The Silver Bridge (18 page)
Authors: Gray Barker
“If you will take this, you can go, Agar (Agar was puzzled as to how the boy knew his name).” He again handed him the rocks and the pen knife.
Agar accepted these gravely and put them in his pocket.
“Here, you take THIS.”
The boy eagerly grasped the object, turning it over and over, letting the light reflect on it from all angles. Then he held it close to his body, as if it might get away.
He walked with the boy the remaining length of the bridge. Noting the absence of the arm around his shoulder, the boy looked up and Agar was no longer there.
T
he Point Pleasant Battle Monument towered almost a hundred feet into the night sky. Erected as a memorial to heroes of the prerevolutionary Indian wars, it rose over a local museum, and in daytime commandeered a beautiful plaza.
Tonight, however, fog rose from the river and gave it an amorphous, undulating shape, backlighted by illumination from the town. The monument cast a grotesque shadow through the fog.
This had been the battleground on which the town had been defended from more than a thousand Indians, assembled by chief Cornstalk, a young Shawnee of remarkable courage and leadership. He had marshalled the warriors not only from his own tribe, but also from the Mingo, Deleware and Ottawa. The somewhat loose tribal federation became tightly united in war—an amalgamation known to local settlers simply as Northwest Indians.
In the 1760’s the Indians were thoroughly defeated in a series of battles and a peace treaty of enduring quality was negotiated with chief Cornstalk.
As I regarded the spectral monument, the events of the past few months seemed to fade into oblivion as I considered the long, bloody struggles which had taken place on this very spot two hundred years ago.
The fog poured up from the river like smoke. First the base, then the apex of the monument disappeared into the murky shroud. Only the automobile headlights, their rays penetrating only a few feet, provided any reference to the world around me. Suddenly within the diffused beams I noted a violent agitation in the fog, as it swirled, and a myriad of colors appeared. The kaleidoscopic pattern changed, opened like a huge iris, to disclose a scene within. Here in this great hollow tube in the fog appeared a remarkable and terrifying drama. Several men, some of them in uniform, others in the rough farm clothing of another century, dragged a handsome Indian, his long hair flowing and muscles rippling—and a small Indian boy—into the foreground.
The adult Indian was securely bound with ropes, and, considering his appearance, evidently had been beaten, and slashed with a knife. He still mustered strength as he tried to free himself and remonstrated loudly, though the entire drama was played out like a silent movie. The boy was not bound but securely held by two of the soldiers.
Suddenly the men threw the wounded man to the ground, kicked him and spat upon him. Withdrawing a ceremonial tomahawk (which I assumed belonged to the victim), one of the soldiers rained a series of bloody blows on the fallen body, as if trying to hack it to pieces. The Indian went limp. The boy struggled in his captors’ grasp, as if wishing to offer assistance to the dying man. The soldiers momentarily released him, then threw him to the ground. As the child rose, one of the men swung the butt of his rifle, hitting him a tremendous blow on the head, crushing his skull with that first blow, I would think. Then he pointed the gun at the fallen adult and discharged it into his pelvic area.
Ben Franklin rolled down the window, stuck his head out, in order to better guide us through the the fog. We crept along at five miles per hour.
“I shouldn’t have taken so long to tell you that awful story,” he apologized, “but the fog usually doesn’t come in this fast.”
Downtown the visibility improved. We stopped at Ball’s restaurant.
“You tell a gory tale,” I half-kidded, half-complimented him. “With the fog, that eerie battle monument, and your harrowing description, for a moment I fancied I was almost actually witnessing the murder of chief Cornstalk.”
The incident represented a black mark on the town’s history. Cornstalk, though powerful and valiant in war, had been the major force in maintaining an uneasy peace. The region began to build and prosper. A few of the settlers, however, along with renegade soldiers, still harbored old grudges; so one night they seized chief Cornstalk and his young son and brutally murdered them.
Such had been the bloody account Ben had rendered, a rare interlude in our discussions and investigations of the Mothman incidents. Ben, after our initial interviews with the two young couples, had become my valuable ally in running down further reports. Because he was well known and highly respected throughout the different economic and social strata of the area, a half dozen prominent people involved in business and politics had confided in him about their own sightings of creatures and flying objects. However, most of them would not consent to have their experiences publicized.
He and I had been returning from the home of one such witness when we stopped to view the fog-enshrouded battle monument. The woman, who insisted on anonymity, was the manager of an important civic-commercial organization in Point Pleasant.
Possibly the very first area witness of Mothman, she told us of a frightening phenomenon she and her father witnessed in 1961.
In the summer of that year she took her father out for a drive on Route 2. She braked the car when they saw what appeared to be a very tall man, in gray clothing, standing facing them in the middle of the highway. When they approached to within 100 yards of it, the figure suddenly spread a set of huge wings, filling the entire width of the road. The man, creature, or whatever it was, then zoomed straight upward.
Both were greatly frightened by the incident, turned and drove directly home. Her father wanted to report it to the police, but they finally decided to keep it to themselves, fearing ridicule if they let the story get out.
Nor did she tell, until this evening, of other puzzling events which took place at her home, located at Gallipolis Ferry, a few miles south of Point Pleasant. Hearing of Ben’s interest in such cases, she came into the store one day, drew him into his office and first told him of seeing a brilliant, multicolored disc in the sky, on March 28.
That was not the thing that had alarmed her, however. Prior to the sighting, odd thumpings on the outside and roof of her house, occurring at three different times, had frightened her. At one time during the thumpings she looked out the window and saw a shadowy shape, suggesting a winged creature, float past it. She heard high-pitched beeping sounds, “somewhere between the cries of a bird and electronic noises”, which seemed to emanate “from all around” her. Her house was on a back road, and she was often alone there during evenings because of her husband’s work which often took him out of town overnight. Because of the incidents she moved to Point Pleasant, where Ben and I had interviewed her.
