SO EP:701 The Mothman Prophecies

I was unaware that was your first time attending that festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, so I think.

Steve Ward is one of the hosts. And Steve Ward is a guy who I believe lived in Illinois and then moved to Point Pleasant because of his interest in the area and in the Mothman legend. He's quite schooled up on the history of that and John Keel and all that stuff, so he reached out to me. I did his podcast and it was in and around the time I did that podcast, either on the podcast or the next day or something, he was like, Hey, I'm

right here in Point Pleasant. I work with Jeff Walmsley, who runs and created the Mothman Museum and he also created the Mothman Festival. Do you want me to get in touch with him and maybe you show up as a guest in September. And it was the first time that anyone from the festival itself had reached out. And I was like, oh, okay, yeah, definitely. And I'd always

wanted to go. It had always been floating out there, but because of school schedules and kids going back to school in September and usually I'm working on a TV show, September is a busy month. It just never seemed to work out or be a super convenient time. But not currently working on a TV show, and my youngest son just graduated high school, so suddenly it was like, wait, a second, September is totally fine. So on the spot, I was like yes, I'll do it. I'm just going

to commit six months ahead of time. And then I creeped into my wife's office and said, Honey, is it okay if we go to the Mothman Festival in September? And she's yes, it is, so yay, let's do it. And then we immediately set up a whole like we're going there, let's do some live shows of the podcast. So we made this whole plan. But yes, that is how I ended up for the first time ever at the Mothmad Festival.

to that story? That was the impetus for you to write the screenplay?

and the people were the people. And usually when you read books like this, Guy Lyon Playfair's book This House Is Haunted, which is about the Enfield Poltergeist, he was there. He was in the house as things were happening, but the point of view of the book was very much I'm writing about I am observing the things that are happening, and I'm just trying to report on them. What was so interesting about John Keel's book was how real the parent Noia became because it was as he was investigating

it really did that. He started getting weird phone calls, and then other people would come to him and say, oh, I got your call last night. I'm sorry I wasn't able to call you back. I never called you, so weird things start happening to him. And not only that, but he starts doing things like as he's observing lights

that are appearing above the Ohio River. He's taking his flashlight and he starts flashing Morse code up into the sky, just to not really fuck with the UFOs, but to just see what happens, and the lights would flash back, and so he began interacting with the phenomenon, and then the phenomenon began interacting with him more and more, to the point where he really did feel like he was going crazy, which I just thought was because for me that was like, this is the story of a person

interacting with the supernatural to the nth degree. It's really having an effect on his life. And I found that so fascinating. I was like, Okay, this is a main character for a movie, and this is a worthwhile journey to go on because it's dangerous, and it's dangerous psychologically and emotionally. Not just ooh, it's dangerous because I'm going to go suddenly see Bigfoot or fight Mothman or something

like that. It's no. When you go down these roads and you look in the darkness, it really does look back. And that's so much about what the Mothmant prophecies is about. And that was to me the most interesting part. So once I became that hooked, it was just a matter of Okay, I want to do this, and I just got to figure out how to make it a story that anyone else on earth will understand.

While you were writing the screenplay, how did you approach that balance of the fact and the fiction and being respectful of the people that still lived in this area at the time after this bridge collapse and the people who perished there.

and purchasing an option on the book. This is back in ninety six ninety seven, so we were mailing letters back and forth. There wasn't even email, not that John Keel was using, and we were literally handwriting letters to each other, and we would talk on the phone. And I was so enamored with him and so impressed with him and with his philosophies, which I thought were so fascinating and weren't really well known, at least as far

as I knew at the time. No one was talking about John Keel, so I really wanted to get his ideas out there. So weirdly, the first hurdle I had to get over was there's no way for me to tell his story. He's still alive, he lived his story, and if I'm trying to get every moment of his investigation in the movie in chronological order, I'm dead. It's impossible. There's just too much. So I had to give myself permission to back off from that and just go, okay,

