Tear Up The Town is a weekly column investigating the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

On September 12th, 1952, brothers Edward and Fred May, along with their friend Tommy Hyer, watched a flaming spacecraft streak across the West Virginia sky and crash into the nearby hills.

After running home to tell their mother what they had seen, the boys, along with Ms. May and three other local children, rushed out into the darkness to find the wreckage. After arriving at the top of a hill, the group saw a pulsating red light and, nearby, illuminated by a flashlight they’d brought, a 10-foot tall creature with two bright glowing eyes and a head (or, possibly, cowl) shaped like the ace of spades. The creature made a hissing sound, hovered toward them, and then turned and fled. The group ran screaming from the site and back down the hill into their small town of Flatwoods.

The Flatwoods Monster has gone on to be featured in books, television shows and video games. The creature has been identified as everything from an extra-terrestrial visitor to a cousin of fellow WV-based cyptid, The Mothman, to a startled barn owl. The story has been thoroughly debunked by skeptics, who, along with the barn owl explanation, cite that residents across three states (West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland) reported meteor sightings that night, and say that the red light was almost certainly one of the many aircraft hazard beacons that dot the West Virginia countryside.

What the debunkers fail to address is why a group of seven people would mistake three separate common objects and occurrences for a spaceship crash and an enormous hissing monster. Could Hollywood’s commie-as-martian mania, a 19th century Thunderbird encounter, and the Trans-Allegheny Asylum for the Insane have something to do with it? Tear Up the Town says, “yeah, you know…it’s possible.”

The 1950s marked a strange era in America’s history. General social conservatism and a newly vigilant focus on family values existed alongside new and revolutionary cultural institutions, such as Playboy magazine, the Kinsey reports and the Beat Generation. At the same time, with tensions between the U.S. and the Soviets growing, pop culture was occupied in constructing sensationalist cold war narratives and allegories. And what better way to fictionalize one of America’s largest cultural concerns than by combining it with another? 1951 saw the theatrical release of The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing From Another World, which both delivered 90 minutes of cold war paranoia in the form of vintage 1947 Roswell hysteria. Additionally, as Hollywood released film after film in which Mars, the red planet, stood in for the Soviet red menace, Entertaining Comics (previously Educational Comics) was busy taking advantage of the fact that the comic industry, unlike Hollywood, had yet to come under any industry content regulations, allowing EC to produce a plethora of kid-targeted grotesque, gratuitously violent and overtly sexual horror and sci-fi comic books (including Tales From The Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, Two-Fisted Tales and Shock SuspenStories) without official recourse.

Six of the seven witnesses to the Flatwoods Monster were under the age of 18, and, as a result, were inundated not only with news stories about very real Earthly terrors, but also with sensationalist movies and extreme comics that placed monsters and aliens alongside Soviet nukes and communist infiltration of the government in the cultural rogues gallery. Meanwhile, Ms. May, the one adult witness, was at once aware of the broader socio-political fears that were sweeping the nation, in an understandably heightened state of anxiety, and in the position of sole responsibility for not just her two children, but also four others. These elements alone show how easily a meteor could become a plummeting saucer and how an aircraft hazard beacon might appear as an extra-terrestrial road flare, but a barn owl as an unearthly creature?

The 50s were also a transformative time for West Virginia. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, miners and their families had been flocking to the region’s prosperous coal mines, pushing the state’s annual population growth well above the national average. Unfortunately, with the standardization of mechanical mining equipment, fewer human workers were needed (remember, John Henry was supposedly a West Virginia native) and, after peaking at just over 2 million residents in 1950, West Virginia’s population began to steadily decline.

