Mothman and the Silver Bridge Collapse — Point Pleasant, West Virginia (1967)

On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge — a suspension bridge spanning the Ohio River between Point Pleasant, West Virginia and Gallipolis, Ohio — collapsed during rush hour traffic, killing forty-six people. The disaster, caused by the failure of a single eyebar in the bridge's chain suspension system due to a stress corrosion crack, was one of the deadliest bridge failures in American history. The collapse occurred thirteen months after the first Mothman sightings in the Point Pleasant area, and the temporal connection between the two phenomena became central to the Mothman mythos. Multiple witnesses later reported having seen the Mothman on or near the Silver Bridge in the days and weeks before the collapse. Some interpreted the creature's presence as a warning — a harbinger of the coming disaster. Others suggested the Mothman had caused the collapse through supernatural means. John Keel, the journalist and ufologist who had been investigating Mothman sightings in the Ohio Valley throughout 1967, drew explicit connections between the creature and the bridge disaster in his 1975 book 'The Mothman Prophecies,' which was later adapted into a 2002 film starring Richard Gere. After the bridge collapse, Mothman sightings in Point Pleasant dropped dramatically, reinforcing the perception that the creature's presence was somehow linked to the catastrophe.