Appalachian Folklore & Myths
On a September evening in 1952, a handful of boys on a schoolyard in central West Virginia watched a bright object streak across the sky and vanish behind a hill on a neighbor’s farm. Within an hour they were stumbling back down that hill with their mother, a National Guardsman, and a terrified dog, telling anyone who would listen that they had just come face to face with something twelve feet tall, glowing, and not quite human.
Newspapers would dub it the Braxton County Monster, the Green Monster, and the Flatwoods Monster. Wire stories carried their account across the United States. Air Force investigators filed it away in Project Blue Book. Folklorists and skeptics returned to it for decades, arguing over meteors, barn owls, and mass hysteria.
Today that short walk up a farm road outside the village of Flatwoods sits at the crossroads of Cold War anxiety, UFO belief, and Appalachian tourism.
A fireball over the Fisher farm
Just after 7:15 p.m. on September 12, 1952, brothers Edward and Fred May and their friend Tommy Hyer were playing on the grounds of Flatwoods School when they saw a bright object arc across the sky and appear to land on a hilltop owned by farmer G. Bailey Fisher.
The boys ran to the May home, which sat below the ridge, and told their mother, Kathleen May, what they had seen. She did what many mountain parents might do when children come in breathless with a wild story. She looked outside for herself, saw a strange reddish glow in the direction of Fisher’s field, and decided to go look.
By the time the little search party left the house it had grown to seven people. Along with Kathleen and her sons were their friend Tommy, neighbors Neil Nunley and Ronnie Shaver, and her cousin Eugene “Gene” Lemon, a young West Virginia National Guardsman. The family dog, sometimes called Rickie in later accounts, went along and trotted ahead up the path.
Near the top of the rise, the group entered a patch of low brush and noticed a mist with a sharp, irritating odor that burned their eyes and noses. Sources that draw on later interviews and oral histories describe a pulsing red light beyond the hilltop and then, to the left, a pair of bright spots like eyes. When Lemon swept his flashlight toward those lights, the beam picked out a tall figure with a round face and a pointed cowl or hood, its body draped in what looked like metallic folds.
Descriptions diverge slightly from witness to witness, which is part of what has kept the story alive. In Gray Barker’s tape recorded interviews, later retold in his Fate magazine article “The Monster and the Saucer,” the figure stands around ten feet tall, with a blood red face, a spade shaped hood, glowing eye like features, and a dark, almost mechanical looking lower half. Kathleen May emphasized claw like hands and clothing that fell in pleats.
Whatever they saw, it moved. When the light hit the figure, it gave off a hissing sound and appeared to glide toward the group. Lemon dropped the flashlight, screamed, and everyone ran. Several later reported nausea and throat irritation that night and into the next day, symptoms variously chalked up to the irritating mist, to fear, or, in some later tourism writing, to something like chemical exposure.
Soon after, Braxton County sheriff Robert Carr and a deputy went up to the site with local reporter A. Lee Stewart Jr. They found no craft or creature. What they did report were trampled grass, two elongated marks in the field, and a lingering odor that did not match any obvious farm smell.
Monsters in the morning paper
If the story had stayed on that hillside, it might have become a family ghost tale and nothing more. Instead it walked straight into the pages of the Braxton County Democrat and then onto the national wire.
Stewart, who co owned the Democrat, covered the case in his hometown paper and in a United Press dispatch filed from Sutton. In a Washington Daily News piece that quickly made the rounds under the headline “Around a Bend They Saw a Pair of Bulging Eyes,” Stewart painted a picture of a twelve foot, evil smelling green creature with bulging eyes and clawed hands confronting seven young people on a lonely hill after a meteor like object flashed overhead.
That description is as close as we get to a primary text for the earliest version of the legend. It fixes core motifs that later writers repeat almost word for word. The boys see a light that looks like a fiery saucer. The group walks through an acrid mist that makes their eyes water. A towering figure with a bright, inhuman face glides toward them. They flee.
United Press and other services rewrote the story for their own subscribers. Papers around the country ran versions under headlines that leaned into pulp language, calling it a “red faced monster” or “green bodied monster” that terrified a party of seven in the hills of West Virginia.
