Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of George Johnson of Mason, West Virginia
On a cold week in November 1966, the Mason County sheriff’s office suddenly became the front desk for a national monster story. Within days of the first “man sized bird” sighting near the old TNT area north of Point Pleasant, reporters were calling, cars were lining the back roads, and frightened residents were phoning in strange lights and red eyes in the dark. At the center of that storm sat Sheriff George Johnson, a small town lawman trying to keep order while the rest of the country learned a new word: Mothman.
Most later tellings focus on the creature or on the Silver Bridge. The paper trail from 1966 shows something a little different. It shows a county sheriff listening carefully to witnesses, working with biologists, and using every tool he had, from calm statements to threats of arrest, in order to pull the story back toward the ordinary world.
This piece follows Johnson rather than the monster, using the same contemporary newspapers and police material that underpin the larger Mothman legend.
“I do not discount the stories”
The first wave of reports reached local law enforcement almost immediately after the Scarberry and Mallette couples’ nighttime encounter at the TNT area. As more residents stepped forward, the Morgantown Dominion News ran a wire story under the headline “Mason County Has ‘Flying’ Mystery.” In that piece, United Press International quoted Mason County Sheriff George Johnson as saying that he did not “discount the stories of Steve Mallette and Roger Scarberry and their wives” who swore they had seen the creature several times near the abandoned power plant north of town.
That sentence matters. Johnson was not dismissing people as hysterical or lying. His office took statements, logged calls, and passed information along to the press. Later summaries of the case note that one contractor, Newell Partridge, contacted Johnson to say that he had seen glowing eyes in a field and that his television and dog had behaved strangely, details that soon became part of the standard Mothman narrative.
At the same time, Johnson pushed hard for a natural explanation. In that same Dominion News story, he told the reporter that he believed everyone was seeing a “freak shitepoke,” a regional name for a small heron, and the article went on to describe the bird in ordinary wildlife terms.
Local memory and later reference works have held onto that moment. The West Virginia encyclopedia entry on Mothman and modern retellings from tourism sites to skeptical essays nearly always mention that the county sheriff thought the creature was an unusually large heron and used the old fashioned word “shitepoke.”
In other words, the earliest press coverage casts Johnson as a lawman who took frightened citizens seriously but tried to ground their stories in the bird life of the Ohio River bottomlands rather than in something supernatural.
Bringing in the biologist
If Johnson’s “shitepoke” comment framed the sightings as a bird problem, a Huntington reporter soon handed him a more formal explanation. On November 19, 1966, the Huntington Herald Dispatch ran Ralph Turner’s article “That Mothman: Would You Believe a Sandhill Crane?” In it, wildlife biologist Dr Robert L. Smith of West Virginia University told Johnson that, based on the descriptions he had read, the “thing” frightening people around Point Pleasant matched a sandhill crane that had wandered off its usual migration route.
Turner’s story carefully described the crane: a bird about five feet tall with gray plumage, a wingspan around seven feet, and a bright red patch of bare skin around each eye. Those details lined up neatly with the reports of a tall, gray, winged figure with glowing or red eyes near the McClintic Wildlife Station. For a sheriff trying to settle a scared county, a rare migratory bird that was already protected under state and federal law made more sense than a winged omen.
Within a few weeks, the crane explanation had left West Virginia through national wire coverage. An Associated Press story titled “Monster Bird With Red Eyes May Be Crane,” carried in papers such as the Gettysburg Times, repeated the suggestion that the mystery figure might be a sandhill crane, passing along the calm voices of local officials and biologists to readers far from the Ohio River.
From the perspective of local law enforcement, this was success. Sheriff Johnson and his allies had turned a baffling set of calls into something that could be filed under “unusual wildlife” rather than under “mass panic.” Whether or not witnesses accepted the bird theory, the sheriff had a story he could give to reporters and residents that did not involve monsters.
The law on the bird’s side
The most revealing glimpse of Johnson’s role may come from a November 19, 1966 editorial feature in the Point Pleasant Register titled “Our ‘Bird’ Has Law On Its Side.” In that piece, the Register explained that if the mystery creature turned out to be a sandhill crane, then it enjoyed the protection of migratory bird laws. The article quoted Sheriff George Johnson saying that he would arrest anyone caught in the TNT area with a loaded gun after dark and noted that he had asked residents not to harm the bird.
By that point, the bigger problem for the sheriff’s office was no longer a single creature. It was the influx of armed monster hunters and thrill seekers. Contemporary coverage mentions people roaming the McClintic Wildlife Station at night with rifles, cars clogging narrow roads, and families uneasy about strangers around their homes. Later summaries by local historians and museum staff point out that Johnson and his deputies had to respond to trespassing, accidental gunfire, and traffic, not just to things seen in the sky.
Johnson’s public stance was simple. If the thing was a bird, it fell under wildlife regulations. Those regulations existed to protect rare species and to keep people from taking matters into their own hands. By promising to enforce them, he tried to pull his county out of vigilante mode and back into the slower processes of law and conservation.
