Haunted Cosmos - The Dusty Tome, Chapter 3: Marcella and The Mothman

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

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This episode of the dusty tome is brought to you by White Tree Solutions, life support by Joseph L. Kellogg, and our supporters at patreon.com. During this liminal time, that seemingly interminable threshold between seasons one and two of Haunted Cosmos, we didn't want to leave you empty-eared. But how do we accomplish this, faithful listener? Well, Brian and I decided that we would do this by inviting you all into the inner circle, the sanctum, the walled garden of haunted cosmos, something. that we call The Dusty Tome.

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We're glad that you're here. For the final episode of the Dusty Tome that we will be releasing to you all in this off-season, we're going all the way back to episodes two and three. of season one, and we're going to revisit some of the weird stories surrounding the Mothman events in Point Pleasant West Virginia, specifically a first-hand account story that didn't make it into the main show, not because it isn't just as interesting as the other stories, but because

there simply wasn't room. So everyone, please sit back, relax, and enjoy this dusty tome episode on Marcella and the Mothman. Due to popular retellings of the Mothman events, the actual first sighting of the creature often goes overlooked. Now, today's episode of the Dusty Tome isn't actually about that first sighting, but knowing the story of it is important to lay the groundwork in our minds for what we are discussing. There is a town some miles from Point Pleasant named Clendon in West Virginia. Now, when I say some miles, I mean a fairly good chunk, about 90 miles, in fact.

And on November 12th of 1966, just three days before the joyriding couple would see the monster at the T&T area outside of Point Pleasant. This town, Clendenin, would actually be the site of the first haunt committed by this harbinger of doom and despair. It was the middle of the day. Five grave diggers were hard at work in their local cemetery, preparing a grave for burial.

As they worked in the sweat-pooled on their shirts from the wet warmth of a West Virginia fall, one of them looked over into an adjacent row of trees and noticed something. He got the attention of his workmates, and they all joined him and watching something that looked like, quote, a brown human being, end quote,

rise up from among the trees into the air before flying over their heads. They said it definitely didn't look like a bird, partly because it didn't fly like a bird. There was something truly uncanny about the whole thing, a man with wings that just didn't seem right. Now, we bring this up because it's intrinsically connected to our story tonight.

Although all mothman stories are in a sense intrinsically connected to one another, Rather, I want the connection of the mothman and death, decay, and despair to be made in your mind, dear listener. His first sighting was at the graveyard in a town that had slipped into mere nominal and normative Christianity, thereby making the graveyard a place of darkness and loss rather than a place of foundational hope. Then the two couples out for Joyride saw him on November 15th at the TNT area, outside of Point Pleasant, an area forgotten by any true inactive dominion of man.

The T&T area's usefulness as a munitions cache had long since been tossed away. Instead, it was now kept as a wildlife refuge. But picture that for a minute, a place with dangerous chemicals left over from a World War II munitions facility, with man-made structures all over it, slowly getting reclaimed by Kudzu and Privet, was now supposed to be a refuge for the local fauna. that is a juxtaposition that just doesn't work out. Inevitably, you're left with a place that appears less naturally wild and more abandoned and forgotten, a ghost town slowly decaying.

And this is the focal point of mothman's sightings. All of this leads us to the story of one Mrs. Marcella Bennett. As we hear this story, keep in mind the mothman's apparent inclination towards death, decay, abandonment, and loss. Around the TNT area, there were few residential properties. One of these few houses belonged to a man named Ralph Thomas. He and his family lived there with the Bennets as relatively close neighbors for the region. One night, November 16th, actually, the day after the joyriding couple saw the monster, Ralph and his family were outside when they noticed a strange red light in the sky.

It moved and hovered above the TNT plant, its motion more akin to a helicopter than anything else. Only it was silent. Well, Mrs. Marcella Bennett, the Thomas's neighbor and friend, saw the same light. She was so taken aback that she loaded herself and her baby into the car and drove over to the Thomas property, hoping to get answers, or at least to feel more secure in numbers. Her husband was away at the time. She pulled onto the driveway, put the car in park, and slowly climbed out. She walked over to the other side to get her child out of the car seat in the back, and as they made for the house, she heard something begin to rise off the ground. behind her. She turned and saw a big gray thing, bigger than a man, with terrible glowing eyes,

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Quickly, as mad at herself as she was afraid of the beast in front of her, she picked up her daughter and sprinted to the house. The Thomas family was met with a distraught Marcella and shocked and panicked from whatever it was she had just seen. Though the family had not seen the monster, they had seen the light and were already on edge because of it. They locked all the doors to ensure nothing could get in or out. A few moments passed and tensions within the house began to cool when suddenly hysteria snuck back into their minds. They heard shuffling noises on the porch outside, the stomping of feet and a constant dragging of some heavy thing.

