Lore 233: Down to Earth

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I don't know about you, but I love a good mystery.

From watching Goonies as a kid to growing up with Indiana Jones on the big screen and even the national treasure films, I feel like I've constantly been surrounded by compelling mysteries.

And believe me, I'm not complaining.

So I have to wonder how the early settlers of West Virginia must have felt when they started to spread out and explore, only to discover mysterious objects scattered all across the region, large stones along riverbanks, and flat surfaces inside caves, all bearing an intriguing puzzle.

Petroglyphs Now, on the surface, they aren't too cryptic.

These are carvings and drawings left behind by the Ojibwa and other Algonquin tribes that once lived in the area.

They capture pieces of their mythology and document the significant animals that made up the world around them.

At the same time though, most people who stumbled upon them didn't know any of that.

They just saw ancient carvings in a landscape they had just entered and it made them feel much less alone.

It made them nervous.

It made them feel fear.

Today, archaeologists think these petroglyphs could be as new as the early 1600s or as old as 1500 years ago, but it's probably impossible to narrow that down.

A lot of them have disappeared over the years as humans have engineered the rivers of the region to suit their needs, causing them to rise and conceal a lot of these stones.

Of those that remain, a lot of them are being kept secret by historians and archaeologists in an effort to protect them.

It seems that all sorts of folks want to see them, touch them, and even take them home.

And I sort of get that.

People arrived in West Virginia to begin new lives and write new new chapters of their personal stories.

But when they got there, they discovered older stories had already been written.

Because of this, the area has become a hotbed of legends and belief in the supernatural, and some of those tales are more than a little dark.

So, as the legendary musician John Denver once sang, Country Roads take me home because it's time for us to return to West Virginia.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

We probably need to start with the most obvious question.

Why?

What is it about West Virginia that generates so much folklore?

Why do stories seem to take up residence there more than most other states in America?

And maybe this is a good time to remind everyone that we've visited West Virginia a couple of times before.

We've already explored the river monster Menongi, the grafton monster, and some oddly named creatures called the Granttown goon and sheep squatch.

And of course, the state's most famous visitor, Mothman.

But it goes so far beyond that.

There are stories about snakes so poisonous that their venom kills all the plants around them and even turns water green.

One folktale even tells of a snake that coiled around an apple tree.

And when two children hiding in that tree ate the apples, they fell down dead.

So powerful was that poison.

But it's not just cryptids and mythic snakes, though.

There are also animal omens.

In one account collected in an issue of Midwest folklore, as told by a woman named Mrs.

Gypsy Scott, a neighbor was paying a visit to a sickly old woman when a bird flew to the window and flapped at the head of the sick woman's bed.

The neighbor interpreted the bird as an omen of death, and sure enough, the old woman died the the next morning.

So again, what is it about West Virginia that makes it so prone to these stories and sightings of monstrous creatures?

Well, one answer a lot of people propose is its location.

Out of the 13 states that have some sort of a foothold in the region known as Appalachia, only West Virginia is fully inside it.

And Appalachia is where a huge spectrum of cultures arrived, mingled, and set down roots.

It was the coal mines that drew them there.

The English, Irish, Scottish all brought their fairy tales, and those mingled with local Cherokee legends and the religious stories found in their faith.

Newcomers also arrived from Czechoslovakia, Italy, Hungary, Austria, and more.

That's a lot of people in a brand new place trying to set up new lives while maintaining a connection to their past.

Toss in the new landscape and all the strange animals they had never encountered before, and you have a recipe for mystery.

Basically, people were primed with a slew of old supernatural beliefs from their homeland, new superstitions they learned from their new multicultural West Virginia neighbors, and the uncanny magical thinking that rises out of being in an unknown, unpredictable environment.

Oh, and that landscape?

It's dotted with caves.

Yes, they're mostly the result of the mining that's taken place there for a long, long time.

But dark holes in the ground have always been a breeding ground for story.

