The Tall Men

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Story 1.

The Legend of the Mothman.

In 1966, The residents of a small town in West West Virginia were stalked by an unknown creature with glowing red eyes.

Was he real or just a figment of the imagination?

And does recent photographic evidence suggest that he may have returned?

We now live in an age where most people carry on their person at least one device capable of photographing or recording any given incident.

As a result, reports of encounters with monsters and cryptids have become not only less commonplace, but also far less believable.

Of all the alleged incidents that feature such entities, the only available evidence is often the verbal testimony of those involved.

And because actual proof is often lacklustre or non-existent, it is almost routine for these experiences to be written off as campfire stories or urban legends.

But what are we to believe when the incident is witnessed over a sustained period by multiple members of the same community.

Point Pleasant, West Virginia, is a small town with a big history.

Its population of just over 4,000 occupies an area of just three square miles.

One would not think of it as a city, but in fact it is.

A city surrounded by lush green countryside, bisected by the vast Ohio River, and steeped in larger-than-life legend.

As its name suggests, its character is quaint, peaceful, and above all, pleasant.

On the surface at least, no one would ever suspect that it was home to one of the most unsettling encounters of the last half century, one that still strikes fear into the hearts of many.

During the latter half of the 1960s, reports began to surface of a mysterious and horrifying creature stalking residents on the outskirts and surrounding areas of town.

Encounters with this entity were said to be so frightening that at least one person suffered from psychological trauma for many years after their experience.

The first sighting occurred on the 12th of November 1966, when five gravediggers working in a local cemetery near Klendenin saw what they thought was a human being fly out of a group of nearby trees.

They watched for about a minute as it swooped low over their heads and then took off into the distance.

Two days later on the 14th, a resident of Salem, Newell Partridge, was at his home watching television when he saw two red objects hovering over a field at the rear of his property.

Upon investigating, He realized that the glowing objects were in fact a pair of eyes, which belonged to a tall dark figure.

This silhouette was standing on the branch of a tree about 100 meters distant, when it promptly rose up into the air and flew away over the woods, letting out a blood-curdling scream as it went.

His dog, a German shepherd named Bandit, took off in pursuit and was never seen again.

The following evening on the 15th,

two young married couples burst into the Mason County Sheriff's Office in a state of panic and distress.

They were Mr.

and Mrs.

Roger Scarberry and Mr and Mrs.

Steve Mallet, and they had been on their way back from a double date, driving close to the TNT area of Point Pleasant, when they saw a tall grey figure standing next to the road.

They reported that it looked like a man but much taller, possibly seven feet or more in height, and that it appeared to have a pair of wings folded behind its back.

In front of it lay the carcass of a dog, the breed of which was never determined, but was later assumed to be that of Newell Partridge's German Shepherd.

As they passed this strange-looking figure, it rose into the air and proceeded to fly after the car.

Mr.

Scarberry, who was driving, sped up to nearly 100 miles an hour, but the creature was able to keep up, matching the speed of the vehicle.

His wife said that it emitted a high-pitched screech as it flew and that it had huge red eyes, which glowed like a pair of car reflectors.

As they entered the town, it broke off the chase and flew back in the direction of the TNT area.

A press conference was held on the afternoon of the 16th, where the Scarbury and Mallet couples gave their accounts of the previous evening.

Dr.

Robert Smith, a wildlife expert, was also in attendance and offered his explanation to the waiting media, saying that what the two couples had actually seen was an abnormally large crane, which had been blown out of its migration route.

These reports would hit the local evening papers on the 16th of November, as word of the encounters spread through the town like wildfire.

This,

as with any kind of sensationalism, unfortunately invited many fabricated sightings from other so-called eyewitnesses, and from here on out, nearly all of these alleged encounters should be subjected to a much higher scrutiny.

That is not to say that all or even most of them are fictitious, however.

One sighting in particular occurred on the evening of the 16th at around the same time the first evening papers were being deposited in local mailboxes.

Mr and Mrs.

Raymond Walmsley, along with Marcella Bennett and her baby daughter Tina, were on their way to visit the Thomas family who lived on the outskirts of town.

When they pulled up to the Thomas property, the car seemed to disturb something.

As they were getting out of the vehicle, they were shocked to see a large grey figure, bigger than a man, rising from the ground nearby, which they described as having terrible glowing red eyes.

Marcella was so alarmed that she dropped her baby daughter.

After collecting herself and her child, she ran to the Thomas home and was let in by one of their children.

The creature shuffled after them and continued to terrorise the household by peering in through the windows.