Marcellan knew what it was, the wings. The fear reached a boiling point when they saw this thing peering at them through one of the windows, those red-glowing eyes so menacing in the dark, as if lighted by some independent and sinister source within the creature. Quickly, Ralph called the police who came out to the property within a few minutes, but the thing, the mothman, whatever it was, was already gone into the night. Between a burden of dread, the creature instilled in her,

and the self-loathing that comes from dropping her child when her child needed her mother most, Marcella Bennett would only mentally and emotionally recover from this incident after months of outside help. She no longer had the ability to deal with fears and worries, and seeing this thing again was chief among those worries. She was plagued with vivid and terrifying dreams. These dreams were so vivid, or perhaps not all of them were dreams,

that she believed in her heart of hearts the monster had come to visit her own home. Even after she considered herself recovered from the torment, she reported hearing a keening-type sound, like the high-pitched screech of a distressed woman near her home just on the edge of Point Pleasant. These screams came frequently and lasted the duration of the Mothman saga.

Now you may have just listened to that and felt how creepy it was, for lack of a better word. But do a recap in your mind. Why was it creepy? We believe it's because of two primary reasons. One, the precise targeting the entity seemed to engage in. Terrorizing a mother and newborn daughter is an especially hopeless thing.

It reminds me of that story from the Zodiac case. The killer helps a woman who has a flat tire on the side of the road. He offers her a ride into town and she gladly accepts. As she puts her baby in her lap, the killer realizes the depths of depravity he's about to enter into and for some reason refuses it. He lets the woman go. The mothman has no such compunction.

It is unfettered by the prospect of tormenting the most vulnerable and the most innocent among us. The second reason for the creepiness lies in the consequences. The dropping of a baby by her mother, something that no mother in human history could ever take without the greatest tinge to her conscience. And the lasting effects that are relatively short, an overall physically harmless encounter had on Marcella

betray some credibility to the story. Why would she make this up? Yeah, something had to have scared her to the core that night. I mean, scared her so much that the fear stayed with her for months on end, that the memory of the fear was enough to reawaken it, unfated, as if it was happening right in that moment. And that to us, that's a spiritual kind of deep, dark, intrusive fear. Whatever this monster was, whatever the end game was that it had,

whether we're right in our analysis or not, whether it was to scare a town and submission before killing many of its beloved members and a bridge collapse, or some other reason that we can't even comprehend or haven't even considered yet, it remains one of the greatest proofs of two of the haunted cosmos and dusty tome axioms. Number one, the world is more than just stuff. And number two, that world is an embattled world. Absolutely epic story. Unreal. I mean, this is one of the, I'm surprised that this actually didn't make it into our main show.

There's just so many with the model. There is so many. It's like, what's that thing? Did you ever have the two clowns visit your school, the two Christian clowns? What? And they, man, with their names, I'm so mad. Oh, Baskin and Robbins. On purpose?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This was not like a school lockdown scenario. I went to a Christians chose for this to happen. What? I went to a Christian school, K through 12. And every year, at least once, an elementary school, the clown duo Baskin and Robin would show. up and they would do their clown thing as like a, you know, like a comedy routine. But one of the things...

Wait, you said this as if this was like a normal thing by those children experience. I forget, I forget A, that you didn't live in Georgia. I went to public school too. And B, that you went to public school. Anyway, I apologize. I just kind of weirded out right now, but... But the whole, like, final thing of their act was this magic trick where they have a pitcher of water and it never runs out.

She just keeps... And it's like, the Holy Spirit, it fills you up and it never runs out. Yeah. The Mothman story reminds me of that because the picture of stories just never runs dry. Yeah, there's so many. There's always something new.

Yes. But look, about this story specifically. Okay, one of the things that struck me, and if you have, actually no, you will not, even if you do have patron access to the first half of the season, you will not have heard

any of our Skinwalker episodes yet. Oh, they don't even know we've, so I'm just spill the beans. No, no, I'm just going to tease it. Yeah, let's tease it. Okay, because we do talk about, this in the Skinwalker shows. The red light that kind of begins this whole story

that's hovering above the T&T plant. Okay, why? Yeah. Like, what's, is it bait? Is it like a lure? A lure. You know? It's like an angler fish.

But it also reminds me of the, yeah, it is. It also reminds me of the, the, uh, the orbs in Skinwalker. Mm-hmm. Where it doesn't, they don't all, they don't seem omniscient. Like,

they kind of have to look for people. Yeah, you can hide from them. They're almost sentient seeming. Like they are doing something. They're sentient, yeah. But you can hide from them and they can't find you. It's very strange. It's really weird.