At the same time, entirely separate papers in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and other states were printing sober little stories about an unusually bright meteor that had streaked across several states on the evening of September 12. A recent compilation by the Camp Cryptid project gathers clippings from the Sandusky Register, the Daily Times News of Burlington, North Carolina, and other outlets, all describing a fireball that crossed the sky about the same time the boys in Flatwoods were playing ball.
The result, even before the UFO writers arrived, was a story in which a very real meteor shower and a very local panic blurred together in the public imagination.
Gray Barker, saucer clubs, and the UFO flap
It did not take long for the growing UFO community to latch onto Braxton County. Gray Barker, a Braxton County native who worked as a movie booker and part time writer, came back home, interviewed the witnesses, and wrote “The Monster and the Saucer” for the January 1953 issue of Fate.
Barker’s article was one of the first extended narratives of the case. He emphasizes the sincerity of the witnesses, the detail of their recollections, and how difficult he found it to “break down” their stories through cross examination. He also elaborates on their sensory impressions, describing a globular object on the hillside, a strong odor, and a figure whose shape and movements do not fit any known local animal.
Within a year, the Los Angeles based Civilian Saucer Investigation group had taken up the case. Their bulletin, in a piece called “More on the ‘Green Monster,’” used Stewart’s reporting and Barker’s interviews to argue that Flatwoods represented a true close encounter rather than a misidentified meteor. Although the original CSI text now circulates mostly in UFO archives, its arguments are preserved in later bibliographies and summaries.
By the mid nineteen fifties, Flatwoods was showing up in flying saucer books and radio programs. Donald Keyhoe’s “Flying Saucers from Outer Space” and Ivan Sanderson’s later writing treated it as one of the clearest cases in which a landed craft, a monster, and physical traces all appeared together in one report.
During the same years, Barker himself helped launch modern “Men in Black” lore, blending his work on Flatwoods with other cases and casting government agents as ominous silencers of UFO witnesses. Modern scholarship and archival work on Barker at places like the Clarksburg Harrison Public Library and West Virginia University have shown how much he shaped mid century UFO culture, not just by collecting stories but by dramatizing them in print.
Project Blue Book, meteors, and owls
Behind the headlines and saucer fanzines, the United States Air Force quietly added Flatwoods to its official UFO files. Project Blue Book investigators looked at the reports, meteor sightings, and local interviews and eventually classified the case as “explained.”
Later summaries of the Blue Book material, including a History channel feature on the Flatwoods Monster, note that the Air Force concluded the light in the sky was a meteor, not a controlled craft, and that nearby flashing beacons or aircraft lights could account for the pulsing red glow the party saw on Fisher’s hill.
The more controversial part of the explanation concerns the creature itself. In 1952, Stewart already floated the idea that the group had actually seen the eyes of a large bird, perhaps an owl, perched in a tree, and that brush and shadow did the rest. Later skeptics picked up that line of thought.
In a detailed reconstruction published in Skeptical Inquirer in 2000, investigator Joe Nickell combined the meteor clippings, the Blue Book file, and on site fieldwork and argued that the most likely explanation was a meteor, three nearby red beacons, and a startled barn owl. Nickell points out that the reported height of the creature matches the height of a limb, that the described gliding movement and hissing sound fit an owl taking off in fright, and that the green “skirt” below may have been foliage seen in poor light through the mist.
Nickell also notes that symptoms like nausea, vomiting, and eye irritation appear in many panic situations and can be explained as a mix of exertion, fear, and the very real irritation of walking through a cloud of vapor of unknown origin. Braxton County’s tourism site uses a short excerpt of his article on its “Folklore” page, a sign that the skeptical reading is now part of the local story rather than a distant debunking.
Whether one finds the owl theory convincing or not, it is important that even some of the earliest primary sources already contain a naturalistic “maybe it was an owl” aside. The legend grows out of that tension between uncanny experience and immediate skepticism.