By the time the police got there over half an hour later, it had of course vanished, but this was not the last Marcella would see of the so-called Mothman of Point Pleasant.

She just so happened to live on the outskirts of town near the TNT area and claimed that after her initial encounter at the Thomas residence, the creature had visited her home on several other occasions, and that she often heard its blood-curdling scream in the dead of night.

Marcella apparently suffered with nightmares and other mental health issues for many years after her ordeal.

The TNT area of Point Pleasant would later become heavily associated with the Mothman.

It is a large tract of land dotted with small concrete igloos used during World War II to store ammunition.

It is also adjacent to the 2,500-acre McClintick Wildlife Station and the entire landscape is covered with dense forest, steep hills and riddled with tunnels.

The press would go on to claim that the area provided a sort of home for the creature during its time there, with most of the sightings having occurred in that area.

There were many more reported encounters towards the end of 1966, peaking especially in 1967.

During December of that year, the Silver River Bridge over the Ohio River collapsed, plunging a number of vehicles into the icy depths and killing 46 people in the process.

Immediately after this tragedy, sightings of the Mothman ceased altogether, leading many to believe that the creature was somehow responsible.

That it was, in fact, a harbinger of death.

So who, or rather what, was the Mothman?

Was there any truth to the events that took place?

Or was it all just an elaborate hoax, orchestrated with the sole intention of increasing tourism in a failing backwater town?

Ideas have been varied to say the least.

Sceptics have largely agreed with Dr.

Robert Smith's explanation.

maintaining that the Mothman was nothing more than a very large bird, and this may well have been true.

The sandhill crane is a large avian species, common in North America, which normally averages a height of around 4 feet, but is capable of growing up to 6 feet.

It also has shocks of bright red feathers around its eyes, somewhat matching the descriptions given at the time of the sightings.

However, eyewitnesses have taken great issue with this, rejecting the idea that what they saw was a bird, and countering that they would have known the difference.

Firstly, it would have to have been abnormally large in order to match the proportions given by those who encountered the strange being, seven feet tall in most cases.

Secondly, the Mothman's eyes were said to glow red, and whilst owls exhibit eyeshine when a light source is pointed in their direction, most other birds do not.

By all accounts, the creature's eyes glowed red even when no light source was pointing directly towards it.

The high-pitched scream it emitted was also said to be far more human-like than bird-like, and Mr Scarberry would go on to question exactly what kind of bird could fly at over 100 miles per hour.

Finally, Whilst it might be plausible for one or two witnesses to misidentify a large bird, it would be highly improbable for so many others to have done so.

This is of course if many of the eyewitness accounts are to be believed.

Sightings dramatically increased after the Scarberry and Mallet accounts were published in the local papers, and it would only be prudent to assume that some, if not most of them, were completely fabricated to further inflame the situation.

Even the Scarberry-Mallet sighting is said to have several inconsistencies between how the story was originally reported to the police and what it later became in the press.

For instance, other sources have stated that the creature did not in fact fly after their car, but rather shuffled down the road in pursuit for a very short distance.

With this in mind, we are once again at the mercy of speculation, and of this there is no shortage.

Tourism to the town experienced a noted increase in the wake of those first sightings, and of course, this has led a number of sceptics to believe that the entire episode was a cleverly planned hoax, engineered towards that end.

On the other hand, the reason this story captured the imaginations of so many in the first place was the result of those first four encounters.

These four sightings all happened over the course of as many days in locations that were many miles apart.

They were all strikingly similar, even though nothing had been reported in the press during that time, and despite the fact that none of the witnesses knew each other.

Add to this the fact that the sheriff absolutely believed the Scarbury and Mallet accounts, having known them for most of their lives and witnessing firsthand how extremely upset and visibly shaken they were after their encounter.

For this reason, many are prepared to extend these sightings a degree of credence.

There could well have been an unknown cryptid stalking the countryside around Point Pleasant, and if this was indeed the case, what was its purpose and where did it come from?

One theory within the fringe community is that the Mothman is a symbol of impending doom.

Completely unrelated to the Point Pleasant sightings, the same creature has allegedly been seen all over the world, and wherever it appears, tragedy soon follows.

Indeed, many have likened the Mothman to the strange flying humanoids often witnessed in parts of South and Central America.

The most popular theory amongst believers, though, is that the Mothman was extraterrestrial in origin.

Some time before the first Mothman sighting, A sewing machine salesman by the name of Woodrow Derenberger, driving along Highway I-77 not far from the area of Point Pleasant, encountered a UFO which stopped his car dead in the road.

