Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Check out the origins of the Grinning Man and hear how things with ol’ GN are these days on Friday.

A brief personality test to help determine optimist/pessimist status: Is John Keel half full of crap or a halfway decent, if overly superstitious, journalist?

Let’s lay all our cryptid trading cards on the table – The Grinning Man is sort of John Keel’s joint. He interviewed the kids in Jersey and he recorded the account of Woodrow Derenberger. More to the point, he linked the accounts together under a looming, toothy umbrella, thereby, creating a monster. Had there only ever been those two encounters, and had Keel been content to forego conclusions and just revel in the sheer weirdness of the whole thing, I’d be more apt to come down on the optimist side of the test question – that Keel is well-meaning and proficient at collecting accurate witness accounts, but a tad overeager in the extent to which he analyzes and collates his data.

But then there’s the third account.

Grinning man aside, Keel spent much of 1966 in Point Pleasant West Virginia hot footing it after a shadowy airborne monstrosity with giant red eyes and a penchant for lurking. Written and filmic accounts of the Mothman’s year-long tenure in the Mountain State are multitudinous. For our purposes, all you really need to know is that beginning in November of 1966, multiple residents of Point Pleasant reported seeing a giant creature flying in the skies above their homes and just sorta milling about in their yards. Residents of the small town chattered and cowered and speculated themselves to the brink of mass hysteria. The sightings only tapered off the following December after the Silver Bridge, a local suspension bridge spanning the Ohio river, collapsed, killing 46 people. Keel suggests that all the Mothman’s ooking and spooking was a prescient, unheeded warning of the bridge’s unstable condition (in which case, worst supernatural portent ever). I, on other hand, tend to wonder if, in the minds of the populace, a massive, bloody disaster trumps rumored sightings of a fairly non-descript neighborhood bogeyman.

Much more AFTER THE JUMP…Either way, Keel chronicled the Mothman investigation in his first book, “The Mothman Prophecies.” Along with all the Mothman speculation, Keel goes on and on about a pantsload of other paranormal phenomena that supposedly accompanied the red-eyed seers arrival, including psychic activity, UFO sightings, encounters with the Men in Black and, of course, a cameo by the Grinning Man.

The Lilly family – momma, daddy and teenage daughter – lived on the outskirts of Point Pleasant. During the reign of the Mothman, they began experiencing a bunch of Poltergeist-like activity (slamming cabinets, bumps in the night, two knocks on the pipe because, apparently, the Mothman didn’t want them) in conjunction with weird, colored lights in the sky above their house. A concerned Keel Muldered his way into their lives and, under the auspices of “investigating” the phenomena, asked them totally not at all leading questions about whether they’d encountered any strangers in or around the house. 16-year-old Linda Lilly confessed that she had, in fact, awoken suddenly one night and seen a large, smiling man standing over her bed.

Maybe, one might suggest, it was merely a vivid dream, or a drowsy hallucination molded from shadows by the slowly receding fingers of sleep. Maybe visions of that sort aren’t all that unexpected when the person in question has bughouse parents who are tripping balls off the heresay exhaust vented off by the town’s overactive rumor mill.

But Keel didn’t make any of those suggestions. He took the girl’s vague account at face value and, voila! A third appearance by the Grinning Man.

So, is John Keel half full of crap or a halfway decent, if overly superstitious, journalist?

His enthusiasm to link the gaudily-attired Jersey Grinning Man to Derenberger’s telepathic Indrid Cold to the shadowy figure in Linda Lilly’s bedroom represents an involved subjectivity that runs far too deep to take any of the accounts at face value. At the same time, I don’t believe Keel intentionally fabricated anything.

Does that make me an optimist or pessimist? I dunno. Maybe there’s a third option.

Perhaps John Keel was sort of a nut. A half full of crap, halfway decent journalist nut.

Either way, he certainly managed to start something.

Friday: The Grinning Man Today