just tell the emotional experience. The thing that was interesting to me beyond all the things that happened in the book, which are fascinating, but what was most fascinating to me was his emotional journey. So I'm like that's all I'm gonna do. I'm just going to boil it down to that and really focus on that, which meant I lost ninety percent of the book. I'm like, I can't be doing Men in Black. I can't do every single thing that happens to him. It's just got to be about

a guy, and it can't be him. The character can't be called John Keel. It's just got to be a guy who goes to Point Pleasant there's some strange things happening, and then those things begin to focus on him, and that's it. And it's got to resonate emotionally. So he's got to be in a very emotionally vulnerable and open place when he goes, so that this isn't just a story for a book or a newspaper. It's got to

mean something to him. And then for that to be real, it's okay, then he's just experienced a because that's when you know, all the great movies and all the great stories are you know about someone you know in the aftermath of a death of a family member or a spouse, they go on a spiritual journey because that's when those questions are ever present. And then once I was doing that, I realized, then this really isn't going to be a docudrama about what happened in Point Pleasant. It's not going

to take place in the sixties. It's going to take place at that point modern day, which was late nineties, early two thousands, And it's not going to be Drawn Keel and it's John Keel was never married, but this character is. And then once I realized I was using it as a jumping off point, but I wasn't going

to try to be faithful to all the events. I realized that the more I changed it, the better it was, because I would make it more and more clear that I was not trying to tell the specific story of that collapse. Even though it was Point Pleasant and it was the Silver Bridge and all that stuff, all those things are the same. I purposely didn't make it forty six people. I purposely didn't make it happen on December fifteenth.

It was on Christmas Eve. I was trying to change enough obvious things that I hoped that anyone who lived there and lived through the tragedy would not feel that, Oh, here's a movie purporting to tell the true story, and they're getting everything wrong. It was like, it's based on a true story, but this is not a docudrama. And so I was like trying to keep things at arms distance in terms of actual facts, actual names, and focus more on just the emotions that he was experiencing. And

I just keep it like that. And so in that way, I felt a little estranged from point pleasant, like I didn't go there to do research because I'm like, that would be disingenuous, because I'm not honestly trying to talk to the people and tell their story. That's another kind of writing that other people have done and will do, and so I should keep my distance. And I think

emotionally I felt that way for a long time. And it's been twenty eight years since I wrote it, in twenty something years since the movie came out, and since no one has really said that movie ruined our town and that movie was a disgrace and hurt people, and

no one said that. No one certainly said that to me, And in fact, what it seemed like was that in some weird way, maybe it helped because now there's a festival in a museum and people are stopping by to get their pictures taken near the statue and they're spending money in the town, which they should, and so maybe it was a good thing, and I felt like maybe it was safe to go back.

top overkill. He is the king of overkill. Yet you found some way in this screenplay, in my opinion, to do a brilliant job of creating this haunting atmosphere. It was very scary, but there wasn't this overt horror. How did you approach that in the screenplay and how do you think that played out through?

and actual physical deaths. Look everything from The Exorcist to Halloween, there are people dying. And while people died in Point Pleasant, they weren't being murdered. They weren't being killed. They died in a horrible accident of infrastructure. There wasn't some creature mothman wasn't murdering anyone. So to put that on it would be, in my opinion, to make it less interesting.

What was interesting and compelling to me was this growing sense of mystery and dread and this human need to find a reason for it and find an answer for it, and how those answers in real life never come. That just is not a part of people who go through alien abductions. Very few of them are settled with that and go oh, yes, I'm being abducted by aliens, and I totally understand why, and I'm totally good with it. And often the people who are like that, what you're

seeing in that attitude is an attempt. It's adaptive. It's trying to make something that is hugely destabilizing not as destabilizing, so that life can go on. But these are destabilizing events. That was the whole point of the Mothmann prophecies, that was the whole point of John Keele's stories. That when you really get into this stuff and you're looking at it with clear eyes and you're soberly approaching it looking for an answer, that's when you're most at risk, because

that is what the phenomenon will not ever serve. There's a trickster element. It will lie, it will baffle you, it will lead you down dead ends. It's never going to just simply give you the answer. So all those ideas were what I found fascinating, But it also made the movie a hard sell because a lot of people

read it expecting it to build into that. There were studio executives who were like, well, we love the first part of it, it's really interesting, but then at the end I think we got to have him fight Mothman on the bridge, and I'm like, I totally get that. I know why you're saying that, because there is that kind of movie. You want that, but that's not what this is. So or make what this is or don't.

