Mothman, the Jersey Devil and the Chupacabra: America's Modern Monsters

Bigfoot and Nessie are said to be animals waiting to be discovered. America's modern monsters are different: each appeared at a particular place and time, in a burst of reports amplified by newspapers, radio or television, and each settled into a local legend with a festival, a statue or a sports team named after it. Because they have a documented beginning, they are unusually good cases for asking how a monster story starts and why it spreads. This article follows three: the Jersey Devil of 1909, the Mothman of 1966 and 1967, and the chupacabra of 1995.

None of the three has left a body, a bone or a clear photograph. What they have left is a paper trail, and it shows a similar pattern each time: a frightening first report from ordinary people, intense press coverage, a wave of further reports from people now primed to see the creature, and then a slow fade into folklore and tourism.

The Jersey Devil belongs to the Pine Barrens, the sandy, forested heart of southern New Jersey. Its legend says that in 1735 a woman known as Mother Leeds, about to give birth to her thirteenth child, cursed it, and the child was born a devil, grew wings and flew off into the pines. The historian Brian Regal has traced how the story grew out of the reputation of a real colonial family, the Leedses, whose almanacs and politics made them unpopular; Benjamin Franklin, a rival almanac publisher, mocked Titan Leeds in print.

For more than a century the Leeds Devil was a regional folk tale. Then, in the week of January 16 to 23, 1909, newspapers across South Jersey and the Philadelphia area reported hundreds of encounters: strange hoofprints in the snow, a winged creature on rooftops, a monster seen from a crowded trolley car. Some schools closed, some workers stayed home, and armed groups searched the woods. The reports faded as quickly as they had come. Footprints in snow are easily faked and easily misread, and the newspapers had every reason to keep the story running. In 1982 New Jersey's new National Hockey League team was named the Devils in its honor.

On the night of November 15, 1966, two young couples told police in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, that a huge gray figure with glowing red eyes and wings perhaps ten feet across had followed their car near the TNT area, the abandoned site of a World War II explosives plant north of town. The local paper reported it the next day, other residents came forward, and within days the creature had a name. With the Batman television series at the height of its popularity, newspapers called it Mothman.

Reports continued for about a year. The county sheriff suggested an unusually large heron, and a West Virginia University wildlife biologist, Robert L. Smith, said the descriptions fitted a sandhill crane, a bird nearly as tall as a person, with a wingspan of up to about seven feet and a red patch on its head, which could have strayed from its migration route. Owls, whose eyes shine back in headlights, are another suspect. The TNT area's empty bunkers and dark roads were also a popular place for young people to drive at night, an ideal setting for a fright to grow in the retelling.

On December 15, 1967, during the evening rush hour, the Silver Bridge, which carried U.S. Route 35 over the Ohio River between Point Pleasant and Ohio, collapsed into the river. Dozens of vehicles fell with it, and 46 people were killed. It remains one of the deadliest bridge disasters in American history.

Federal investigators traced the collapse to a single failed eyebar, one of the long steel links that formed the chains from which the 1928 suspension bridge hung. A small flaw in the eyebar had grown through stress corrosion and corrosion fatigue until the link fractured, and because the design had no redundancy, the whole structure came down in less than a minute. The flaw was in a part that the visual inspections of the time could not reach. The disaster led directly to the first national bridge-inspection standards in the United States.

In his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies, the writer John Keel connected the year of creature reports with the collapse, and the idea that Mothman was an omen of the disaster has been part of the legend ever since. It is a legend. The engineering cause is established, and nothing in the investigation points to anything other than a fractured steel link. The 46 people who died that night are part of Point Pleasant's real history, and they are the reason the bridge is remembered.

In March 1995, farmers in Puerto Rico began finding sheep, goats and other animals dead with puncture wounds, and the deaths were blamed on a mysterious predator said to drain its victims' blood. The comedian and radio host Silverio Pérez is credited with the name that stuck: chupacabras, Spanish for goat-sucker. In August 1995 a woman in the town of Canóvanas described seeing a creature three or four feet tall that walked on two legs and had a row of spines down its back. Her description became the basis of the best-known drawing of the creature, and reports spread across Puerto Rico and then to Mexico, Central America and the southern United States.

The investigator Benjamin Radford spent five years on the case, and his 2011 book, Tracking the Chupacabra, makes two main points. First, that founding description closely matches the creature in the science-fiction film Species, released in July 1995, which the eyewitness had seen before her report. Second, examinations of the dead animals did not confirm that they had been drained of blood, and ordinary predators can leave puncture wounds with little visible bleeding. In the southwestern United States, where the chupacabra later turned into a hairless, doglike animal, carcasses that were examined proved to be coyotes, dogs or hybrids suffering from severe sarcoptic mange, a skin disease caused by mites that strips away fur and leaves the skin thickened and crusted.

Set side by side, the three cases follow a recognizable pattern. A vivid first report comes from ordinary witnesses who were genuinely frightened. Newspapers, and later radio and television, give it a name and a shape. Other people, now primed, reinterpret their own odd experiences, a strange noise, dead livestock, a large bird caught in the headlights, as part of the same story, and each new report makes the next more likely. Psychologists recognize the roles of expectation and social contagion in shaping what people perceive and remember, and folklorists have documented the same wave pattern in scares from many periods and places.

That pattern does not mean the witnesses lied. In each case they saw or found something real: a crane or an owl, the work of a predator, a line of prints in the snow. What they could not know was how strongly the story already in circulation would shape what they saw. Then the scare fades, and the monster settles into local identity. Point Pleasant holds a Mothman festival every year, with a metal statue of the creature downtown, and the Pine Barrens' devil has become a beloved regional emblem.