Cam rentsch

artwork by Sarah Becan – support her here.

Maybe you’ve heard this one before – or at least one like it. Young couples are out for a joyride. It’s a trip to find a lover’s lane, to find some holler or field to drink beers in, it’s the 60s, the Baby Boom, peak Americana, and they end up becoming folklore. They’re at the West Virginia Ordnance Works – often called the TNT area – and now the McClintic Wildlife Management Area, near Point Pleasant, West Virginia. But once there, their car is chased by a large, winged, humanoid figure with glowing red eyes. One-hundred miles per hour down country roads, never losing the being until they got back into town and head right to the Sheriff. Accusations of reefer madness followed, but then word reached town of gravediggers in Clendenin who saw something similar. More sightings followed, over a hundred, and word really got around of that giant bird-like thing with the glowing red eyes. The Point Pleasant Register published an article titled “”Couples See Man-Sized Bird…Creature…Something!”. An unknown Ohio newspaper copyeditor coined the name “Mothman”, which has stuck ever since. The Mason County Bird Monster didn’t have the same ring to it. Hunting parties headed out from the small West Virginia town, boys with their hands on the smooth wood of rifle stocks, entertainment being far different before the internet age. Somethingwas happening – whether tongue-in-cheek fun, the paranormal, or something beyond language, there was a sense that this was all real in some meaningful way. 

But then, upon the collapse of the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River, the whole thing was put away for a while. The bridge collapse killed forty-six people. 

But in 2010s, something else happened. The descriptions – glowing red eyes, wingspans in excessive of twelve feet, a humanesque torso – all began to arise again. But in Chicago this time. I’ve lived in Chicago twice during my life, once in Lincoln Park and once in Hyde Park, both odd feeling neighborhoods in a city where neighborhood culture is more apparent than anywhere else in the United States, a city where I felt like I was walking around with some great weight on my shoulders because I couldn’t see past all the buildings unless I went to Lake Michigan – which, for a kid from Appalachia who couldn’t swim, might as well have been the barren face of the moon.

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Point Pleasant sits at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers and was known as Chinodahichetha by the Shawnee. Once claimed by French colonizer Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville, it then was the site of a battle as part of Lord Dunmore’s War in the British colonization of the area. These early colonial wars were ones of decimation and disease and bitter powder smoke under old growth forest soon to be cut down. Hokoleskwa lead a coalition of Shawnee and Mingo in the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774, and twenty years after their defeat and nineteen after Hokoleskwa’s execution, Point Pleasant would receive an official town charter. The green hills, the spring river fog, the turned earth smell under fermenting autumn leaves – all were traded for timber, for agriculture, for industry, and later, a bridge across the wide brown river the town had grown next to. 

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The Mothman has grown beyond a backwater curiosity or paranormal documentary subject and has become a camp, gay hero of the 2010s Tumblr blog variety. Etsy shops sell Mothman pins that say “Trans Rights!” and bumper stickers that say “Mothman is real and He is a gentle and caring lover” or “The Mothman Ate my Whole Ass at a Denny’s”. Beyond the internet, Mothman has created an economy all his own in Point Pleasant – once emblematic of the rural American Dream, now any defunct and disinvested small town looking for any signs of life, any kind of future. There is the Mothman Museum, Mothman cookies at a local coffee shop, a Mothman Diner, Mothman blend coffee beans, Mothman Pizzas, a yearly Mothman festival. Whether this is done begrudgingly to bilk money from the tourists or with some sense of pride isn’t quite clear from the outside looking in. 

The Mothman even appears in the much-hated Fallout 76 – a video game widely mocked for being released essentially unfinished in a clear cash-grab by Bethesda. This is definitely a bummer, considering it’s one of the largest pieces of media to take anything near a loving glance at West Virginia. 

Theories on the Mothman abound, with most trying to connect him to actual biological fauna. Some even go as far to say that Mothman is some radioactive beast, based on rumors from the 40s that said much more than TNT was being made at the Ordnance Works, rumors of irradiated birds grown large beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. We know what made the Silver Bridge collapse – a single eyebar, number 17, broke in the suspension and that brought the whole thing down. Yet, there are those who say the Mothman was involved – that he was there to warn the citizens of Point Pleasant of the upcoming tragedy, or even that he was on the bridge that day, some harbinger of doom. These theorists point to alleged sightings of the “Blackbird of Chernobyl” – saying this was the Mothman come to Ukraine to warn of the upcoming reactor meltdown. 