And then luckily the studio Lakeshore that eventually bought it and the director Mark Pellington who eventually directed it, both agreed with my vision. They were like, this is not a horror movie. This is a supernatural drama. This is more like the sixth sense. It's eerie, it's scary, it's emotional, but it isn't horror.

To some degree, I have found that with the thousand plus people I've interviewed for this show and conferences and festivals where I speak and travel, there seems to be this theme. Where as you said, you stare into the darkness, it stares back at you, and you seem to open

yourself up to experiences. So were there any experiences that you had supernatural or otherwise, or maybe even coincidences that occurred when you started getting into writing the screenplay, or maybe even while they were filming the film that made you question reality a little bit more, maybe than you did when you started the process.

I'm like, oh God, I hope not. And to be honest, they really haven't, thank god, not in any bad way, just but the good way, Like you know, meeting you with the AMA Festival the appropriate amount of crazy I like to think, so yeah, But at that time in my life I was very interested and for years After that, I was like, I've really got to begin a serious investigation of my own, even if it justin balls, staying at a haunted hotel for the weekend, or putting a

cassette in a tape recorder before I go to bed at night and leaving it downstairs and seeing what happens. But I never did. For some reason, I never moved in that direction. And then years went by, and about ten years ago I was on the writing staff of a television show and there was a woman who was a little bit older than me. And as weeks went by and we talked more and more, it became clear that she was someone who was very woo if you will, and then knew a lot about that stuff and had

experiences of her own. And yet she also seemed to emanate wisdom and piece in other words, did not seem crazy or chaotic. And around that time I picked up a used copy of Robert Monroe's book about a pow to have an out of body experience, and I was like, now I'm feeling like solid and secure enough. Maybe I could from that solid standpoint experiment a little bit and just like literally see if I can go into the

room next door and see what's on the desk. I just want to prove to myself it can be done. And I started reading the book. Now this is the story I was telling her because it was happening at that time, and I said, I started reading the book and then for some reason I stopped and I just felt, Nah, this is not right for me. And she was nodding and smiling the whole time, and she said to me, she said, yeah, I don't think that's what your journey

is about this time through. I said, oh, what do you mean, And she's I just get the feeling that for you this time through, it's about really being inside your physical body and really connecting to that and connecting to the ground and really being in the physical world.

And so many lights flashed at that moment. For me, I'm like, God, I've had therapists who have said that my whole physical experience of being alive has been that about trying to reconcile the life of the mind with just being physically present in the moment, trying to become just more physically adept from being a kid who could never play a sport than to being an adult who I could barely screw in a light bulb, much less do any form of house repair. And it's like slowly

like learning. Okay, maybe I'll learn how to work out. Maybe I'll get a bike, learn how to bike ride. And even when I'm riding my bike, my wife is like, focus, don't go up in your head. You're going to get killed. I'm like, okay, and I've been in thankfully never a serious accident, but I've fallen off my bike a dozen times, and I'm not going up and down hills. This does in my neighborhood because us, hey, there was a parrot. Then I get distracted and then I'm on the ground,

so it's okay, I need to be careful anyway. So it's a long way of saying no, and I no longer seek those experiences out. I now understand that, look, if something supernatural happens, okay. But in terms of me seeking those experiences out, I think I'm okay where I am.

current question. If you were to revisit the Mothman Prophecies today, in a social media era where folklore almost instantaneously, do you think you might look at the story and approach it a little bit differently today versus twenty eight years ago when you wrote this.