And don't get me started on the forests either.

West Virginia is the third most forested state in America.

Heck, just the Monongahela National Forest alone covers nearly a million acres.

That's a lot of hiding places.

But not all of West Virginia's monsters are speculative or animal.

Some of them, it seems, are human.

Take, for example, Louis Wetzel, who was a complex individual.

Born in 1763, his family moved to West Virginia when he was still just a boy.

And you have to remember, white Europeans were seen as invaders and thieves by the indigenous people who owned the land.

So when Lewis and his brother were kidnapped by a group of Wyandat warriors during a raid, it was a situation with cruelty on both sides of the coin.

It's not right to kidnap children, but any of us would also stand tall and defend our property.

Like I said, it's complex.

The boys managed to escape later that night, and as a result of the experience, young Lewis dedicated his life to murdering any Native American he could find.

He didn't live a long life, dying at the young age of just 45, but over that short span, he managed to kill hundreds of people.

By every definition of the term, Louis Wetzel was a serial killer.

But despite that, he was lauded as a hero.

Folks mentioned his name in the same breath as Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett.

Teddy Roosevelt sang his praises.

And the local Shawnee people talked about him too.

But they called him something different.

The Dark Destroyer.

Today, there's Wetzel County, named after him.

And just like the rest of the state, it's a county filled with ghost stories.

Remember the phantom airship panic of the 1890s?

One of them was spotted in that area.

People have discovered ancient burial mounds, reported supernatural creatures, and strange lights in the sky.

Sometimes the things that go bump in the night are nothing but legend.

Sometimes they are simply dangerous, misguided men.

But sometimes, if the stories are true, they are something more.

And the story that makes that distinction clear descended from the sky.

It was hard to miss.

The three boys had been playing in the local schoolyard just after sunset when something massive appeared in the sky.

What they didn't know though was just how much it would change their lives.

Brothers Ed and Freddie May were 13 and 12 respectively.

Their pal Tommy Heyer was a bit younger at 10, but all of them knew what they saw.

A big red object they described as a fireball streaking across the September night sky and crashing onto a hill on a nearby farm.

Now you have to get the right mood set up in your mind before we continue.

This was 1952 in the tiny rural West Virginia county of Braxton.

Just five years earlier, the country had been taken by storm by the events in Roswell, New Mexico, where some people claimed a mysterious object fell fell out of the sky and crashed to Earth.

These three boys probably felt a lot of things in that moment.

Fear, of course.

I mean, fireballs falling from the sky never seemed like a good thing, right?

But also a bit of excitement.

Their Roswell fantasies could very well be coming true.

So they bolted for home to tell their mother and find out what to do next.

Freddie and Ed's mom was a 32-year-old beautician named Kathleen May.

I'd imagine that she was trying to relax after a long, hard day on her feet, probably still even cleaning up after the mess of the evening meal.

But the look of excitement on those young faces immediately drove her into action.

Two other neighborhood boys heard the commotion.

Neil Nunley was 14 and Ronnie Shaver was 10, and they wanted to join in on the fun.

But Kathleen wanted another person who resembled a responsible adult, so she called on Gene Lemon, a 17-year-old who was freshly minted as a National Guardsman.

Together with a family dog, Ricky, the whole gang of them headed off, like some 1950s version of Stranger Things.

They were nervous but also curious, who knew what waited for them atop that hill on the nearby farmland.

Ricky was a good dog and ran ahead of them, but soon the rest of them started to hear barking and then Ricky came rushing back, tail between its legs.

And when they all crested the hill, they understood why.

Right there, about 100 yards away from where they stood, was a ball of fire they described as roughly 10 feet in diameter, and it was pulsing with light and hissing.

To be fair, it was hard to see everything clearly.

The hilltop was covered in a strange mist, and the air had a weird metallic smell to it.

In fact, their eyes and noses were starting to burn and water, but they pressed on.

