admittedly, happens. But witnesses consistently described a creature with no visible neck, which doesn't match crane anatomy. And the cranes don't explain the glowing, reflective eyes reported across multiple sightings.

The Owl Theory

Investigator Joe Nickell of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry argues that many Mothman sightings, especially the original Point Pleasant cases, can be explained by large owls, particularly barred owls.

The argument has merit:

- Owl eyes reflect red when hit by headlights or flashlights (the "eyeshine" effect)

- Owls emit eerie screeching sounds

- With wings fully extended, they can appear much larger than expected

- A snowy owl shot in Point Pleasant in 1966 had a wingspan of nearly five feet and was described as a "giant owl" in local papers

But the Chicago sightings describe something 6 to 10 feet tall. Owls, even at their largest, don't come close.

Great Blue Herons

Wayland himself, examining video evidence from the Chicago cases, has noted that some footage appears to show great blue herons, thin, tall birds with long legs and wingspans up to 7 feet. In dim lighting or silhouette, they could certainly appear more humanoid than they are.

But not all footage matches. And not all witnesses are filming from a distance. Some claim close encounters, close enough to see featureless faces, to watch wings unfurl, to feel that something was watching back.

Mass Hysteria and Pareidolia

Psychology offers another angle. Pareidolia is the brain's tendency to perceive familiar patterns, faces, figures, in random stimuli. At night, in the right frame of mind, a tree branch could become an arm. Shadows could assemble into shapes that aren't there.

And mass hysteria is well-documented. When a community is primed to see something, sightings multiply. People unconsciously influence each other. Details converge. The story takes on a life of its own.

This is almost certainly a factor in the Point Pleasant wave. Once the newspapers started publishing stories, everyone started watching the sky. Fear is contagious. So are expectations.

But here's what the skeptical explanations don't account for:

- Why did the sightings cluster so intensely in a 13-month window, then stop after the bridge collapse?

- Why are the Chicago sightings, separated by 50 years and 500 miles, so consistent in their descriptions?

- Why do multiple O'Hare airport employees, with no connection to each other, report the same thing?

- And why, across six decades, do witnesses keep using the same word: It wasn't a bird. It was like a man.

Maybe it's all explainable. Maybe every sighting is an owl or a heron or a hallucination or a prank. But all of them? Every single one?

Theories from the Fringe: What Is the Mothman?

If we set aside the skeptical explanations, not dismissing them, but putting them on a shelf for a moment, what are we left with?

The paranormal community has no shortage of theories:

The Harbinger Hypothesis

This is the most popular interpretation, especially among Point Pleasant locals. The Mothman appears before disasters. It's a warning, not a threat. Some have suggested it appeared before other catastrophes, Chernobyl, the 2007 I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, even 9/11, though documentation for these claims is thin at best.

The appeal of this theory is psychological as much as paranormal. It transforms a terrifying unknown into something almost protective. The Mothman isn't hunting us. It's trying to help. We just don't know how to listen.

The Ultraterrestrial Theory

This was John Keel's preferred explanation. He rejected the extraterrestrial hypothesis, aliens from other planets, in favor of something stranger. Keel believed entities like the Mothman and Indrid Cold were ultraterrestrials: beings that exist alongside us in dimensions or frequencies we can't normally perceive. They've always been here. They occasionally bleed through.

This theory has the advantage of explaining the randomness of the phenomena, the weird phone calls, the prophetic dreams, the way reality itself seemed to glitch around Point Pleasant in 1966-67. It's less a monster sighting and more a haunting.

The Tulpa/Thoughtform Theory

Some researchers suggest the Mothman might be a tulpa, a thought-form created by collective belief. The more people fear it, the more real it becomes. Mass attention feeds it. In this view, the Mothman is less an independent entity and more a manifestation of human anxiety given wings.

It's an uncomfortable theory because it implies we're doing this to ourselves.

The Unknown Species Hypothesis

And then there's the simplest fringe explanation: maybe it's just an animal we haven't classified. A surviving pterosaur. A giant bat species living in cave systems. Something biological, just outside the current zoological catalog.