adaptation of the book. You would still have to impose more story and character relationship, but maybe you could get all those things and you could do it in that time period, and you could have Mary Higher and you could have Linda Scarberry, and you could have Woodrow Derrenberger, and you could actually have those people play a role in the movie and then make it a little bit more true to life, because I'm like, just the costumes and the set decoration alone would be amazing, and then

playing into all those events that people who now have read the book, and there's so many more people now who have read the book since the movie came out, that it's oh now for them, they'll be like, Oh, there's that scene and there's that moment, and I thought, maybe you could do it that way, and the thoughts winning and out of my mind. I never really sat down, and unfortunately six seven, eight years ago would have been

a good time. Now, probably with the entertainment landscape the way it is, I think that'd be a really hard sell, unfortunately, because I think it would still be entertaining. But I think just the way studios are approaching what they actually do and make and the way they do it, I think it'd be a really billion to one shot now that would be a thing that could get made.

other cryptid activity was completely separate. I just separated the two put them into boxes that I could check off. But I found talking to so many people and doing so many interviews over the years, all of this stuff

seems to be connected in some way. I guess the question for you is, do you think it's possible that the phenomena of something like mothman and Bigfoot could be somehow connected, whether it be symbolically, energetically, and it's representing something deeper in the collective unconsciousness that may be out there in the zeitgeist. How do you feel about the possibility of these phenomena being connected in some way?

understood Bigfoot. In fact, I've been rereading You'll know this the minute I hold it up, but I've been rereading this Don Hunter Renee, a Hinden book, and everything about this book there is not a mention of a portal. There is not a mention of a UFO. There is not a mention of an ultra terrestrial. This book is We're hunting an animal, and so that's how I grew up with that same feeling. It's like Bigfoot is an

animal in the woods. UFOs are crafts from other planets, filled with creatures that bleed blood and breathe air and land and talk to us and shake our hands. And then ghosts are ghosts. That's separate, that's dead people. That's a whole different thing. And I don't feel that way anymore. I do feel that it is all connected. It is all connected in the sense that our brains are not radio dishes that are just these big open things that

just take in signals from everywhere. I feel now that our brains are these locked down turtle shell filters that are blocking so much out so that we can focus on just being alive and getting through whatever this human journey is. But some people can open their shell a little bit, and those are your psychics, and those are the people who've had near death experiences, and whether they like it or not, people who have alien encounters. These are people who are taking in a little bit more

than we are. Mediums, people who have precognitive dreams. They're getting a little more. And all of those things, bigfoot, UFOs and mothman, I think exist in a way that is sometimes physical. So it seems very tempting to go, oh, my gosh, look there are tracks, or my eyes got burned by looking at something. My eyes had to get

burned by something. The Cleague conjunctividis I've got there was a light somewhere, and not a normal one, because most lights I look at throughout my life don't burn my eyes. So what happened? All of those things, they're a little bit physical, a little bit not physical. Something's out in the woods throwing rocks at us. Something is out in the woods. It's making those weird calls. Something is in the woods hitting a tree with a stick. We're hearing it that's physical, and.

I can't even believe I'm saying this. I used to not even be open to that possibility, and now people have told me, the longer you stay in this, the longer you do what I do, the more you seem to move towards that wu or that high strangeness. Because frankly, sometimes it's the only thing that makes sense. Let me ask you this, as a writer, if you were to write a film or a series about Bigfoot, what angle would you take?

you never find the thing you're looking for? Is it that you do find the thing you're looking for and both answers seemed unsatisfactory to me because it felt like the person doesn't find it, then the whole movie is just one long tease, and then if he does find it, there's something disappointing there too. It's oh, so it's just there's Bigfoot and he's not going to kill it. No one wants a movie where a guy's tying the corpse

of Bigfoot onto the hood of his car. So would they just look at each each other in the woods and then Bigfoot waves and walks away. I don't like that either, and that's usually where the thinking would stop. But that was because everything I'd grown up with was flesh and blood, paws and claws, Bigfoot. And it wasn't until the Mothman Prophecies and reading that book that it was like, oh, this is about something where the author himself is this isn't fully physical, like something else is

going on here. I'm not walking around and looking for Mothman scat. He's not doing that. He's having a whole other experience, which weirdly made more sense to me. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. You can do it both ways, So I think it'd be really tough I don't know how to do the Bigfoot movie in any straight way. Is there a way to do it as a character comedy. Is there a way to do it as a metaphor for something else? Maybe? Is there a way to make it supernatural? Bigfoot?

