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Mothman still has hold on man who tracked down tale
Posted on Saturday, September 16, 2006 (CDT) by Thoth
 In 1966, Ralph Turner was a 27-year-old reporter at the Huntington Herald-Dispatch, writing stories about city politics and crime that would lay the groundwork for a distinguished journalism career.
On a chilly November night that year, Turner was sent out, on what seemed at the time like a wild goose chase, to do a story that lives on to this day. He spent a few hours in a Mason County field under cover of dark waiting for a chance encounter with the Mothman.
This weekend at the Fifth Annual Mothman Festival, Turner will recount the time he spent investigating sightings of the creature in the Point Pleasant area and his part in one of the most best-known mysteries in Mountain State history. It's a story Turner once pledged he wasn't going to tell anymore.
But the monster, or the myth at least, has a hold on him.
"No matter what I did in my
career as a professor or all my years as a reporter, this is what
follows me," Turner said. "I decided a year ago I wasn't going to talk
about it again, but I shouldn't have done that. I almost gave it up,
but you can't. Mothman won't go away."
Turner, an award-winning
journalist and retired Marshall University professor, has for years
told his tales to Boy Scout troops and Rotary Clubs. They tend to
capture an audience's imagination, not because he has any real answers
about the mystifying red-eyed creature, but because he has first-hand
experience of what it was like when the monster captivated an entire
town.
He went to Point Pleasant that night in 1966 not really knowing what to expect.
"I had one of those tough
city editors," Turner recalls. "He called me up and told me to go up
there and check out the nonsense. He didn't believe in it at all."
Turner didn't either. Well, not really.
"It seemed unrealistic that
it was some sort of Mothman thing, so the challenge was to find out
what was going on," he said. "I didn't think there could be such a
thing, but I do remember I stopped at my house on the way and got a
ball bat. Just in case."
Turner and a photographer from the newspaper made the hour-long drive from Huntington to Point Pleasant in an old Ford Bronco.
"It was foggy around the
river," he says. "It looked like Dracula-type weather all along Route
2. It was misty and foggy and damp."
The duo set up shop near
the abandoned powerhouse in Point Pleasant, known as the TNT area. It
was the place where most of the Mothman sightings, which numbered 10 or
so at that time, had occurred.
Even at 10 o'clock at night, the spot was crowded with people hoping to catch a glimpse of the monster.
"There were people still
stirring, and we just set up some railroad ties there, and we kind of
camped out with our reporters' pads and cameras," Turner said. "We
stayed up all night and didn't see anything."
The story didn't end there, of course. Turner took it upon himself to try and find the source of the weird phenomenon.
He called a biology
professor at West Virginia University, and wound up writing the first
report that attempted to solve the mystery and explain the sightings as
something other than the supernatural.
A story -- "That Mothman?
Would You Believe a Sandhill Crane?" -- appeared that week in the
Herald-Dispatch with Turner's byline. Nonbelievers still tout the story
today as proof that the Mason County myth is based on a bird.
In an interview with Turner
and with local police, biologist Robert Smith said descriptions of the
Mothman perfectly matched those of a sandhill crane, a huge winged bird
usually found in the Deep South and in Canada.
Smith said he thought one
of the animals, with its seven-foot wingspan and ringed, fleshy red
eyes, might have gotten caught in a corner of West Virginia while
trying to migrate further north.
Turner's story temporarily stalled furious speculation in Point Pleasant, but the crane explanation didn't hold up for long.
"I figured, case closed,
people saw a bird," Turner said. "I think there's a logical reason for
everything, and it was the most logical conclusion I know of that
anybody has offered. Obviously, a lot of people didn't agree with me."
Turner says he only wrote,
at most, a handful of stories about the Mothman sightings, but he has
become one of the central characters in the story that's now known
nationwide and that became the basis for a blockbuster movie just a few
years ago.
"I started getting calls
from friends telling me that someone had done a book in Indiana or
somewhere and I was known in it as the Mothman reporter," Turner said.
"The movie was a real stretch. I like to kid that Richard Gere played
my part."
Turner will be a keynote
speaker in this weekend's Mothman Festival, an event that's growing
each year and is expected to attract as many as 5,000 monster fans and
paranormal experts from all over the country.
He isn't planning on
publicizing the fact he still believes the legend of the Mothman
probably was born by people witnessing the frenzied fight for freedom
of a lost bird.
"I don't think they're
going to change it to the Sandhill Crane Festival," Turner quipped.
"For years in Point Pleasant, they didn't know much about it. The movie
has had to do with a lot of it, but they have a lot of fun with it."
In one of his news stories
about the Mothman, Turner turned speculative about whether the mystery
might ever be solved. He seemed to have fairly accurate foresight of
how the incident would forever change the county.
"Just what was seen in the
dark that night may never be firmly established," he wrote in a Nov.
22, 1966 story. "The Mason County monster may become a legend. Maybe a
new tourist attraction has been born."
Copyright: Charleston Daily Mail
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Re: Mothman still has hold on man who tracked down tale
by Hypatia on Saturday, September 16, 2006 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message) | | I don't understand the picture. Is it the crane? Is it a statue of mothman? I would like to see the crane. |
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Re: Mothman still has hold on man who tracked down tale
by FyreSpirit on Saturday, September 16, 2006 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message | Journal) | Here you go, this page has info on sandhill cranes and some pics.
http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/framlst/i2060id.html
I used to see these in Florida, there was a meadow near us where they wintered. In the spring they would have a couple of fuzzy chicks too. |
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