Paperwork, police cards, and the making of a legend
Behind the headlines and interviews, the sheriff’s office produced the usual paperwork that comes with any cluster of unusual complaints. Witnesses’ statements were typed up. Telephone calls were logged. Deputies’ notes and incident cards recorded times, locations, and comments.
Many of those documents survive today in the Mothman Museum and Research Center in downtown Point Pleasant. Smithsonian Folklife and local public history projects describe how curator Jeff Wamsley has assembled original police reports, photocopies of the Scarberry and Mallette statement, and other materials from law enforcement files alongside photographs and news clippings.
Seen together, those records put Sheriff Johnson back at the center of the story. When witnesses described a “large bird with red eyes” or a “man sized bird” chasing cars, they did so in interviews at his office or with his deputies. When later writers and filmmakers quote those early descriptions, they are drawing indirectly on paperwork created under Johnson’s watch.
How later writers remember the sheriff
Modern scholarship on Mothman rarely spends many pages on Johnson himself, yet he appears in nearly every serious account. Donnie Sergent Jr and Jeff Wamsley’s book Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend reproduces the Register and Herald Dispatch articles and highlights the sheriff’s early comments as part of the official record. Cultural geographer David Dixon’s essay on “Fortean geographies” of the legend examines how press coverage and local authorities worked together to situate the sightings within familiar landscapes like the TNT area instead of treating them as free floating supernatural events.
More recent work by Eleanor Hasken, whose dissertation “The Migration of a Local Legend: The Case of Mothman” traces how the story travels through communities and media, also leans on these same 1966 articles and police records. Daniel A Reed’s Skeptical Inquirer article “The Mothman and the Crane: A Contemporary Perspective” revisits the bird explanations proposed at the time and argues that some sightings may fit large herons even better than sandhill cranes, which indirectly supports Johnson’s original hunch.
Outside academic circles, popular retellings from Snopes fact checks to travel blogs still quote Johnson’s “shitepoke” line as shorthand for local skepticism. In many of these pieces, he appears as the practical Appalachian sheriff who insists on birds and wildlife regulations while the legend around him grows stranger with every telling.
A lawman’s place in a hometown legend
Compared to witnesses, investigators, or later writers, we know very little about Sheriff George Johnson’s life before or after the Mothman flap. The primary sources show his title, his office, and his decisions in the space of a few intense weeks in late 1966. That limitation is part of what makes his role so revealing.
In those weeks, Johnson did what many rural sheriffs have done when confronted with something that frightened their neighbors. He listened to people who came in shaking and swore that they had seen a creature that did not fit any line in a field guide. He checked with experts, in this case a university biologist, and passed the explanation along. He worried, perhaps more than anyone else, about what would happen if crowds of armed men kept converging on a wildlife area after dark. He used his authority to protect both residents and whatever unknown thing was out there, at least long enough for the county to calm down.
The legend that grew from those events eventually left him behind. As books, documentaries, and festivals remade the story into one about omens and prophecies, Sheriff Johnson became a supporting character whose main job in the narrative was to insist that the monster was a bird. Yet the surviving newspapers and police records remind us that every famous haunting or cryptid story in Appalachia unfolds within real institutions and under real names written on office doors.
For Mothman, one of those names was George Johnson. His effort to keep Mason County’s “bird” inside the bounds of law and ecology did not stop the legend from spreading, but it did leave a clear imprint on how that legend was first framed. Even today, anyone who digs back to the 1966 clippings will find a sheriff who refused to mock his neighbors, insisted on ordinary explanations, and threatened to arrest anyone who tried to solve a mystery with a loaded rifle in the dark.