A being then exited the strange craft, sporting a huge inhuman grin.

This entity was said to have communicated with Derenberger telepathically, asking about the strange glow on the horizon.

not realizing it was the lights of a distant town.

Derenberger reported that the individual referred to himself as Indrid Cold,

a name which didn't mean anything to him at the time, but one which has gained much notoriety over the years.

Many alleged alien abductees have reported meeting an Indrid Cold,

otherwise known as the Grinning Man.

Cold was said to have asked Derenberger many questions about the people and surrounding areas, then thanked him and left in his strange craft.

Less than two weeks later, the first sightings of the Mothman began to surface, and over time, links between the two entities have invariably been made.

Not only that, but many UFOs and strange lights were witnessed in and around the town at the time the encounters were going on.

Some residents even reported paranormal activity in their homes, which gradually abated after the sightings themselves had ceased.

Even the famed men in black were said to have made an appearance on a few occasions.

Whoever or whatever the Mothman was,

there is no doubt that something strange was going on in that small city on the banks of the Ohio River during the latter half of the 1960s.

Whether people were seeing a genuine cryptid, or nothing more than a figment of someone's extraordinary imagination, we have to ask ourselves which is the more bizarre.

A species yet to be discovered, of earthly origin or otherwise, or the length some people might go to, in order to save their town.

In closing, a picture taken near Point Pleasant on the 20th of November 2016, almost 50 years to the day after the first Mothman sighting occurred, seems to show a winged humanoid of some description flying through a twilight sky.

And whilst this could be nothing more than a bird of prey clutching a snake in its talons,

the question must be asked:

Could the Mothman have finally returned to Point Pleasant after all this time?

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Story 2.

Who is the Grinning Man?

Alien?

Humanoid Cryptid?

Man in Black?

Hallucination?

Or possibly a combination of these?

This 7-foot-tall being who sports a menacing inhuman smile and terrorizes people in the dead of night by watching watching them sleep may be known by many names but he needs only one.

Who is the grinning man?

Cast your mind back to your childhood.

A time when life was a curious mix of innocence, hijinks and promise.

When each day was a new adventure, when there was no limit to your curiosity, energy or imagination.

When weekends brought you pocket money, scraped knees brought you tears, and darkness, all manner of foreboding.

Just as surely as most children fear the dark, Most also fear some kind of bogeyman.

Was there a bogeyman in your town?

Perhaps it was the village recluse who lived in a decrepit old house at the end of the street.

Maybe it was something unseen, watching from beyond the treeline of the woods behind your home.

Or perhaps it was some unsightly creature, dwelling on a lonely windswept moor, only venturing out during the night to feast on human blood.

Whatever it was, your fear of it more than likely diminished with age.

There are no such things as monsters your parents probably told you, drummed into you even,

and maybe you would believe them, maybe you wouldn't, but in time, as you got older, it became an accepted and imperishable truth.

And yet even now,

how can we be so sure?

Every year across the globe, people report what they describe as monsters.

Aliens, ghosts, Bigfoot, the Wendigo, Skinwalkers, Black Eyed Children, the Chupacabra, Dogman, Mothman, Lizardman, Pig-faced men, men in black.

The list goes on and on and on.

And whilst encounters with such beings are said to be horrifying, by far and away one of the most frightening entities you could ever bump into on a cold dark evening is said to be the Grinning Man.

Not least because, unlike many of the others, he has been known to enter people's homes in the dead of night and watch them whilst they sleep.

On the surface at least, the Grinning Man's appearance doesn't sound all too frightening.

He doesn't have the large soulless black eyes of an alien grey, the huge imposing girth of a Sasquatch or the sharp teeth and claws of the dogman, but there is something about him that disturbs eyewitnesses to their core.

Said to be about seven feet tall with broad shoulders and a muscular physique, he is described as having small beady eyes which are set unnaturally wide apart, nestled either side of a shallow nose.

His face and head are utterly devoid of hair and he is often seen wearing a tight-fitting one-piece suit, which is reflective, like tinfoil.

It is said that his facial expression would otherwise be docile, but for the fact that he consistently sports a wide, inhuman grin.

And it is this grin which eyewitnesses find most disturbing.

For it is not a grin of pleasure or even amusement.

It is one of sheer menace.

It is said that his mouth smiles but his eyes do not.

And aside from this disconcerting facial expression, witnesses have also reported a feeling of absolute dread when confronted by this being, almost as if they are staring death in the face.

