Qualla: Point Pleasant

Point Pleasant: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. On November 12, 1966, five men digging a grave in Clendenin, West Virginia, reported seeing a man-shaped creature with wings rise from the trees above them. Three days later, two young couples driving past an abandoned World War II munitions plant outside Point Pleasant saw something with red eyes step out into their headlights and chase their car back into town. The local paper, the Point Pleasant Register, ran the story. A reporter from a nearby paper coined a name: Mothman. Over the next thirteen months, more than a hundred people reported seeing the thing - around the TNT plant, along Route 62, on country lanes outside town. Then, on the evening of December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River buckled at rush hour and dropped 46 people into the river. The Mothman sightings dropped off too. People in Point Pleasant have been arguing about the connection ever since.

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Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Point Pleasant: Two Rivers, Two Histories

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 Virgin...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Point Pleasant: Cornstalk's Curse

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

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Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Point Pleasant: The Silver Bridge

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit E.F. Schrand and A.R. Arend, Public domain. 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...

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Image: E.F. Schrand and A.R. Arend | Public domain

Point Pleasant: A Tourism Industry Built on a Cryptid

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

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Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Point Pleasant: Flying Over the Confluence

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. 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 ol...

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Image: Nyttend | Public domain