And it reminded me of that. Like this red light almost seems very omniscient, especially when you consider what then came of it. But I also wonder if it, I don't know, if the mothman put it up there, but then just kind of like someone fishing. It's a lure and it might work and it might not. I don't know. What are your thoughts on that?

I think the anglerfish is the picture for me that comes to mind. It's like this lure out at the end in the darkness that leads to some sharp teeth. You know, that seems to be, and like you pointed out, I thought it was interesting. You pointed out in this little episode that the moth man is connected deeply with scenes of death, decay, and the abandonment of human rule. It's also showing up in towns that are post-Christian in many ways. Yep. Post-industrial too. They used to be into the railroad,

and now it's kind of left, and they're still trying to figure out what they're supposed to do. It's like in the scriptures when it talks about the desert, the wilderness being the haunt of the jackal, the owl. That's nice.

It's a haunt. Yeah, that's nice. Because it's evidence that man who is made to be God's imager, his image bear in the world, and take dominion in his name, he hasn't done that, or he's failed and retreated from a place.

And so it's a place of decay. And the mothman shows up there and then lures people there. Yeah. Which is very creepy. Yeah, it is really. And it works. We're so dumb. We're like in the horror movie.

I've seen this movie, the black guy dies first. Like, I'm not more. Like, oh, look. A red light in the sky. I'm going to go to it with my baby. Right. Like, I'm sorry, Marcella. Well, no.

Probably don't. Here's the thing that gets me about that. So, yeah, maybe. would have been better for Marcella to stay home. But here's the thing. And this is where the omniscience question kind of comes in. Because nothing else happened that night.

Like there's nothing else on record at least that happened that night. So either the Mothman was just like playing with some lights in the sky. Yeah. And this was a crime of opportunity. Yeah. Or he did that so that Marcella would leave so that he could scare her. Because he was like waiting for her in the driveway.

at this place and then stood up next to her car. So it's like, did she really have, like, was she stupid or was there some level of compulsion? Well, it reminds me of the, uh, in acts, the girl that's possessed by the spirit. Yeah. Prophecising for profit. Yeah. It's like, apparently that spiritual being had the ability to do that.

I think of like medium. We're going to have to do an episode of mediums. Yeah. Because some of them are obviously frauds and they're just really good at cold reading and things like that. but there is, I believe, definite necromancy that continues today. And there's some kind of prophecy or some kind of like, the illustration I've heard is that just because something,

take that entity that maybe, I think it could, there's at least, it seems that the author of Acts that Luke is saying, like this thing had the ability to foretell things in some way, prophesy. And it would do it as like a party trick to earn money. Father Tanner is a medical missionary in a, galaxy ravaged by war. To pursue his mission of healing, he and his crew of doctors and smugglers contend with hostile alien governments, hardened criminals, bloodthirsty beasts, and sectarian warfare. In the midst of it all, he's faced with baffling alien patients that test the limits of his

medical training and his faith. The Life Support series is available now on Amazon, your favorite ebook retailer, or use the promo code Haunted at Joseph L. Kelly. to get the first book free or check the episode description for links and the promo code well you don't have to be god necessarily i suppose to do that i've heard of like the window washer illustration where it's like you know if you're down in traffic in new york city you might hear an accident up in the future and not know about it till that and then you drive up and you see it but there might be a window washer up on a skyscraper who's 50 stories up and not only does he see the accident before you but he sees it's about to happen. He sees a car about to run the red light and he knows it's going to happen.

And you don't way back in traffic. And it's not because he's omniscient. It's because his perspective is different. Yeah. His reference frame is different from yours. Yeah. So, so some of this I wonder how, I don't know. How does the, we're obviously not given this information in scripture. Right. Yeah. How do these spiritual beings operate? Is it perspective? Is there some timey, whimy thing? Yeah. I don't understand. Is it some just at some level, the answer comes down to, well, God providentially allows some something, some level of knowledge that they then operate under. And then it gets into stuff that we just shouldn't even be asking.

Yeah, we're just, why would God do that? We don't know. Leave it. Well, it's not for you to know. Do they operate? Do they interact with time differently than us, maybe? I don't know. I mean, I think that they have to.

Yeah. Because I think that unless you say that, and, And look, I don't know. Okay, I'm not even going to say that. All I'm going to say is I think that they have to. Yeah. Because they really clearly seem to operate outside of the boundaries of space time. Yeah.

And since those things are intrinsically connected, like you cannot separate time from space. Yeah. But the beings in the unseen world good and bad, they both are outside of space. Therefore, therefore, they're also outside of time. At least to me. Because from our understanding, those are connected. Right, right. And that could be wrong. Like that whole accident could be way off.