What follows is a select few of some of the most terrifying encounters with the grinning man

The earliest recorded sighting occurred in Elizabeth, New Jersey on the 11th of October 1966.

It was 9.45pm and two boys by the names of Martin Munov and James Jan Kaitis were walking home from a movie theatre along New Jersey and 4th Street.

After a while, They turned onto another road that ran adjacent to NJ and 4th and found themselves walking beneath the elevated New Jersey turnpike.

After dark, this area of town was certainly no place for two young boys to be wandering around unsupervised.

They must have felt uneasy as they walked through what was essentially a dark tunnel, with traffic pounding 30 feet over their heads and only a few pools of light emanating from the street lamps on the road above.

Lining their route was a high chain-link fence, the other side of which was a steep incline leading back up to the underside of the turnpike.

Earlier that evening, they had heard that a woman in town had been chased by a huge man wearing a green suit, but they tried to put this out of their minds as they walked through the darkness, chatting as casually as their nerves would allow.

They had almost emerged from the other side of the turnpike when James noticed someone standing in the bushes on the opposite side of the chainlink fence.

He nudged his friend and said, Who's that?

Martin turned to look behind him and that's when both boys noticed how incredibly tall and well built this figure was.

He was wearing a green reflective suit and his attention seemed entirely fixed on a house across the street.

situated some 200 meters away from where they were.

He didn't even notice the two boys looking at him at first, but after a few seconds, he turned to face them.

The boys later described him as the weirdest looking guy they had ever seen.

His face didn't even look human.

Needless to say, they panicked and ran, leaving the figure behind, grinning at their backs.

As fate would have it, famous author and ufologist John Keel was in the area shortly after the encounter, investigating a UFO which had been witnessed 40 miles north of Elizabeth.

He got wind of the boy's story and set about interviewing them separately.

They both gave the same description, and both indicated exactly the same spot where they had seen the strange entity.

And because the aforementioned UFO sighting had occurred on the very same evening, it wouldn't be long before conclusions were drawn pertaining to the Grinning Man's otherworldly origins.

The second eyewitness account was to come less than three weeks later, some 500 miles to the west of Elizabeth in West Virginia.

As we recounted in the previous portion of this episode, a sewing machine salesman named Woodrow Derenberger had a chilling encounter with the Grinning Man whilst driving along Interstate 77, two weeks before the Mothman sightings began.

Derenberger described this being as very tall, with wideset eyes and sporting an inhuman grin.

Unlike the New Jersey sighting, this individual was wearing a blue suit rather than a green one, but both exhibited the same properties in that they were reflective, like tinfoil.

Indeed, there was a sighting of the grinning man on the outskirts of Point Pleasant, when the Mothman phenomenon was at its peak.

The Lily family had been experiencing poltergeist activity in their home around this time, which had begun abruptly for no apparent reason.

All of a sudden, things were being moved around the house of their own accord, objects were being thrown from shelves, doors were being slammed, and even lights were being seen in the sky above their house.

It was a tumultuous time for the family, who were constantly bearing the brunt of this bizarre episode at all hours of the day and night.

However, it would be the youngest daughter Linda who fared the worst and would experience the most terrifying instance of this strange activity.

At 2am on December 14th, 1966, Linda came running into her parents' bedroom screaming in terror.

She told her mother and father that she had been awoken by an odd clicking sound and when she opened her eyes she was horrified to see a figure standing at the foot of her bed.

It was a man, she said.

A big man, very tall.

I couldn't see his face very well, but I could see that he was grinning at me.

He walked around the bed and stood right over me.

I screamed and hid under the covers, and when I looked again, he was gone.

Suffice it to say that Linda refused to sleep in her own room for weeks afterwards, and by the time she did pluck up the courage to climb back into her own bed, the poltergeist activity in the home had abated, and the Lily family never experienced anything out of the ordinary again.

From late 1966 to early 1967,

several people in Provincetown, Massachusetts would have separate run-ins with a neighbourhood prowler, whom they described as very tall, muscular, and always wearing a fixed grin.

The details of these reports do exist in old clippings from local newspapers, but unfortunately they are yet to be published, online.

It's interesting to note that not all grinning man sightings have occurred in the US.

A woman living in Scotland by the name of Mary Elizabeth Macrae would have an extremely chilling encounter which would trouble her for many years afterwards.

Mary lived with her husband Alan on the outskirts of Dunkeld, a small village situated right on the cusp of the stunning Cairngorms National Park.

The couple were in their mid-50s, their children had long since left home.

and for the most part it was just Mary and Alan living together in peaceful isolation.

Their house was remote.