The first book on The Mothman was written by John Keel, a man who claimed to have been trained in psychological warfare and propaganda writing by the US Army during the Korean War and is credited with inventing the term “Men in Black.” One of Keel’s personal friends believed that he could look at people and know when they were going to die. Keel believed the Mothman was not exactly a physical being but rather an “ultra-terrestrial”, some kind of psychic being beyond mere human understanding. The book eventually became a movie in 2002, staring Richard Gere and Laura Linney, the same year she won an Emmy for Wild Iris. They don’t even mention The Mothman Prophecies on her Wikipedia page, if that gives you any insight into the film. One year after the movie premiered, a statue of the Mothman was erected in downtown Point Pleasant, a tourist attraction with a great ass, and later, the Mothman Museum opened in 2005. 

Mass Hysteria, a Fortean delusion, an irradiated Sandhill Crane, or even just a prankster Barred Owl with his famous “who, who cooks for you?” call, the Mothman is now real in a way whether or not he’s a physical being. He’s moved beyond the paranormal, beyond any theory. But why is he in Chicago now? 

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My first stint living in Chicago: I’m a college freshman at DePaul University. I’m lonely and struggling to fit in as a first-generation student who keeps getting asked about where his accent is from. I spend a lot of time just walking, especially at night, when the yellow lights of the city would create a bubble over my head under which I could overanalyze every single word I’d said that day. When I went back to my hometown, a rural one about the size of Point Pleasant but across the river in Ohio, I was met with that special kind of meanness only found in small American towns – almost as if pursing an education had made me some kind of traitor, that merely by enrolling in school I had in some way abandoned the place that I’m from despite it never quite feeling like home. At least, it never felt like what I thought a home was supposed feel like. I left DePaul before finishing my freshman year, dropping out of school to go care for my dementia-ridden grandfather in a town of two-hundred. But I returned to Chicago for grad school, still not able to imagine moving further from Appalachia. I’d leave Appalachia eventually, but these “facts” I’ve learned about the Mothman have never quite left me.

I want to know why Mothman left Appalachia for Chicago, if only because I want to understand why I did the same thing. I might have said at the time that I was searching for an education, for a career, personal growth, but to this day I remember feeling compelled to drive State Route 30 back to Eastern Ohio, wondering how on earth people grow up without hills in the mud of the small Indiana towns along the highway. Mothman hasn’t come back to from after moving to Chicago – or, if he has, nobody is mentioning it. 

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It’s years later when I’m trying to work myself into understanding all this, and I haven’t lived in Appalachia for a long time and only visit seldomly. I’ve seen how close lightning can strike in the San Juans, smelled moose in the Bitterroots, felt cold cascade mist raise goosebumps over my whole body in the Columbia River Gorge, even heard the endless roar of Pacific Coast swell from Big Sur. Quite a change from an occasional family vacation to Myrtle Beach and being jealous of the kids who got to go to Disneyland.

Chicago really is a fantastic place to live – despite the oppressive summer humidity and bitter winter wind. They rebuilt the whole place from the ground up after the Great Chicago Fire, and then later lifted it all up on jackscrews to put the first comprehensive sanitation plan in the United States into action. It was the first city in the United States to have a homosexual rights organization, in 1924. They invented the steel high rise and ushered in the skyscraper era. During the Civil Rights Movement, The Young Patriots, poor boys from Appalachia who migrated to the city, partnered with Fred Hampton in the Rainbow Coalition. You can find every kind of food you’d ever dream about, every major sports team, every kind of entertainment, everything you could imagine, all within reach. There’s even more than 8,000 acres of parks. Was it any of these things that drew the Mothman to Chicago? Or was it something else?  

You might wonder if I actually believe in the Mothman – if I set up trail cameras or head out after dark hoping to catch a glimpse of something between monster and man, something between our world and the one I know exists beyond it. I don’t think it matters really. Something’s existence has never changed it’s ability to influence human life – and plenty of people will tell you about how much Appalachians believe in monsters. The people up there are different – haven’t you heard about the Hatfields and McCoy’s? There are plenty of other monsters in Appalachia – the Snallygaster, the Grafton Monster, the Flatwoods Monster.

The Appalachian mountains are older than Saturn’s rings – older than many religions, worn down by water and wind and the aching time of millions of years into dark hollers and humid groves of rhododendrons. Is this primeval beginning the reason that all these monsters live Appalachia? Or is it the poverty – LBJ passed his “War on Poverty” bill with pictures of us on the cover. He also used to take his dick out to threaten foreign diplomats. Hell, until the 1980s, the Library of Congress even referred to Appalachians as “Mountain Whites”. Creek baptisms and snake handling certainly ain’t done in any churches in the city. We have our harbingers of doom – or we are them for you. Jokes about hearing banjos after taking a turn down the wrong dirt road getting you killed, or even worse, a now popular movie trope. Can you believe in Appalachia without believing in monsters, or being one yourself? 