The same boom that had vastly increased West Virginia’s general population over the prior half-century had concordantly introduced a growing population of the mentally ill, many of whom were housed in the Trans-Allegheny Asylum for the Insane (later re-named Weston State Hospital). Opened in 1864 with the capacity to house 250 patients, the asylum underwent massive growth over an 80 year period and, by the 1950s, housed more than 2,400 epileptics, drug addicts and myriad other so-called “uneducable mental defectives.” The asylum is also just over 30 miles from Flatwoods. After a revealing piece in the Charleston Gazette in 1949, which portrayed the hospital as a nightmarish, unsanitary, over-crowded hell, already rampant rumors about the asylum’s conditions, treatments and patients were embraced as facts. These confirmations added to the discomfort of families in the area who already couldn’t help but construct dread speculations about deranged escapees. Living in Flatwoods in the early ‘50s, it would be difficult to venture out into the darkened forests and hills without some underlying sense of dread at the knowledge that just a bit farther out into the woods, in an isolated, ever-expanding compound packed to overflowing with mistreated mental patients, experimental surgeries, some using ice picks and electricity, were being performed in dirty operating rooms.

Even more to the point, in the same way that stories and rumors spread about the asylum, Appalachian folktales and legends dispersed and persisted throughout the state. West Virginia, like all of Appalachia, has always occupied a certain cultural niche because, while it’s geographically poised to adopt social and cultural trends along with the rest of the country, its population remains somewhat insular. In part, this insularity is a result of the mountainous terrain, which makes travel outside of major thoroughfares difficult, but, mostly, it’s a result of the state’s lack of industrial diversity. With coal as the area’s only major viable resource, the pre-‘90s population primarily consisted of semi-migrant blue-collar communities whose search for local identity led them to retain, and revel in, the rich cultural history of the mountaineers who first traversed West Virginia’s rocky terrain and discovered the valuable coal reserves beneath it. While much of the extant Appalachian lore is based around stories of these pioneer characters, herbal remedies and general folk wisdom, a proliferation of Cherokee Indian mythology, including thunderbird legends, is vital to the tradition’s underlying framework.

To the Cherokee (and many other tribal nations), the thunderbird has rich, nuanced religious and cultural implications. To the colonists, and in prevailing Appalachian lore, they’re really just regarded as giant flesh-eating birds of varying species, including owls (often dubbed “Bighoot”). They are, in fact, such a prevalent part of Appalachian lore, that beginning in the 1800s, a rash of Thunderbird sightings were reported around the United States, including a series of incidents in 1895 involving a giant avian creature consuming both livestock and humans over a weeklong period in Addison, West Virginia, less than 30 miles from Flatwoods. Flatwoods residents, then, would not only be pre-disposed to hearing legends about fearsome, man-eating birds simply through the extensive oral tradition of the Appalachian region, but would also be doubly aware, and perhaps subconsciously wary, of the creatures, given the existence of an exceedingly horrific local account dating back less than 60 years before the encounter with the alleged Flatwoods Monster.

Given all of this dissonant input, from Hollywood’s equation of the red scare with an alien menace to local fears of escaped mental patients and giant birds, it makes sense that a child of Appalachia who sees what he interprets as a spaceship could then read a nearby barn owl (the shape of the Flatwoods Monster’s head, the sound the creature made and its erratic towards-then-away movement are all consistent with this species), which already bears a sinister connotation, and it’s elongated shadow as the creature from the ship.
A final note: I understand that it might read as contradictory that this piece suggests that these children are both at the forefront of American pop culture, enabling them to see a meteor as a space ship, but also shut-in, out-of-touch hillbillies who rely on folk legends to interpret the world around them, so an owl becomes a monster. Really, it’s the co-existence of these two factors, which is the result of the gradual culture and population shift that began mid-century in West Virginia, that allows the Flatwoods Monster to exist.

These children, due to equal parts chronology and geography, belonged to one of the only generations given the opportunity to subconsciously fuse, in a manner both thematic and terrifyingly physical, rarified traditional American folklore with the all-consuming technocentric xenophobia of the atom age.

Matt Finley is a regular contributor to Weird Things and is currently based in Cleveland. His works can be found at Finfizzler.wordpress.com.

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