They were nearly there, maybe 50 feet away from the strange glowing object, when a sound to their left caught their attention.

Turning, they spotted two green glowing eyes.

But the proportions weren't right.

These eyes were roughly a foot apart, which would make the head they resided in unnaturally large.

So the young National Guardsman Gene aimed his flashlight at them.

What they saw terrified them.

Each of them had their own take on the creature's description, but as a whole, the common elements were as bizarre and frightening as you would imagine.

The creature those eyes belonged to stood roughly 10 feet tall, with some sort of a cowl-shaped garment behind its head.

Its body, they said, was draped in a metallic dress-shaped piece of armor that got wider toward the ground, and light reflected off it in shades of green and deep black.

Kathleen would later go on record as saying the creature was, and I quote, a fire-breathing monster, 10 feet tall with a bright green body and a blood-red face.

And then she added, it looked worse than Frankenstein.

It couldn't have been human.

Setting aside the all-too-common misunderstanding that Mary Shelley's terrifying creature was named Frankenstein, it seems that Kathleen's words reflect the horror of everyone there.

And a moment later, it got worse as the creature, whatever it might have been, let out a high-pitched hissing sound and began rushing toward them.

Gene dropped his flashlight.

One of the younger boys wet his pants.

A few of them probably screamed.

And then all of them in unison bolted back in the direction they'd come from.

and they didn't stop running until they were safely home.

Once there, a few of them vomited, either from the terrifying experience or from the unusual mist that had burned their eyes.

And then Kathleen called the police.

What did they find?

Well, according to later accounts, the top of the hill was empty.

No glowing fireball, no 10-foot-tall metallic monster in a dress.

It was quiet and calm, as if everything that took place had vanished into thin air.

Except for one thing.

All of the men who visited the hill that night reported that the air had a very unusual odor.

They said that it smelled metallic.

Kathleen hadn't just called the police, though.

In her moment of panic that night, she had also dialed up the local newspaper and told them everything.

And that, it seems, is why the entire country knew about their walk in the dark.

The strange arrival took place on the evening of September 12th, which was a Friday.

By the following Monday morning, people all over the United States were opening newspapers with headlines about it.

In Michigan, one paper proclaimed, some believe, some doubt reports of mysterious glowing monster.

Down in Tennessee, a paper carried the headline, glowing monster reported skulking in West Virginia.

And up in New York, the article declared, the the thing 10 feet tall terrifies seven.

I get that this wasn't the age of the internet.

There was no short-form video platform where millions of people could turn a single post into a trending topic.

But in every other sense of the concept, the events in Flatwoods, West Virginia went viral.

Soon enough, hundreds of tourists were pouring into the little town of less than 300 residents, and they all had one thing on their mind, to catch a glimpse of the glowing monster.

One of those visitors was a minister from Brooklyn who had recently witnessed a creature that fit Kathleen's description perfectly.

In his dreams, apparently.

Some of the visitors were more than just tourists though.

Ivan Sanderson was a famous paranormal investigator from New York, and he ended up spending a number of days wandering around the area with a team of researchers.

And a local guy from right there in Braxton County named Gray Barker drove over to get material for a future article in Fate magazine.

Barker, by the way, would later go on to invent a term that has become one of the key elements of the UFO conspiracy story.

His invention?

Men in black.

Speaking of names, the mysterious creature earned a few of them that year.

The Braxton County monster seems a bit too on the nose, but Braxy sounds pretty fun and laid-back.

Others called it the thing, and someone, clearly not from Boston, referred to it as the green monster.

But the one that stuck around all these years?

The Flatwoods Monster.

And I mentioned a little while ago how the timing of this event couldn't have been more poignant.

Since the Roswell incident, there had been a growing national interest in visitors from the sky, UFOs, and all things alien.

And just four months before the fireball crashed down in Flatwoods, Time magazine ran an article titled, Have We Visitors from Outer Space?