Given what we've discovered in the deep ocean in recent decades, species we never knew existed, this isn't as absurd as it sounds. But it doesn't explain the glowing eyes, the apparent intelligence, or the coincidental timing around disasters.

What We Know, What We've Witnessed, What We're Still Asking

Let me break this down the way I like to do it, separating the verified from the alleged from the unknown.

What We Know (Verified)

- Mothman sightings in Point Pleasant, West Virginia occurred between November 1966 and December 1967, with over 100 witnesses interviewed by journalists including John Keel and Mary Hyre

- The Silver Bridge collapsed on December 15, 1967, killing 46 people due to a stress corrosion cracking defect

- Mothman sightings in the Point Pleasant area effectively ceased after the bridge collapse

- The Chicago Mothman phenomenon began around 2011, with significant spikes in 2017-2018 and ongoing sightings through summer 2024

- Over 161 Chicago-area sightings have been documented by investigator Lon Strickler

- Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries Volume 4 (July 2024) dedicated an episode to both the classic case and modern sightings

- The annual Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant draws 15,000+ visitors

What's Been Alleged (Unverified)

- That Indrid Cold was a real entity who communicated telepathically with Woodrow Derenberger and others

- That John Keel received phone calls from Cold warning him of the Silver Bridge collapse

- That multiple O'Hare airport employees have witnessed the creature but stayed silent for fear of job loss

- That Mothman appearances precede major disasters (bridge collapses, Chernobyl, etc.)

- That the creature possesses intelligence and may be observing or warning humans

What Remains Unknown

- The actual identity of the creature(s) witnessed in Point Pleasant and Chicago

- Why sightings cluster around bodies of water, particularly Lake Michigan

- Whether there is any genuine causal or predictive connection between Mothman appearances and disasters

- Why consistent descriptions persist across witnesses separated by decades and geography

- Whether this is one entity, multiple entities, or a recurring phenomenon with a common cause

The Frequency Stays Open

Here's what I keep coming back to, night owls:

People are still seeing this thing.

Not in 1967. Not in some dusty archive. Last summer. Over O'Hare. Along the Lake Michigan shoreline. On rooftops in Chicago. And they're describing the same creature that Roger Scarberry saw in his headlights 58 years ago.

Either we're dealing with one of the most persistent and geographically mobile mass delusions in American history, one that spans generations, survives the rise of smartphones and social media, and maintains remarkable consistency across unconnected witnesses...

Or something is actually out there.

I'm not here to tell you which one to believe. That's not what we do on this frequency. I lay out what we know. I follow the threads. And I let you sit with it in the dark.

But I will say this: the fact that we're still talking about the Mothman, the fact that Netflix is running episodes about it in 2024, that investigators are still logging new reports, that the creature has achieved a kind of immortality in American folklore, tells us something.

Whether it's real or a reflection, something about this entity resonates. Something about red eyes in the dark, about wings too large to belong to anything natural, about the feeling of being watched, it hits a frequency in the human mind that refuses to tune out.

Maybe that's all it is. A symbol. A mirror.

Or maybe, like the witnesses keep saying, it's just not a bird.

Have You Seen Something?

The lines are open.

If you've had an encounter, in Chicago, in West Virginia, anywhere along Lake Michigan or beyond, I want to hear about it. Not to judge. Not to debunk. Just to listen.

That's what the night is for.

- Jack

Sources & Further Reading:

- https://www.wbez.org/curious-city/2024/09/05/the-case-of-the-chicago-mothman

- https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/unsolved-mysteries-volume-4-episode-5-mothman-revisited

- https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a44851472/silver-bridge-collapse-mothman/

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Bridge

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman

- https://www.audubon.org/magazine/mothman-west-virginia-owl

- https://skepticalinquirer.org/2022/06/the-mothman-and-the-crane-a-contemporary-perspective/

- https://allthatsinteresting.com/silver-bridge-collapse

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indrid_Cold