10 Terrifying Monsters That (We Hope!) Don't Exist

2. Mothman

"The nocturnal butterfly. In ancient cultures, the moth represents a form of the psyche, or the soul immortally trapped in the hellish death realms. Mothman. Well, that's what the Ukrainians called him. Rough translation of course. There were a hundred sightings in Chernobyl when the nuclear pump went down. Galveston, nineteen sixty-nine, just before the hurricane. They saw it. But seeing isn't always believing€. €“ Alexander Leek from the film The Mothman Prophecies (2002). From November 1966 to December 1967, locals in and around the sleepy town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, saw something that they just couldn€™t explain... The Mothman was just one part of a series of paranormal phenomena, which included lights in the sky, visits from mysterious €˜Men in Black€™ (who may or may not have been involved in the death of a local journalist) and various other unexplainable phenomena. First sighted in a cemetery in 1966, Mothman (so named for a character in the popular €˜Batman€™ TV series) then went on to chase cars, frighten young couples and generally strike terror into the frigid hearts of anyone unfortunate enough to encounter it. The sightings culminated with the collapse of The Silver Bridge, a tragic event that caused the deaths of 46 people and, from there, Mothman was seen as an omen of death and tragedy. Just as four crows flying over an English house is said to foretell misfortune, or birds peering into windows supposedly denotes a person€™s death, sightings of The Mothman tapped directly into ages old folklore and superstition, mostly forgotten by the residents of Point Pleasant. This superstition became especially rife as locals struggled to come to terms with such an awful turn of events striking their quiet little town. The belief in Mothman as a warning of impending disaster, or of the creature actively causing bad things to happen is especially potent today, as Mothman sightings appear to have gone global. Mothman was apparently sighted (and photographed) in the area around the World Trade Center just before the tragic events of 9/11 occurred. He also is said to have appeared to miners in Freiberg, Germany, shortly before a major collapse. Since the mid 1970€™s, a similar creature is occasionally sighted here in the UK (specifically, Cornwall), where we call him €˜Owlman€™. It has been suggested by some that the Mothman sightings were actually those of a Sandhill crane, which is a bird large enough (and unfamiliar enough to locals) to be the root of at least a few of the alleged sightings. We don€™t know about you, but that version of events is a little bland (and something of a letdown when stacked against the version detailed above...) Still, if nothing else, we got a pretty great movie out of it in 2002, as well as lots of lovely creepypasta for ghoulish, net-savvy insomniacs to enjoy...