From panic to legend in West Virginia print
By the time folklorists began to write about Flatwoods in the later twentieth century, the Monster was already shifting from news story to ghost tale and regional icon.
Buddy Griffin’s article “The Legend of the Flatwoods Monster,” published in the state heritage magazine Goldenseal in 2002, treats the 1952 sighting as both a family story and a piece of statewide folklore. Griffin draws on interviews with locals who remembered the media circus, the sudden flood of phone calls, and the way Flatwoods acquired the unofficial title “Home of the Green Monster.”
At roughly the same time, educator Judy Byers and collaborators recorded “The Legend of the Braxton County Monster” for the folk culture journal Traditions, using Kathleen May Horner as an informant. That short piece, cataloged in the West Virginia and Regional History Center’s folklore bibliography, captures how May herself told the story fifty years after the event, long after newspapers and UFO books had put their own spin on it.
Today, the West Virginia Encyclopedia entry on the Flatwoods Monster gives a succinct synthesis of those strands. The article lists the witnesses by name, retells the September 12 walk to the Fisher farm, notes the smell, skid marks, and trampled grass, and then sets the whole episode alongside other West Virginia cryptid legends such as Mothman, Batboy, and the Grafton Monster.
In other words, by the early twenty first century, state reference works were treating the Flatwoods Monster not as an unresolved case file, but as a part of West Virginia folklore that tells us something about mid century life and imagination.
Braxie in chairs, museums, and video games
If you drive through Flatwoods and nearby Sutton today, the monster looks less like an omen of invasion and more like a mascot.
On Main Street in Sutton, the Braxton County Convention and Visitors Bureau operates the Flatwoods Monster Museum. The small storefront houses original and reproduced newspaper clippings, photos of the witnesses, memorabilia from the 1950s UFO wave, and the rediscovered 1952 sketch of the Monster that A. Lee Stewart commissioned from a New York artist based on the witnesses’ description.
Across the county, visitors can track down five oversized wooden chairs painted in different interpretations of the Monster. Each stands about ten feet tall, echoing the reported height of the creature, and the convention bureau hands out “Free Braxxie” stickers to travelers who photograph themselves at each stop.
The Braxton County tourism website retells the 1952 story in a vivid narrative voice, then adds later alleged encounters, such as a report from Mrs. Audra Harper near Heaters and a car stopping episode near Strange Creek. Folkloric truth and promotional flair mix freely in these accounts, and the site places Nickell’s skeptical explanation on a separate “folklore” page, inviting readers to decide for themselves.
Beyond Braxton County, the Flatwoods Monster has become part of pop culture. The Wikipedia overview notes appearances or references in video games like Majora’s Mask and Fallout 76, television dramatizations in the Project Blue Book series, and an annual Flatwoods Monster convention that began in 2019.
The little hill above the Fisher farm has become a case study in how a frightening local event can turn into a brand and then into a kind of shared Appalachian in joke, complete with merch, conventions, and tongue in cheek roadside art.
Cryptids, Cold War Appalachia, and identity
Flatwoods also sits at an interesting crossroads in Appalachian history. The Clio entry on the Braxton County Monster crash site frames the 1952 sighting in the broader context of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and fears about secret weapons and government coverups. A streak of light in the sky and a sickening mist on a hill felt different to families who were reading headlines about atomic tests and mysterious new gases.
Recent scholarship has started to treat creatures like the Flatwoods Monster as part of a broader story about West Virginia identity. Bailey South’s thesis “The Man, the Myth, the Mothman: Cryptid Folklore and West Virginian Identity Formation” argues that modern tales of beings like Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster give West Virginians a way to talk about economic change, outsider stereotypes, and pride in their own strangeness.
In that reading, Braxie is not simply a question of “real or fake.” The creature becomes a symbol of a small community that suddenly found itself on the front page and in the crosshairs of national anxieties. Stewart’s wire story, Barker’s saucer prose, Nickell’s owl reconstruction, Griffin’s Goldenseal narrative, and the Monster chairs on modern Route 4 are all layers in a story about how West Virginians tell the world who they are.