But that's just, with the best that I know now, I think that they can. What? Well, I was going to say, he's pointing at me. This also reminds me of, like, the rules that the moth man could creep around her house, but he couldn't come in. Dude. He didn't break the door down. Yeah, he could have forced himself in.

You would think. It was all the power. I mean, that also, like, picked about German Shepherd. He had to lure Marcella out of her house. What's that? And then also, what is it? Yeah, okay, so this whole trope that you have to be invited in. Yeah, the vampire.

Yeah. I mean, have we released vampires yet? Yes, vampire. No. No. So that's another great Easter. Is that second half? I think that's episode six, actually.

So that's a great tease. Vampire's so good. That's like bright and eyes peak, I think. Listen. Vampires. It's so good. Maybe you'll all hate it. It's the first one that comes

on the warning label. Yeah. But really there, we hit on this trip, and we touch on it before, that these things seem to not be able to come in unless they're invited in. I mean, we talk about it with the men in Black in Mothman Part 2. Yeah. And that is really on display.

It's on display in almost every story. You just have to be looking for it. It's like once you see it somewhere, you see it everywhere. He had to lure her out of her house. He had to get her to someone else's, house. But even when they were at the Thomas land, the Thomas property and locked inside, he couldn't just go in. Yeah. Like that's the thing. He's strong enough physically to where he could just knock the door down if he really wanted to. But there's something that impedes that.

And maybe it's just that he wanted to terrorize them. Maybe they, maybe he just wanted them to be afraid. Yeah. But that doesn't seem very on brand compared to the other things that he does. The only time that I could think that he didn't have to get him like permission. permission was Lawrence Gray, who's the guy that had sleep paralysis, and instead of a shadow person, he saw the mothman. Interesting. But even then, it seemed to be this like ethereal, non-physical version of the mothman, where he kind of melted away when he started proclaiming the name of Christ.

But maybe that's the only way that he doesn't have to be invited in. So maybe that's the play of sleep paralysis, where the demons they have an end, they don't have to be invited. They just can't do anything, quote, unquote, real. Yeah. You know, you even have like the Hatman. If you've listened to the Sleep Paralysis episode, then you'll know what I'm talking about. The story of the hat man where the girl is having a sleep over with her mom because their dad's on a business trip. I don't think that one's come out yet. No, sleep paralysis is four. Isn't this three? Well, yeah, but the whole, but Patreon people already have access to all. Oh, that's right. You guys are, I'm dumb. I'm like behind. I forgot about the Bennies. And keep going, keep going. My, my, my malfunctioned for a moment. Yeah. It's. It's all good. It's all good. My guy. I can't go on it. Hey, can I go on it.

So, I know. We're so dumb. This is behind the paywall guys. I mean, like, this is, this is,

unscripted. We often will just sing lips of an angel by hinder to each other. Like, enough times that really it is actually a little bit of a problem. Yeah, it's conscript.

The other people in the office don't like it. Honey, why you're crawling me. So late. Everyone just came. canceled. Yeah. So anyway, before everyone else cancels, the lady, she's having to sleepover with her mom,

and the hat man, she wakes up and sees the hat man coming closer and closer to her. And then finally, she, like, wakes up, or she looks back up, and he's right at the foot of the bed. And she resolves to just go to sleep. And he can't

do anything to her. And even with the story with Aaron Rogers, like, it chased him, but didn't actually do anything to him. I wonder if that's sort of like an end and then they can kind of go from there. I don't know. This is really off the cuff. I've never thought of this before. We're riffraffing here. Yeah. We're riffing. Speaking of. Yeah. Hey, well, new album drop. Look, new album drop. Go listen. Even Dragon Shell and praise. So true. No, you need to listen to it. Yeah. We're talking about a new album by a world-known artist,

Brian Silve. The artist formerly known as Hinder. Actually, not true. First of all, that song, just to clarify, is terrible. I mean, I mean, the message. Who among us didn't jam out to it in Middles? Yeah, the message is bad. Come on. It's like, it's like if Creed was only about adultery. It's like, well, yeah, I guess.

But adultery that makes you sympathetic to the adulterer. Ugh. You know? It's bad. Yeah, it's bad. Anyway, thanks for listening, guys. Appreciate your support of Haunted Cosmos. We hope the dusty tome is enjoyable to you.

And we'll catch you next time. We'll catch you the next chapter of the dusty toad. That's right, in the next chapter, the next page of the dusty tome. And then remember in two weeks, Q&A, so send in your questions. And if you have any crazy stories that's happened to you, send them in as well. Yep. See you guys later. Want more haunted cosmos?

Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content, as well as exclusive content in regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself. So go to patreon.com slash hauntedcosmos and sign up now.