Good evening,
Welcome to Beneath the Shadows, a quiet place that exists somewhere in the grey between the fading light and the imminent night. A place where the darkest nightmares from around the world claw their way at the veil between dreams and daylight. Be sure you don’t get lost… Beneath the Shadows…
Tonight, we delve into a legend that clings to the darkness of West Virginia, a story woven from fear and fueled by the chilling certainty of impending disaster. We’ll be examining the tale of the Mothman, a creature of unsettling appearance and presence. Reports began in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in November 1966, detailing sightings of a large, winged creature with glowing red eyes. These weren’t isolated occurrences; they coincided with a series of unsettling events – structural failures, strange noises, and, most terrifyingly, the feeling that something terrible was about to happen. The legend quickly escalated, becoming inextricably linked to the collapse of the Silver Bridge in December of that year, a tragedy that claimed 46 lives. And now, we’ll examine a recently discovered, handwritten journal detailing a series of sightings leading up to the disaster, offering a new, chilling perspective on the creature and the events surrounding it.
For the consideration of the Shadow Society… The Crimson Echoes of Point Pleasant
The rain hammered against the windows of the abandoned Mill Creek Bridge house, a relentless, drumming reminder of the storm raging outside. I, Elias Thorne, was a historian specializing in regional folklore and, frankly, a sucker for a good ghost story. I’d inherited this dilapidated building – and the obsessive journal of Samuel Abernathy, a local mechanic who’d been documenting the Mothman sightings in the weeks leading up to the Silver Bridge collapse. Abernathy was a pragmatic man, a mechanic by trade, and his entries were remarkably detailed, devoid of the hysteria often associated with such legends.
The journal was written in a cramped, almost frantic hand. He’d started observing the creature – initially dismissing it as a large, unusually colored owl – around November 1st. “It’s… unsettling,” he’d written. “About the size of a small horse, dark feathers, cloaked in shadows, and those eyes, my god those eyes. They don’t reflect light; they pull it. It always seems to be watching from the edges of the woods, near the old TNT silos.”
The entries grew increasingly frequent, more panicked. “It started appearing near the bridge. Three times this week. Each time, the air felt… thick. Like static. And I swear, the sound – a high-pitched whine, almost painful. It’s driving me mad.” He’d sketched crude drawings of the Mothman – a tall, slender silhouette with oversized, crimson eyes, unlike any creature he’d ever seen.
Abernathy’s meticulous notes documented a pattern. The creature always appeared before a structural issue manifested. He’d identified a distinct ritual he believed it was performing. He mused the creature to be a herald of some inevitable ruin. He put his work aside and dedicated his time to charting the timing of the sightings, carefully noting the precise angles of where it seemed to be looking, the intensity of the whine, and the temperature drops he experienced when it was near.
“November 22nd,” he’d written, his handwriting shaking. “I caught it in my headlights. It was… closer than ever, just standing there in the middle of the road facing me. The whine was deafening. My car radio blazed to life with some high pitched whispering, almost words. I felt a pressure in my head, and with it a feeling of dread and urgency. In my panic I lost control of the car and it spun nearly all the way around when I slammed the brakes. I looked back to where it had been standing and it was gone. I heard a great whooshing sound that I knew to be the beating of giant wings. Every nerve in my body screamed not to look, but I forced my gaze up. For a single heartbeat that seemed to stretch to hours it held there, silhouetted by the full moon, darker than even the night it seemed to be cloaked in, and then it was gone. The whooshing sound grew more faint and suddenly I realized I had been holding my breath. With a gasp I collapsed to my knees. Once I recovered I walked back to my car, the sound of the engine the only noise in the night. The car’s headlights lit the side of the bridge, casting broken shadows across the support column on the other side and I knew. I knew what was coming.”
I’d spent weeks poring over his entries, attempting to understand the logic, the pattern. I believed Abernathy was onto something, a terrifyingly accurate prediction of the bridge’s eventual collapse, but how? I turned the page to see the final entry, dated November 23rd, the day of the disaster. It was different. The handwriting was calmer, almost serene.
“It’s beautiful,” he’d written. “The eyes… they don’t warn of destruction. They show me everything. I understand now. There was a calm silence, and my head was suddenly clear. The pressure had stopped once I accepted the truth. The creature… it didn’t cause the collapse. It revealed it. It’s not a harbinger of doom; it’s a window. And through that window… I see the future. I see myself.”
I stared at the last line, a cold dread seizing me. I examined the final sketch – a detailed rendering of a man, sitting in a chair, the very same chair in which I now sat, hunched over a book, the rain drumming against the windows. Abernathy hadn’t been documenting the Mothman; he’d been a prisoner of it. The creature hadn’t caused the bridge to collapse. It had simply presented a pre-ordained future to someone who was already destined to witness and record it. Abernathy, in his obsessive pursuit, had become part of the legend, a catalyst himself, fulfilling the creature’s strange, unsettling purpose.
Suddenly, the lights flickered, plunging the house into near darkness. The rain intensified, and a high-pitched whine, just barely audible, filled the air. I turned, and there, silhouetted against the rain-streaked windows, was a figure. Large and dark, with two impossibly bright, crimson eyes. It wasn’t watching me with menace; it was… observing. And I realized with horrifying certainty as I looked at the pencil that had seemed to appear in my hand that I wasn’t reading Abernathy’s journal. I was writing it.
So who was the author of the journal? Abernathy? Thorne? Or was one just the shattered psyche of the other, driven to madness by visions we could never hope to understand?
We may never know the real truth of the author or of the creature who haunted him. Abernathy, or was it Thorne, was never heard from again. A quiet cabin on a lonely hillside the only testamant to the events lain to paper in a dusty, leather bound journal.
A journal that only exists…Beneath the Shadows.