Probably now you could. I think you could still make a horror movie about Bigfoot, for sure, and then you could probably also make a supernatural drama where you're able to understand that Bigfoot is a spirit of the woods. It's been there, it's still there, it will always be there, but never one hundred percent physically. And I think people could watch that nowadays and it wouldn't strike them as foolish. It would actually strike them as more realistic.

to which people identify with these cryptids. It does not surprise me at all that these are often people who feel like they're outsiders in our culture, and for them to identify with these other creatures, these other beings whose legitimacy and even reality is questioned by the larger society. I get that metaphor completely. So the notion that you could write and actually see a cryptid as something that you could empathize and sympathize with, I totally get that,

and I think it makes sense. Well, what's hard about it is to fully step into the creature's point of view, because the creatures are so unknowable that to step into their point of view it's a little tough. Like as a writer, I would be like I don't know what

that point of view is. You would have to make a pretty big leap, and it can be done to then go, okay, here's how Now I'm going to be actually in that character and say this is how Bigfoot feels in this moment, and this is how Mothman feels in this moment, and this is their point of view on what's happening. That is a big leap, and it might be such a big leap you might be crossing genres, which by the way, everyone does now sound like a thousand year old man at this point. But you've got

to really know what you're doing. And I would say, if you're going to take that step, which maybe you did, I've got to read your book, but you've really got to do it. Then you just got to really jump in with both feet, as it were both big feet, and go, okay, now we're in Bigfoot's point of view. Now we're going to get his thoughts or her thoughts.

on planet Earth. And as long as you're not the most reductionist materialist debunker who relegates all of this to mental aberration, misidentification, attention seeking, all of that, but if you can really just say sometimes people do legitimately have these transcendent experiences that they struggle with, Yeah, I think it's teaching us about what it is to be human.

And those are so close in the mathmat prophecies, the notion of having a supernatural experience you can't explain, and also having just a fairly common life experience, which is I suddenly experienced a terrible tragedy and lost someone I love. Those two are very close, and once you're in one place, it's not that hard to step into the next place, because now you're asking those questions of what does our

life mean? And when people die, are they truly gone in every possible sense or is it only in the physical sense? And can you ever get across that chasm? And if you do, and if something comes back, what is it that's coming back? Is it your dead loved one, or sometimes is it something else that's masquerading.

But with a guy like Whitley Streeber, who has devoted the second half of his life to repeatedly being open to interacting with some non human intelligence, my questions always boiled down to do you feel you have even just intellectually gained something from them, not necessarily from the experience, because I think the answer that I would get would

be Whitley Streeber would say, yes, I've gained something. I've gained an understanding that the world is not completely material, and that our place in the cosmos is different than we thought it was, and all that stuff. And I get that, But I am weirdly curious if he feels

that he has gotten something solid. I will say that there was one occasion where in my telepathic communications with these beings, they told me something that came true, or they told me something that assured me that a dead relative or loved one was in communication with me in a way that I solidly believe rather than just there is more. Do they ever palaver with us on a more human level? My guess is the answer is no, because that's not what they do.

