Culture
2026 Mothman Festival brings believers, skeptics and the curious to Point Pleasant
By: Emily Votaw
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POINT PLEASANT, W.Va. (WOUB) — Allison Roberts says she was about 14 when she “lost” 12 hours to the Mothman.
“Missing time” is a common experience among those who claim to have brushed up against the paranormal. Still, Roberts spent those hours wide awake, reading everything she could find about a red-eyed creature from a West Virginia town she had never seen. She had gone looking for legends closer to home in rural Mississippi.
The Mothman was more interesting.
“By the end, I was like, ‘This is my cryptid,'” Roberts said.
More than a decade later, she finally went to “meet” him — or, at least, attend the increasingly famous celebration of the Mothman.
Roberts, now 25, drove roughly 13 hours from Liberty, MS, to Point Pleasant, a small river town, for the 2026 Mothman Festival on Sept. 19 and 20 to celebrate a creature no one can prove is real. Like the thousands of others who descended on Point Pleasant over the weekend, she had nothing but enthusiasm to share.
“I’m having the best time ever,” Roberts said Sunday afternoon, despite soaring temperatures Saturday and periods of heavy rain Sunday. “Everyone’s been so lovely and nice.”
The annual festival once again transformed downtown Point Pleasant into a celebration of one of Appalachia’s most enduring legends. Main Street was filled with people in elaborate Mothman costumes, artists selling Mothman-inspired wares, paranormal researchers, and plenty of the merely curious.
Some came out of sincere belief in the unexplained. Others came for the love of a red-eyed creature that has become an unlikely West Virginia icon.
Mothman reached a much wider audience through John Keel’s 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies and its 2002 film adaptation. What witnesses actually saw remains debated, as does whether Mothman had any connection to the bridge disaster.
Festival programming included live music, guest speakers, food and merchandise vendors, and tours connected to the legend, including trips into the nearby TNT area associated with the original sightings. Organizers estimated tens of thousands of people would visit Point Pleasant during the weekend.
That crowd bears little resemblance to what brothers and paranormal researchers John and Timothy Fricke found at the first Mothman Festival in 2002.
“The first year probably just a couple hundred people showed up throughout the day,” John Fricke said. “So it was very, very small because not many people even knew about it.”
The Maryland brothers had visited Point Pleasant a few months earlier and befriended people in the local Chamber of Commerce. When those contacts learned organizers were planning a Mothman festival, they reached out.
“We found out about it like 13 or 14 days before the festival,” John said. “So we were lucky to get in right from the ground.”
They have attended every festival since, and over more than two decades, they have become part of its history.
After riding the festival’s Mothman hayride in 2002 and 2003, the brothers decided the attraction needed its namesake.
“We thought Jeff ought to have a Mothman, like on a zip line or something,” John said.
Jeff Wamsley, the festival’s organizer and owner of Point Pleasant’s Mothman Museum, told them to go for it. John and Timothy built a Mothman figure, and every year since 2004, the brothers have sent it flying through the darkness over hayride riders in the TNT area. It swoops past to an eerie screech they sampled from a bootleg recording of Pink Floyd performing “Echoes.”
According to Encyclopedia Virginia, a program of Virginia Humanities, Cornstalk often worked for peace in the Ohio Valley. He also commanded Shawnee and allied forces at the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774 during Lord Dunmore’s War. When the Revolutionary War began, he pushed for Shawnee neutrality even as other Native leaders sided with the British.
In November 1777, Cornstalk came to Fort Randolph at Point Pleasant to warn American officers about growing pro-British sentiment among the tribes. The officers held him hostage. On Nov. 10, after a soldier was killed nearby in an unrelated incident, a mob of militiamen responded by murdering Cornstalk, his son Elinipsico, and two other Shawnee men.
Cornstalk’s remains now rest at Tu-Endie-Wei State Park, near the festival grounds where costumed crowds spent the weekend.
Local legend holds that Cornstalk cursed the region as he died. Some have connected Mothman and the Silver Bridge collapse to that supposed curse. Timothy sees an irony in the curse story. Whatever people believe about it or Mothman’s origins, the creature now brings tens of thousands of visitors and an annual economic boost to the town.
“It’s really good for the local economy,” Timothy said. “It really helps bring in tourist dollars. I wouldn’t necessarily call that a curse.”
For John, the festival’s size has become a phenomenon of its own.
“I often wonder if the Mothman appeared in ’66 so that the Mothman Festival would someday come into being,” he said. “The Mothman Festival was like 30,000 people showing up. It’s so much bigger than the previous Mothman phenomenon.”
The festival’s celebratory atmosphere stands in contrast to some of the darker interpretations that have followed the Mothman story.
“I think some people attribute something negative to Mothman because he was scary,” John said. “Some people think Mothman may have had something to do with Silver Bridge collapsing, but Mothman may have been trying to warn people that Silver Bridge is going to collapse.”
He doesn’t take a side.
“I think he’s neutral, neither good nor evil,” John said. “But it’s very hard to say exactly what his intent was.”
Whatever Mothman wanted all those decades ago, John knows what keeps bringing the brothers back.
“When you come to the Mothman Festival, you meet new people every year, and some of these people become your friends for life,” he said. “Even the people that you talk to and sort of bond with a little bit [and] you never see again, it’s still special.”
For Roberts, the trip had little to do with proving what Mothman is.
She celebrated her first festival wearing a feather boa, a homemade headband decorated with feathers and pipe cleaners, red sunglasses and a Mothman necklace from friends. She called the outfit a “minimalist version” of her usual costumes because she wanted to spend her first visit taking in as much of the festival as possible.
“It was worth easily the 13-hour drive,” Roberts said. “I can’t wait to come back again.”