When I think about the Mothman in Chicago, I have to wonder if he was running towards something or away from something. Or, was he just running? It’s a pretentious reference, but like how Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy, I must imagine Mothman scared. Because when I moved to Chicago, I was scared. He’s left something behind – for some reason he had to leave West Virginia. Like when I was younger, is Chicago as far west as his imagination will let him run? Does he go to Lou Malnati’s because he likes it, or only when people come to visit him in the big city and he needs something to show them? Does he ever ride his bike to Pilsen to buy tamales and cry on the way home, so sad and aching and grown, like I used to? Has anybody made him take a shot of Malört? Does he like Old Style? How about the Bears? What does he think of the gay bars in Boystown? Does he feel like he belongs, or is he just overwhelmed? Do the city noises keep him up at night, and when he looks out the window only to see no stars above him, how does that make him feel? Do I have sympathy for the monster, or do I just feel like one myself? 

A spate of paranormal sightings is generally referred to as a flap – and the Chicago Mothman flap began in the early 2010s, but increasing in number significantly after 2016. A jogger on Navy Pier, a father and son fishing in the Little Calumet, couples walking in Lincoln Park, a trucker on the freeway – they all report some “winged-being”. The sightings continued, increasing especially around the O’Hare airport. If, as some believers claim, that The Mothman comes around to warn us of impending disaster, what is going to happen in Chicago? Nothing quite like the Silver Bridge collapse has occurred since, and the sightings continue until today. I don’t want to hear your take on the Chicago Mothman being there to warn about gun violence, because he didn’t show when Al Capone was causing just as much murder during Prohibition. 

I don’t think the Mothman went to Chicago to warn them of any doom – I think he went there because he was leaving his own doom behind. From the 60s till today, the meager lives so many lived in Appalachia have only gotten worse – West Virginia is rated last in Infrastructure and Healthcare among all US States, and only 47th in Educational Attainment and Economy – whatever that last word means. But I’m not sure if Mothman left because he couldn’t see a future for himself in the place that he was from. Maybe it’s because he didn’t like how people treated him, like some unknowable mystery, or maybe he was looking for a place he might actually belong. If that’s the case, I’m glad he’s popping up all over Chicago, because I hope he gets to settle down in a neighborhood he likes. Lord knows I never quite found one, and all my angsty freshman year cigarettes could never change that. 

The most popular theories on what Mothman might “actually” be are just birds – Barred Owls and Sandhill Cranes usually. The Barred Owl, with it’s distinctive round face and similar eyeshine, makes more sense to me, but the Sandhill Crane – sometimes referred to as the “ribeye of the sky” for what it tastes like, is cited more often by experts. Dr. Robert Smith, a wildlife biologist at West Virginia University, is a proponent of this theory. Sandhill Cranes are large and have red circles around their eyes, although they don’t reflect back light like Mothman’s. Sandhilll Cranes are usually only about four feet tall, and their wings top out at about six and a half feet – much less than the ten foot wingspans and six foot height originally reported in Point Pleasant, and even less than the twelve feet seen in Chicago. Maybe the Mothman is growing. Barred Owls are even smaller – standing only about two feet tall with a five foot wingspan. In the first Point Pleasant sighting, witnesses described the Mothman as attempting to avoid the headlights of their car – not a very moth-like behavior, if you ask me. 

Outside of the physical description, I think the kids on Tumblr are right – there’s no way Mothman is straight. Not to say he had to leave West Virginia because of this – there are plenty of queer people in Appalachia – but because there’s is something truly unknowable about him, and that just doesn’t compute with my understanding of heterosexuality. 

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Since Mothman moved to Chicago, I wonder how he feels about them changing the name of Lakeshore Drive? Does he call it the Sears Tower, or the Willis Tower? Was he around for the 2020 protests? I was stuck in my apartment with a broken foot and an eating disorder, manically scribbling out a thesis at 3AM. Has he made it to the St. Patrick’s Day parade to drink green beers and marvel at a river turned backwards? Does he ever wonder if he might have been a sideshow attraction at the World’s Fair on the Midway? I sometimes wandered to the edge of the Midway Plaisance when I lived in Hyde Park, wondering what it was like for the person who reported seeing a “Crow-Man” on the brick apartment building on 60th Street. 

If he hasn’t decided to move to Chicago permanently, I’d like to take him on a tour of the US. Ask him what he thinks of the near-rancid smell of Portland along the Willamette River – because it has a certain charm to me. I could ask him if he has ever felt a warmer or gentler sun than under giant California Redwoods? We could see all the ski resort consumerism and i70 traffic Denver has to offer. Would we have to get the permit from the Parks Service to climb Angel’s Landing, or could we fly to the top? Would they even let two monsters like us go to a place with such a name? 

Mothman, I don’t know if you’re a monster – but I feel like one a lot. At least I don’t feel quite human. And I feel like I’ve got to hide these primordial parts of me that I think I see in you. Do you still miss the place you’ve never really called home? Does it keep you up at night? If you go back to West Virginia to visit, do you feel like nothing and everything is different at once?

Let’s go home, Mothman. Wherever that is.