Point Pleasant sits at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers, on a flat triangle of land that the Shawnee and Mingo nations had used as a hunting ground for generations. The town's older claim to fame predates Mothman by nearly two centuries: on October 10, 1774, a Virginia militia force fought a Shawnee army led by Chief Cornstalk on this same ground. The Battle of Point Pleasant ended with a Shawnee withdrawal and a treaty that kept the Ohio Country nations out of the alliance the British were trying to assemble against the colonies. Some historians - especially West Virginia ones - call it the first battle of the American Revolution. The more conservative reading is that it was the closing engagement of Dunmore's War, a colonial conflict that nonetheless shaped what came next.

Three years after the battle, Chief Cornstalk traveled to Point Pleasant under a flag of truce to warn the Americans that some of his warriors planned to side with the British. He was taken hostage, and when militiamen learned that another Shawnee had killed two American soldiers nearby, they murdered Cornstalk in his cell. Legend says he died with a curse on his lips - that the land of Point Pleasant would suffer for two hundred years. The curse is a piece of folklore rather than documented history; no contemporary record captures his last words. But after the bridge collapse, after a series of plane crashes and industrial accidents in the area, people in Point Pleasant began telling the story again, weaving Cornstalk and Mothman into a single explanation for a town that seemed to attract calamity.

The Silver Bridge spanned the Ohio River between Point Pleasant and Kanauga, Ohio, carrying U.S. Route 35. It opened in 1928 and was named for the aluminum paint on its eyebar suspension chains. On December 15, 1967, at 4:58 p.m., a single eyebar fractured at a corrosion-weakened pinhole. Within seconds the entire bridge - 750 feet of steel and roadway, with rush-hour traffic on it - collapsed into the river. Forty-six people died. Investigators later determined that stress corrosion cracking in a single eyebar, made worse by decades of weathering on a design with no redundancy, had brought the whole structure down. The disaster prompted the first national bridge inspection program in American history. The replacement, the Silver Memorial Bridge, opened in 1969 a mile downstream. The original piers still rise from the riverbed in low water.

Point Pleasant has embraced the Mothman in the way struggling river towns embrace whatever they have. The annual Mothman Festival each September draws thousands of visitors, far more than the town's regular population of roughly 4,300. A twelve-foot stainless-steel Mothman statue stands downtown. The Mothman Museum on Main Street displays sighting reports, props from the 2002 film, and a serious archive about the case. You can buy a Mothman T-shirt, a Mothman plush, and yes, a Mothman drink at the local coffee shop. The marketing leans into the strangeness without entirely abandoning the underlying tragedy - the bridge collapse, the lives lost, the questions that were never quite answered. The town has chosen to live with its legend rather than outrun it.

From the air, the geometry of Point Pleasant is obvious: a wedge of West Virginia squeezed between two rivers, with bridges crossing east and west into Ohio and south into Mason County. The flat bottomland makes the town look small and the rivers look enormous. The site of the old TNT plant, where Mothman was first reported, lies just northeast in what is now the McClintic Wildlife Management Area - a network of concrete munitions bunkers from World War II, still standing, now covered in graffiti and surrounded by marsh. The Gallipolis Locks and Dam churn the river just upstream. The whole confluence reads as a place where two valleys meet and where, for one strange year, a town swore something with red eyes was watching back from the trees.