Flatwoods Monster

A crashed light, a hilltop, and a ten-foot figure with a spade-shaped head. Half the town drew the same thing.

It's the evening of September 12th, 1952, in the tiny town of Flatwoods, West Virginia, up in the hills of Braxton County. And you're one of a group of boys playing football on a school lot when you see it: a bright object streaking across the twilight sky, coming down, it seems, on a nearby hilltop, on the Fisher farm owned by a woman named Kathleen May. You run to get her. She comes along with her sons and a few neighborhood boys, and a National Guardsman named Eugene Lemon, and his dog. Flashlights out, you all climb the hill in the dark to see what fell. Here's what is documented. The dog ran ahead, then came running back, terrified. At the top of the hill, the group reported a low-hanging mist and a foul, metallic, sulfur-like smell that made their eyes and throats burn. And then, in the beam of the flashlight, they said they saw it. A towering figure. Ten feet tall, by their account. A round, red face glowing from within, with what looked like a pointed hood or ace-of-spades shape framing the head. A dark, pleated, skirt-like body. And two glowing eyes, or lights, staring back at them. They said it hissed and glided toward them. Every single person on that hill turned and ran. So here's where it gets strange. Several of the witnesses got sick afterward. They reported nausea, vomiting, throat irritation, and symptoms that lingered for days. A local reporter and, later, investigators documented the physical reactions and the group's obvious fright. This wasn't one person's tall tale. It was a crowd, and their story stayed remarkably consistent. But here's the part most people don't know. There is a mundane explanation that ties nearly every detail together. That streaking light in the sky? Astronomers noted a large meteor, or bolide, crossed several states that very night and was widely reported, which explains the 'crash.' The monster itself? Skeptics, most notably investigator Joe Nickell, argue it was a barn owl. Perched in a tree, a startled barn owl has a heart-shaped, pale face that can look like a pointed hood, large reflective eyes that glow in a flashlight, and it hisses. Silhouetted against foliage on a dark hill, with fog and fear doing the rest, an owl on a branch could tower into a ten-foot phantom. The sulfur smell and nausea, skeptics say, could come from a nearby gas or the group's own panic. What's documented: the meteor, the frightened witnesses, the illness, the consistent testimony. What's speculation or legend: that anything landed at all. And yet, the Flatwoods Monster, sometimes called the Braxton County Monster or the 'Green Monster,' became a beloved piece of Appalachian folklore. The town now has a museum and roadside chairs shaped like the creature. So where does Flatwoods land on our map? Right next to Kelly-Hopkinsville, its Kentucky cousin, another rural family fleeing a glowing-eyed visitor. And it belongs to the great Washington Flap of 1952, the summer the skies over America seemed to fill with the unexplained.