Monster Bird Haunts Webster County

When the first reports of a monster terrorizing the area around Pt. Pleasant, WV started pouring in at the end of 1966, the sightings all had one thing in common. Not one witness ever described an actual…moth. The term Mothman was the invention of a newspaper reporter, taking inspiration from pop culture at the time. What people WERE describing was a bird. A very, very large, man-like bird. 

This wouldn’t be the first time a giant bird would haunt the people of West Virginia. In February of 1895, Webster County would be the site of a rash of sightings, and even attacks, by what locals referred to as a giant eagle. 

The trouble began when Landy Junkins, the ten-year-old daughter of Dan Junkins of Bergoo mysteriously disappeared. Landy’s mother had sent the young girl out one Friday around noon to visit the cabin of Joe Warnick. Landy was to walk the 1.5 miles from the Junkins cabin to the Warnick cabin to check on Mrs. Warnick, who had been ill. When she didn’t return home by that evening, her father set out to look for her. Thinking perhaps she had stayed with the Warnicks, he went straight to their cabin, only to find that Landy never made it there. 

An intensive search began that evening and lasted all the next day. The only thing that was found of the girl were her tracks in the snow. Her tracks led off the trail and into a small clearing, where it became apparent that she circled around, rather frantically, before her tracks just disappeared. It was almost as if something had come down from the sky and carried her off….

That’s exactly what people believed happened as in the following weeks, more and more reports of a giant bird were made public. Peter Swadley, a bear hunter, was out with his dog Gunner, hunting on Piney Ridge. Suddenly, a giant bird swooped down on him and attempted to lift him. The creature’s sharp talons tore into his back and head, ripping his coat to shreds, and partially scalping him. The only thing that saved him was that his dog came running. The bird stopped attacking Swadley, and turned its attention to the dog, ripping it open before carrying it off. 

Swadley made it over a mile away to the cabin of Abe Kitsmiller, who brought him to town to treat his wounds. Despite a severe loss of blood and other injuries, Swadley recovered. His dog, however, was never seen again. 

In another incident, Deputy Sheriff Rube Nihiser and his son also had an encounter with the giant bird, and from a ‘safe’ distance away, were able to get a good description of the creature as it attacked a doe and her fawn. The Nihisers described the bird to have a wingspan of 15 to 18 feet and a body as big as a man. Its feathers were dark brown, with white on the wings. The eyes were large and shining. The sound it made was a terrible, shrill shriek.

Dogs, deer, and even sheep were not immune to the dangers of the giant bird. Hanse Hardrick kept a few sheep in a shed during the winter months. He locked the shed and headed into town, but upon his return, saw that someone or something had made a huge hole in the roof of the shed. Wool was caught around the edges of the hole and one of his sheep was missing. No tracks were observed anywhere near the shed or property, and the sheep was never found. Hardrick, believing a ghost, or ‘harnt’ as he called it, was to blame, covered the shed and property with small crosses made from hemlock boughs. 

But it wasn’t a ghost. Ol’ Pap Tammen, the oldest man in Webster County knew what it was. Many years before, TWO giant birds spent an entire winter terrorizing the countryside. It was believed that those two birds, as well as this one, made their den atop the isolated Snaggle Tooth Knob, an area inaccessible by man even in the best weather. It is unclear as to whether the creature of 1895 was one of the original two giant birds, their off-spring, or another altogether. 

Was the Mothman of Pt. Pleasant simply another one of these ‘giant eagles,’ or was the ‘giant eagle’ of Snaggle Tooth Knob actually an early visitation by the creature we now know as Mothman?

St. Louis Globe-Democrat 14 February 1895