Their closest neighbour lived almost a mile away, but they enjoyed the relative privacy.

On the night of the 23rd of November 1972, Mary and Alan went to bed at around 9pm as usual, and they sat up reading for about an hour before turning off the lights and going to sleep.

Mary reported that she was awoken in the early hours of the morning by an indistinct clicking sound, and upon opening her eyes, she found herself lying on her front, completely paralysed and struggling to breathe.

Sleep paralysis was not fully understood or even identified as a disorder during the 1970s, so Mary, who had never experienced anything like this before, felt an inward and intensifying panic, but was unable to do anything about her situation.

The clicking increased in volume, piercing her eardrums, and then something suddenly dawned on her.

She remembered that she had closed the curtains before getting into bed.

It was something she always did every night without fail, and yet now she could see that they were open.

All this time she had had a distinct feeling of being watched, and a very slight movement in the periphery of her vision drew her attention to the bottom left pane of the bedroom window.

To her complete horror, she saw saw a face staring back at her.

It had dark, beady eyes and was fixed with an awful, malevolent grin.

As she stared back, she felt herself becoming transfixed, unable to avert her gaze.

She then felt her whole body lift off the bed and slowly float towards the face.

In her panic, she tried to scream out, but no sound came from her mouth, and she was unable to move.

She was not to know what happened next, as she blacked out, and when she awoke the next morning, she was suffering from a terrible headache, which did not ease for almost a week.

She also noticed that the curtains were still open, a fact which cast doubt on any notion in later years that she had simply experienced a bout of sleep paralysis.

Mary passed away in 2013 at the age of 94, but the memory of what she saw that night stayed with her until the day she died.

Taking all these accounts into consideration, what are we to make of this phenomenon?

Just who on earth is a grinning man?

Or rather, what is he?

Is there more than one of him?

Or is he a single entity who chooses to terrorise unsuspecting individuals for no apparent reason?

There are a few conflicting accounts regarding his identity, and whilst all eyewitnesses describe him in a similar fashion, the situations in which he has been seen vary significantly.

For example, some people who have encountered the men in black have described them as having inhuman features, as well as sporting malevolent grins.

Others who claim to have been abducted by aliens have also reported seeing a grinning man during their experience.

Indeed, the clicking sounds heard in both the Linda Lilly and Mary McRae encounters are commonly reported in many alien abduction cases, and some abductees have even mentioned the name of Injured Cold, the name given by Woodrow Derenberger during his experience.

One such encounter occurred in Italy in December of 1979, when a man by the name of Pierre Zanfreta, who allegedly had a history of being abducted by a race of reptilian aliens, claimed to have been contacted by a grinning man shortly before being taken aboard a UFO.

He said that this man referred to himself as none other than Indrid Cold.

Throughout the late 60s and early 70s, Woodrow Derenberger would go on to state that he was visited more times by the same Indrid Cold he had met on that cold dark evening back in 1966.

He would also claim to have been visited by two other grinning men who went by the names of Demo Hassan and Carl Ardo.

Even his wife testified to meeting these beings and she believed their agenda was evil.

Sadly, she and Derenberger divorced shortly after these encounters.

Finally, there seems to be a connection with the Mothman.

which many people believe was itself an extraterrestrial being.

Some fringe theorists have even presented the theory that the Grinning Man, Indrid Cold and the Mothman were all one and the same, a member of a race of shapeshifting aliens who in fact walk amongst us and even pose as government officials in the form of men in black.

But is this perhaps a stretch too far?

After all, if we are to look at these accounts with a critical eye, We must point out that at least the first three reported sightings of the Grinning Man begin and end with John Keel.

He was the first to write about them in his books and would have applied his own biases and taken his own artistic liberties.

Even the Mothman sightings were further borne out and brought to international attention by him.

Perhaps these encounters were embellished or made out to be more bizarre than they actually were.

and it would therefore be reasonable to assume that any eyewitness accounts since then are purely copycat fabrications.

Of course this is all speculation, and it is rather uncanny how all physical descriptions of this being are inherently similar, and interesting how these sightings always seem to occur around the same time of year between winter and spring.

Could it be that the Grinning Man, whoever he is, seems to prefer colder seasons?

No pun intended, of course, on his alleged last name.

The fact remains that whether we believe it or not, the Grinning Man phenomenon is here to stay, with more and more encounters being reported with each passing year.

And if you ever find yourself walking alone at night, or even sleeping soundly in your own bed, pray you never come face to face with a tall man who wears a fixed grin and calls himself Cold.

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