Sources & Further Reading
“Couples See Man-Sized Bird…Creature…Something.” Point Pleasant Register (Point Pleasant, WV), November 16, 1966. https://themothman.fandom.com/wiki/Couples_See_Man-Sized_Bird…Creature…Something
Samsell, John. “City Getting ‘The Bird,’ Want It or Not.” Point Pleasant Register (Point Pleasant, WV), November 17, 1966. https://themothman.fandom.com/wiki/City_Getting_%27The_Bird%2C%27_Want_It_Or_Not
“Mason County Has ‘Flying’ Mystery.” Dominion News (Morgantown, WV), November 18, 1966. https://themothman.fandom.com/wiki/Mason_County_has_%27Flying%27_Mystery
“Our ‘Bird’ Has Law on Its Side.” Point Pleasant Register (Point Pleasant, WV), November 19, 1966. https://themothman.fandom.com/wiki/Our_%E2%80%98Bird%E2%80%99_Has_Law_On_Its_Side
Turner, Ralph. “That Mothman: Would You Believe a Sandhill Crane?” Huntington Herald Dispatch (Huntington, WV), November 19, 1966. themothman.fandom.com https://themothman.fandom.com/wiki/That_Mothman%3A_Would_You_Believe_A_Sandhill_Crane%3F
Turner, Ralph. “Mason Bird-Monster Presumed Gone Now.” Huntington Herald Dispatch (Huntington, WV), November 22, 1966. janeway.uncpress.org https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/mothman2.jpg
Associated Press. “Monster Bird With Red Eyes May Be Crane.” Gettysburg Times (Gettysburg, PA), December 1, 1966. HandWiki https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=LG0mAAAAIBAJ&pg=620,2790721&hl=en
“Newspaper clippings relating to Mothman sightings, 1966.” West Virginia Archives and History, Charleston, WV. Digital images mothman1.jpg, mothman2.jpg, mothman3.jpg. Apple Podcasts https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/mothman1.jpg
“Legend of the Mothman.” Historical marker, Point Pleasant, Mason County, West Virginia. Historical Marker Database. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=17673
Mothman Museum and Research Center. Archival collection of police reports, photographs, and ephemera relating to the 1966–1967 Mothman sightings. Point Pleasant, WV. Amazon Music+1 https://www.mothmanmuseum.com
“Mothman.” West Virginia Archives and History, Notable Events in West Virginia History. West Virginia Division of Culture and History. Scribd http://www.wvculture.org/history/notewv/mothman.html
“Mothman.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. Academia http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1563
“Silver Bridge Collapse.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. West Virginia Encyclopedia https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/391
“Silver Bridge Collapse.” West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries, November 23, 2020. WVU Libraries News https://news.lib.wvu.edu/2020/11/23/silver-bridge-collapse
“The Silver Bridge Collapses, Killing 46, December 15, 1967.” West Virginia Public Broadcasting, December 15, 2020. West Virginia Public Broadcasting https://wvpublic.org/the-silver-bridge-collapses-killing-46-december-15-1967
Sergent, Donnie Jr., and Jeff Wamsley. Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend. Point Pleasant, WV: Mothman Lives Publishing, 2002. Internet Archive+1 https://archive.org/details/mothmanfactsbehi0000serg
Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975. Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/johnkeelthemothmanprophecies.atruestorybookzz.org
Dixon, David. “Exploring ‘Fortean Geographies’ with the Mothman.” Cultural Geographies 14, no. 4 (2007): 489–504. JSTOR+1 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1474474007075354
Reed, Daniel A. “The Mothman and the Crane: A Contemporary Perspective.” Skeptical Inquirer 46, no. 4 (July–August 2022). Skeptical Inquirer https://skepticalinquirer.org/2022/06/the-mothman-and-the-crane-a-contemporary-perspective
Heilman, Joseph. “Omens in the Sky: A Historical and Comparative Examination of the Mothman and Other Winged Legends.” Journal of Undergraduate Research, University of North Carolina Asheville, Fall 2025. janeway.uncpress.org https://janeway.uncpress.org/capstone/article/2453/galley/2954/download
“Mothman.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman
Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. “An Ode to a Hometown Creature: Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia.” Folklife Magazine, June 7, 2021. Smithsonian Folklife Center https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/mothman-point-pleasant-west-virginia
Traditional Legends. “West Virginia’s Mothman and His Historical Kin.” July 27, 2022. Traditional Legends https://www.traditionallegends.com/post/west-virginia-s-mothman-and-his-historical-kin
Steffen, Darrah. “The Mothman.” January 24, 2022. Darrah Steffen https://darrahsteffenwrites.wordpress.com/2022/01/24/the-mothman
Alexandria Ghosts. “Mothman: The Harbinger of Doom.” 2024. Facebook https://alexandriaghosts.com/mothman-the-harbinger-of-doom
Wheeler-Dubas, Maria. “BioPGH Blog: What Wildlife Might Be Hiding in a Modern Monster Lore?” Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, October 19, 2022. Wikipedia https://www.phipps.conservatory.org/blog/detail/biopgh-blog-what-wildlife-might-be-hiding-in-a-modern-monster-lore
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “From Mothman to the Silver Bridge: 13 Months in the Life of a Local Journalist.” October 20, 2025. West Virginia Public Broadcasting https://news.lib.wvu.edu/2025/10/20/from-mothman-to-the-silver-bridge-13-months-in-the-life-of-a-local-journalist
Soul of Athens. “Mothman.” Lore of Appalachia project, 2020. Soul of Athens https://2020.soulofathens.com/lore-of-appalachia/mothman
West Virginia Department of Commerce. “First Sighting of the Mothman.” 2017. reddit.com http://www.wvcommerce.org/news/story/First-sighting-of-the-Mothman/1215/default.aspx
Daly, J. “Narrative Hijacking: Mothman and the Silver Bridge Collapse.” Research Week 2020, Utah State University. digitalcommons.usu.edu https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/researchweek/ResearchWeek2020/All2020/13
Author Note: As someone who has already written about Mothman’s legend, I wanted to go back to the newspapers and police material to foreground the sheriff who sat at the center of the first scare. I hope this piece helps you see George Johnson not just as a skeptical quote in the clippings, but as a local lawman trying to keep his community safe during a very strange few weeks.