In 1942, the U.S. Army built a TNT factory on 8,323 acres of farmland north of Point Pleasant, hired 3,500 workers, and spent forty-five million wartime dollars assembling boilers, acid plants, and concrete bunkers across what had been pasture. By 1945, the war ended and the plant shut down. The Army sold off the land, and the bunkers were left where they stood. Three decades later, in November 1966, two young couples driving past those same concrete domes reported being chased by a winged creature with red eyes. Three decades after that, in 1981, fishermen began noticing that the ponds inside what was now a wildlife refuge had turned a reddish color. The TNT had been seeping into the groundwater for forty years. Few American landscapes have absorbed quite this many strange chapters in a single century.
The West Virginia Ordnance Works was one of dozens of TNT plants the Army built in 1941 and 1942 to feed an artillery-and-bomb economy that was suddenly fighting on three continents. The site north of Point Pleasant offered flat ground, river access for shipping, and an existing workforce in the Ohio Valley's industrial towns. From 1942 to 1945, the plant produced trinitrotoluene at industrial scale, with 3,500 workers operating around the clock. The acid plant and laboratory buildings still stand in archival photographs - sprawling, austere, the architecture of wartime emergency. Then VE Day came, then VJ Day, and the order book vanished. The Army shuttered the facility almost overnight, drained what it could, and walked away.
The 8,323 acres did not stay together long. Some of the land became the McClintic Wildlife Management Area, where today hunters track deer and birders chase warblers through the marshes that grew up around the abandoned bunkers. About 2,788 acres went to the state for wildlife use. Another chunk became Mason County Airport (FAA identifier 3I2), still in operation as a general aviation field. An industrial park took a slice. A municipal landfill took another. By the 1960s, the wartime fence had been pulled down and the bunkers - rounded concrete arches, half-buried in earth - were just features of the local landscape, places where teenagers parked and hunters waited out rain showers.
Around 1979, fishermen working the McClintic ponds began reporting an unusual reddish tint to the water around certain bunkers. Testing in 1981 found what wartime TNT factories tend to leave behind: trinitrotoluene itself, plus dinitrotoluene and various breakdown products, all of them toxic and persistent. The pink-red color was characteristic of TNT-contaminated groundwater. On September 8, 1983, the EPA listed the site on the National Priorities List - the federal Superfund roster of the most polluted places in America. West Virginia ranked it the state's top cleanup priority, and at one point it was in the national top ten. Cleanup has dragged on for four decades. As of FY 2019, the federal government estimated the total cost at around $72 million, and 2,704 acres remained on the NPL list awaiting full remediation.
It was in this landscape - the bunkers, the marshes, the abandoned acid plant - that Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette claimed, on the night of November 15, 1966, to have encountered something with red eyes and folded wings near what locals called 'the TNT area.' Whatever they actually saw, the spot was perfect for cryptid mythology: dozens of empty concrete domes scattered through bottomland forest, accessible by dirt roads, eerie even in daylight. For the next year, the TNT area drew sightings the way it had once drawn munitions workers. Today, you can still walk among the bunkers in the McClintic WMA. Most are heavily graffitied. Some have collapsed. Their dome shapes remain instantly recognizable - munitions storage in standard 1940s pattern, now half-claimed by trees.
From the air, the old ordnance works reads as a strange checkerboard of land uses: the long runway of Mason County Airport in one corner, the green of the wildlife management area filling most of the middle, an industrial park stretching toward the river, and the scattered dots of bunkers still visible through the tree canopy in winter. The bunkers themselves are too small to identify from cruising altitude, but in low-altitude reconnaissance they are everywhere - regular arrays of concrete that no longer fit any obvious purpose. The Ohio River bends past to the west, and Point Pleasant sits a few miles south. The whole site is a wartime industrial footprint that has been overgrown but not erased.
Located at 38.93°N, 82.08°W, on the flat bottomland between the Ohio River and the foothills, north of Point Pleasant. Mason County Airport (3I2) sits within the old ordnance works footprint - look for its single runway as your anchor. McClintic WMA's marshes and the scattered TNT bunkers extend north and west of the runway. Nearest alternate airports: Gallipolis Municipal (KGAS) across the river, Mid-Ohio Valley Regional (KPKB) about 35 nm northeast. The site is best identified from 3,000-5,000 feet AGL on a clear day.