Listen to the opening paragraph.

The Air Force is now ready to concede that many saucer and fireball sightings still defy explanation.

Here, life offers some scientific evidence that that there is a real case for interplanetary saucers.

How could anyone not look up at the night sky with fear after reading that?

Throw in the growing tension about the Cold War, and folks were honestly just low-key anxious all the time about threats from above.

But of course, there were all sorts of explanations put forward to toss cold water on the UFO theory.

A lot of people have pointed out that there was indeed a meteor shower that night, visible across the night sky in three states.

And what a lot of people don't know is that when meteors crest the horizon, they often look like they're landing or crashing on the ground.

It's a common optical illusion and explains what the boys would have seen in the air that night.

But what about the flaming ball they witnessed on the ground at the top of the hill?

That's a lot harder to dismiss, although many have tried, suggesting light from a passing aircraft as a possible solution.

People have even justified the strange metallic odor as coming from a bad-smelling grass that grows in the area.

But if that were common, why didn't people report smelling it and then experiencing burning eyes and vomiting all the time?

As for the monster itself, critics think the 10-foot-tall, metal-clad creature was just a local owl, startled by a group of kids investigating around its tree.

And yes, owls do make strange hissing sounds, and some have a cowl-shaped head, like the alien they described.

But I'm stuck trying to figure out how that sort of animal could even look remotely close to what Kathleen described to the newspapers shortly after.

A lot of people have stayed curious in the years since it all happened.

To this day, they keep flooding to Flatwoods to experience a bit of it all for themselves.

The town has leaned into it too, since the visitors bring in some much-needed revenue.

And you can't blame them for it.

Yes, the Flatwoods monster represented fear and panic for a lot of people in 1952.

It tapped into their growing anxiety over visitors from outer space or attacks from an aggressive nation, but it also seems to have represented hope.

Hope that there was more out there than cold stars and empty planets.

Hope that while life seemed so precarious on Earth, there might be something bigger than nuclear annihilation.

Hope that perhaps we are not alone.

There's something magical about the night sky, isn't there?

If you have the chance to look up at the stars from a place that's not polluted with light from a big city, you've probably been able to see just how overwhelming it can all be.

It's easy to imagine there's something out there, just beyond our grasp.

Over the years, I've noticed how a lot of folklore seems to exist as a sort of band-aid over gaps in our understanding.

Unanswered questions can fill us with fear, and fear can drive us to do horrible irrational things.

The stories we find in folklore often help explain those noises in the dark or that sudden illness that took a loved one without warning.

Stories give us something to hold on to, even when those stories are about a 10-foot-tall alien in a metal dress.

Flatwoods has now become a sort of theme park for the glowing monster of 1952.

There are massive chairs carved in the image of the creature that tourists can sit in for photographs.

The Visitors Bureau has started displaying memorabilia in an official Flatwoods Monster Museum.

There's even a local ice cream shop that serves a Flatwoods Monster Burger, which is just a double patty, double cheese version of the classic.

And of course, you can buy t-shirts, keychains, and shot glasses, all emblazoned with the monster's image.

The hill where it all happened, though, the owners never allow visitors up there.

It's a refusal to participate in the hype that, in a weird sort of way, makes that hype bigger.

One last story.

The day after the Flatwoods monster sighting, Saturday, September 13th, a couple named George and Edith Snitowski, along with their 18-month-old son, were driving through the mountains of Frametown, West Virginia, about 20 miles from Flatwoods, when all of a sudden, the engine of their car died and they rolled to a stop.

George opened his door and then immediately closed it.

The air outside smelled strongly of sulfur and something metallic.

And maybe it's a good thing he did because a moment later, a shape appeared in the headlights of the car.

It was a creature they described as roughly 10 feet tall, with a cowl-shaped garment behind its large head and an odd metal dress that became wider nearest the ground.

And it leaned over their car and looked inside.