As we talked, Ben pointed out the similarity of her experiences to those of the Mallette couple. For several weeks after their encounter with Mothman, they were often awakened at night by loud hangings on the top of their house trailer, and what they also described as “beeping sounds”.
Another friend of his, who lived in Ohio, had apprised Ben confidentially of a frightening experience which took place on March 12, 1967, about two weeks previous—though he could neither give me the name of the witness nor introduce me to her.
A housewife was driving home from an evening church service with her daughter when a huge creature, much larger than a man, flew across the road in front of them. It had a wingspan of more than ten feet. Its body was white, and they saw long white hair streaming from the thing’s head.
The family, Ben said, belonged to a small fundamentalist religious sect, and was very devout. They believed the creature was supernatural in nature, and was either Jesus Christ, or one of His angels.
They too reported puzzling events associated with the experience. Their telephone often rang, with nobody on the line, and sometimes did not function for brief periods. Their television set developed interference, when neighbors’ sets worked all right, and they reported that in one instance “a Communist program” had been received on an otherwise unoccupied channel. They had also seen lighted objects land in a gravel pit about a mile from their house.
Ben started to change the subject, but was interrupted by the waitress. After we gave her our orders, Ben hit his fist on the table.
“Doggone it, Gray! There’s something I want to tell you, but every time I think of it, I’m interrupted, and it slips my mind !”
“I know how that is,” I sympathized. “MY GOD!” I thought. “You know I’m supposed to be in Charleston tonight, taping a radio show with Hugh McPherson, and I completely forgot about it! What will I do? Perhaps I could call him up with some manufactured excuse, but I suppose I’ll level with him and tell him I forgot about it. I can always point out, if he argues with me, how he forgot his bird (Hugh is the sole support of and trainer of two Mina birds) in a supermarket, cage and all, and was somewhat embarrassed after it had engaged in language unbecoming to the usual sedateness of the establishment.”
I told Ben how I had been impressed, not only by the quality of most of the Mothman reports, but also by their quantity. I briefly reminded him of some of the other accounts which appeared in the press shortly after the initial sightings in mid-November, 1966.
For example, a man who would not identify himself because “people think those who see this thing are crazy” told
The Point Pleasant Register
that a large bird-like creature appeared in his yard the night of November 14. He discovered the thing after his dog barked loudly. The creature flew upward and to the southwest. As it flew it appeared to be “cigar-shaped” and made a noise “like a Washington time signal…it had a motor or hum to it”.
On November 18 two Point Pleasant volunteer firemen, Captain Paul Yoder and Benjamin Enochs, reported seeing a large bird fly across their car “like a white shadow”. They were in the picnic area of the T.N.T. grounds at the time. “I’d say definitely this was a large bird of some kind,” Yoder reported.
Kenneth Duncan, of Blue Creek, near Charleston, told
The Charleston Gazette
that he and some other men were digging his brother-in-law’s grave on November 16 when something that “looked like a brown human being” flew by. “It was gliding through the trees and was in our sight for about a minute,” Duncan declared.
Nor had sightings of bird creatures been confined to the Ohio valley area. Twenty-three-year-old George Wolfe, Jr., of Beaver Falls, Pa., said that while hunting in Enon Valley during the Thanksgiving weekend he had seen a “seven-foot tall bird that looked something like an ostrich”.
He saw the bird in a cornfield seconds after he had fired at a pheasant which his dog had flushed.
“The bird ran. It did not fly,” he told an investigator of the Congress of Scientific Ufologists. “I could see it dodging in and out among the trees. It didn’t leap over the brush like a deer would do, but just zig-zagged through the trees, in a strange kind of sidewise motion.
I was so startled I didn’t take a shot at it. It had a long neck and a round body with a plumed tail that reached high above its body.
“It had a grayish color and looked about seven feet tall. It was only about 50 feet from me when it stood up and began to run. My dog ran after it, but when Old Ringo caught up with it, he let out a howl. He ran back to me with his tail between his legs and he was howling and whimpering.”
“I told Ben that Dr. Kenneth Parks, curator of birds at the Carnegie museum in Pittsburgh, said Wolfe’s description of the bird led him to believe it was a Sandhill crane, which probably had escaped from a zoo, and had had its wings clipped while in captivity.
“Dr. Parks, we must admit, agrees with the opinion of Dr. Roger Smith of West Virginia University, who read the Point Pleasant reports and pointed to the Sandhill crane as the culprit.”
“At least,” Ben replied, “I think we’ve well established widespread sightings of a bird or birdlike creature. But still it just doesn’t seem to involve something natural. The reports usually have ‘side effects’, as I call them, such as UFO reports accompanying the Mothman accounts; and weird stuff like the hangings on the houses and the beeping noises—and, of course, annoyance of witnesses by unknown visitors.”
We left the restaurant and walked toward the parking lot, where I would pick up my wagon which I had left there to ride in Ben’s car.
He grabbed my shoulder.
“Don’t look just now, but there’s two people you should see.”
I turned slowly toward the street.
Advancing toward the intersection was a tall, emaciated man, and a cheerful, short woman, both, I would say, in their late sixties or early seventies. They first appeared to be holding hands, but as they came closer I could see that they jointly held onto an object which they raised into the air between them.
“Don’t laugh at them,” Ben begged. “Although admittedly they are sort of odd, they are, I would say, two of the finest people in the area. I think you should meet them if only to see their weird ‘scepter’.”
They advanced to the intersection and suddenly the object they held shot up into the air, and they drew back to the curb. After a car went by, they spotted Ben, waved with their free hands, crossed the street and advanced toward us.