On that September evening in 1952, seven people on a hill above Flatwoods encountered something that frightened them enough to send them running. Whether that something was an alien, an owl, or a chain of misperceptions, the story that followed has had a longer life than any meteor trail. It glows on in roadside art, in a downtown museum, and in the way Appalachians talk about monsters, media, and themselves.
Sources and further reading
Braxton County Democrat (Sutton, West Virginia), September 1952 coverage by editor A. Lee Stewart Jr., including his reports from the Fisher farm and his United Press account later reprinted under the headline “Around a Bend They Saw a Pair of Bulging Eyes” in the Washington Daily News and other papers.ufologie.patrickgross.org+1
United Press and Associated Press wire stories on the Braxton County Monster, mid September 1952, as preserved in national newspaper archives and summarized by later compilers of UFO press coverage.ufologie.patrickgross.org+1
Contemporary meteor reports such as “Meteors Reported Over Four States,” “Falling Meteor Startles Ohions,” and “Fiery Streak Races Across Southern Sky,” printed in papers like the Hinton Daily News, the Sandusky Register, and the Daily Times News on September 13, 1952. These have been gathered in modern form by the Camp Cryptid project.Campcryptidhorrorpodcast+1
Gray Barker, “The Monster and the Saucer,” Fate magazine, January 1953, based on tape recorded interviews with Kathleen May, Eugene Lemon, and other witnesses.Fate Magazine+1
Civilian Saucer Investigation, “More on the ‘Green Monster,’” CSI Bulletin, Winter 1953, preserved in bibliographies and UFO catalogs that cite it as an early UFO community response to the case.Wikipedia+1
Project Blue Book case file on the Flatwoods incident, consulted through later summaries and the 2018 History.com feature on the Flatwoods Monster.history.com+1
Near primary visual sources including the 1952 sketch of the monster commissioned by A. Lee Stewart Jr., photographs of Kathleen May and Gene Lemon holding that drawing, and period images of the May family and the Fisher farm, now on display through the Flatwoods Monster Museum and the Braxton County Convention and Visitors Bureau.Braxton County+1
Buddy Griffin, “The Legend of the Flatwoods Monster,” Goldenseal 28, no. 3 (Fall 2002), and related public history pieces about Griffin’s work.Goldenseal+2West Virginia Culture Center+2
Kathleen May Horner, informant, “The Legend of the Braxton County Monster,” collected by Judy P. Byers and Dennis Deitz in Traditions: A Journal of West Virginia Folk Culture and Educational Awareness 8 (2002).WVRHC
“Flatwoods Monster,” West Virginia Encyclopedia, revised 2024, which offers a concise synthesis of the 1952 events and their folkloric afterlife.West Virginia Encyclopedia+1
“Braxton County Monster Crash Site,” Clio entry, which places the sighting in Cold War context and highlights its impact on local memory and tourism.Clio
Braxton County Convention and Visitors Bureau materials, including “The Flatwoods Monster,” “Folklore,” and the Flatwoods Monster Chairs pages, which combine narrative retellings, tourism development, and excerpts from Joe Nickell’s skeptical analysis.Braxton County+1
Joe Nickell, “The Flatwoods UFO Monster,” Skeptical Inquirer, November and December 2000, along with later references that summarize his meteor and barn owl explanation.Center for Inquiry+2Skeptical Inquirer+2
“Flatwoods monster,” Wikipedia entry and its references, which provide a useful roadmap to primary and secondary literature, including Barker, Civilian Saucer Investigation, Goldenseal, and newspaper sources.Wikipedia+1
Roy Wenzl, “In 1952, the Flatwoods Monster Terrified 6 Kids, a Mom, a Dog, and the Nation,” History.com, 2018, for narrative context, interviews with later locals, and details of the Air Force investigation and modern tourism.history.com
Bailey South, “The Man, the Myth, the Mothman: Cryptid Folklore and West Virginian Identity Formation,” Munn Scholars thesis, West Virginia University, 2025, for a broader interpretive framework that connects Flatwoods and other cryptids to questions of state identity.WVU Research Repository+2exlibris.lib.wvu.edu+2