Flatwoods Monster
Braxton County, West Virginia
12 September 1952. Seven witnesses, one hill, and a smell nobody could place.
On the evening of 12 September 1952, a group of boys in Flatwoods, West Virginia, saw a bright object cross the sky and appear to come down on the Bailey Fisher farm on a hill above the town. They went to fetch Kathleen May, mother of two of them, and the group that walked up the hill was seven strong, including a seventeen year old National Guardsman named Gene Lemon and a dog.
Near the top they found a pulsing glow and, they said, a mist that made their eyes and throats burn. Lemon's torch picked out something in a tree at the edge of the clearing. Every account agrees on the shape: a figure between seven and ten feet tall, a dark body that several witnesses described as pleated or skirted, and around the face a stiff cowl in the shape of a spade, the ace of spades, pointed at the top and flaring at the sides. The face inside it was described as round, and orange, and glowing.
It hissed and moved toward them and they ran. Several were sick that night. The dog, which had run up the hill ahead of everyone, came back down first and was reported unwell for days afterwards.
The county sheriff went up. A reporter from the Braxton Democrat went up. What they found was a burnt patch, a smell of something metallic, and marks in the grass.
Reported from
- The Bailey Fisher farm, above Flatwoods, Braxton County. The only
significant sighting. Unlike the rest of this guide, this entry is one night.
- Sutton, West Virginia. The Flatwoods Monster Museum. The county has built
a tourist trail of five giant chairs shaped like the creature, which locals call Braxxie, and put it on the road signage.
On the record
The light in the sky is not in dispute and is not mysterious. A large meteor was seen across West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland on the evening of 12 September 1952 and was widely reported. That is what the boys saw come down, and it did not come down on the hill. It was hundreds of miles away.
The standing explanation for the figure is a barn owl. A barn owl in a tree, seen by torchlight from below by people who have just run up a hill in the dark expecting something, presents a pale heart-shaped facial disc that is genuinely close to the pointed cowl every witness drew, with the wings and branches behind it filling in the body. The nausea has been attributed to fright and to the grass. The marks in the field were later attributed to a pickup truck.
The Institute finds the owl explanation persuasive and files the entry as unresolved anyway, for one reason. Seven people, including an adult and a serviceman, gave consistent independent descriptions of a very specific and very strange shape within hours, before they could have compared notes properly, and none of them profited or recanted. Whatever was in the tree, the account of it is sound testimony about a real experience.
They were not lying and they were probably wrong. The Institute has an entire filing cabinet for that category.
Also in the guide: Mothman · Sasquatch · Chupacabra · Wendigo