A heartbeat later, but one that must have felt like an eternity, the monster dragged a hand across the hood of their car and then slowly lumbered off toward the tree line at the edge of the road.

When it vanished, their car mysteriously started back up on its own.

George didn't waste any time wondering what had just taken place.

He shifted the car into drive and then pressed down hard on the gas.

And they never looked back.

Strange arrivals from a distant place, mysterious creatures in the nearby hills, lights and smells that don't seem natural.

I can see why the legend of the Flatwoods monster has stuck around for over 70 years, and I hope you can too.

But there are even older stories that have defied solid answers.

In fact, my team has tracked down one particular topic that's hard to grasp, but despite that, is packed with creepy stories.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about

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One of the earliest descriptions was written down by the Venerable Bede, an English monk who was alive and active in the early part of the 8th century.

He was documenting a curious thing that people had been wondering about and blamed it on the collision of rushing winds.

What was the mysterious result of that collision?

A phlegm-like substance in the fields, which he assumed was poisonous.

John of Gadsden, a 14th century English physician, wrote about a certain mucilaginous substance lying upon the earth.

He called it stellaterae, or the star of the earth.

In other words, it was the physical residue of stars.

16th century physician and scientist Paracelsus agreed, claiming it was a jelly-like excrement created when stars purify themselves, whatever that means.

In 1619, a mystical writer named Robert Flood witnessed a meteor land near his home and followed after it.

Instead of fragments of space rocks, though, he discovered a mass of a white, slippery substance with small black spots in it.

And I know this is weird science stuff, but stay with me, because these are real historical sightings of an unusual substance that has defied explanation for centuries, and our infrequent brushes with it as humans have been fascinating.

In 1821, a chemist in Amherst, Massachusetts named Rufus Graves spotted his own meteor landing and wandered out to the landing site the next morning.

There on the ground was an 8-inch wide circular object.

But it wasn't a stone.

It was jelly, and the longer it sat exposed to the air, the more runny it became.

One night in 1846 in the town of Louisville, New York, a meteor described as larger than the sun entered the sky from the west, lighting up the landscape for five long minutes until it seemed like day.

When it crash-landed in a nearby field, a whole bunch of the townsfolk traveled out to see it, only to find a mass of foul-smelling jelly measuring four feet in diameter.

Today, Most people call it star jelly, although there are other terms as well.

Star blubber, fallen star, spittle of the stars, starnfall, and the favorite of my researcher on this episode, slime of stera, an old Dutch word for star.

But what exactly is it?

The short answer is we don't know.

Some people think it's an algae that's activated by dew on the grass, causing it to expand.

Others have proposed it's just bird vomit, which takes what little romance there might have been out of it.

There are those who think it's the remains of jellyfish or potatoes reduced to a pulp by frost, but no genetic material has ever been found inside.

I don't have a lot of answers for you, but I do have one last story.

You see, back in September of 1950, two policemen in Philadelphia were driving their cruiser around town on their nightly rounds when they spotted a shimmering object floating down from the sky and landing in a nearby field.

Curious, they turned in that direction and headed off to investigate.

But when they arrived, they claimed to have stumbled across a massive, six-foot-wide, one-foot-thick saucer-shaped object.

And I say object instead of craft for one big reason.

It seems this thing glowed with a purple light, and according to the article, it quivered as if it were alive.

Naturally, the officers were unable to make heads or tails of it, and they called for help.

Two other officers joined them, but they were equally stumped.

And that's when one of the original officers tried to grab hold of the saucer.

And when he did, it literally disintegrated in his hands, leaving nothing behind but a sticky residue.

We can question stories like this all we want, but enough people believed it to be true that it quickly spread through whispers and rumors.

And that's why some people think this Philadelphia encounter with a mysterious craft made of star jelly went on to inspire a bit of pop culture from that era.

The 1958 film, The Blob.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Jenna Rose Nethercott and music by Chad Lawson.

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