And I guess the second part of that question would be, is there a book or an author that you featured on the podcast thus far that has profoundly shifted your views on maybe what's real and what's not?

to that is that's not what I'm doing. The podcast isn't about me talking about a subject and then saying and here's the proof, and here's why I think it's real, and you should think it's real too. There are books that I've talked about on podcast where I'm like, this is fake. I'm not vouching for the phenomenon. I might be vouching for the book or the experience of reading the book, but I'm not saying that I believe in the thing that happened in the book. And there are

others that where I say, yeah, I am advocating. If I had to say, i'd say, yes, I believe this person's story. Most of them are just things that we reflect on. Look, what you and I are doing right now is the way I like to think about the supernatural. And I'm sure you've had guests on that are much more in a way, like bigfoot materialists. I'm sure you've had people on who are like, I went into the woods and here's my evidence, and here's why I believe

we're this close. There's that conversation, and the equivalent conversation on the UFO side is people who only want to talk about Louis Elizondo, the Pentagon Disclosure, congressional hearings, and whistleblowers, and there's that conversation. But my thing is, I'm not on the hunt for a physical answer because I don't think I'm going to get one in this life. So I'm more interested in the way certain books have made

me feel. I did an episode about reading a book about near death experiences, but it was about bad near death experiences where people came back thinking, Oh no, what happens after you die is really bad. There is life after death, but it's not going to be good. That book had a huge effect on me. That book really deeply upset me for a long time. And there are other books that have had these sort of emotional impacts

on me. But that's the fun part is each one of these books is like talking to a person and hearing their story and then reacting to it. I covered a book about the Amityville Horror which was written by a parapsychologist, and it was a two hundred page screed about how it was fake and no one was listeningstening to him, and they made the movie without consulting him. Elizabeth and Lorraine Warren made money off of it, and

they shouldn't have. It's the most beautiful, entertaining, wonderful book, which I actually believe he was correct, but it's filled with such righteous indignation that only a parapsychologist or theater critic can really summon. His voice comes through so clearly and so endearingly, and I'm so glad that I think when the dust settles, people will go, oh, this guy's correct, And frankly, the only reason he doesn't get more credit is because he is also a parapsychologist. Apparently the only

people who can debunk Amityville have to be debunkers. When someone who actually believes that there are real haunted houses out there that we should be studying and not Amityville, that's the guy they don't listen to. But I think they should.

The fun is sitting around with your friends and your colleagues like you and I and having these conversations because we wouldn't be having them if they didn't stir something in our souls, and if they didn't touch something essential in each one of us that lives in a place of questioning, that lives in a place of eternal childhood, and is sitting by a fire and looking out the window and feeling that weird, cozy thrill of what's outside.

I don't really want it to press up against the window, but I do want to think about it and wonder about it and hear the stories about it. And that's what keeps me going, And that is what, to me, is the most interesting thing about what it is we talk about when we talk about sasquatch.

And the reason that we can always be interested and will always be in in a murder mystery story automatically is because, in a weird way, what it's doing is it's introducing a character that is imposing logic and meaning on an event that we all struggle with because we're all going to die. But when a detective of any stripe can come in and at least solve the physical aspect of what happened, because that is being presented as a mystery, it touches upon the greater question, which is

why do we die? In what happens next? And that is obviously of pervasive interest to us because that's the journey we are all on. Any mystery, whether it's the Lockness Monster or Sasquatch or UFOs or ghosts, all of them brush up against the big unknown, and it allows us to ask those questions in a way where we can actually form questions and hope to get answers. And then it's just up to how badly do you actually want physical answers and how deeply do you believe you're

ever going to actually get physical answers. Look, you and I know that if you go back to the late sixties and you ask any of those guys Tom Slick or Reneeda Hinden or Don Hundra, any of those guys and Grover Krantz of the Big Ones, Peter Burn, if you said in twenty twenty five, will we have the answer to Bigfoot? They would all have said yes. Not one of them could have imagined that humanity would go another fifty five sixty years and we wouldn't have something.

But we don't. Not really, we have a lot more of the same stuff we've always had. What does that say about our ability to finally ultimately so the question of Sasquatch And for some people that's okay, Yeah, that's where we're going to be. Some things are going to be a mystery, and it's just going to be that thing we have to gnaw on, talk about and turn over in our minds as we go through whatever. This experience of life actually is.

telling a story. It's a real story. You're talking about subjects we like, but you're talking about your life in a very honest and revealing and vulnerable way that brings me instantly back to events in my own life, the goods stuff, the bad stuff, the hard stuff, and it makes me feel less alone along the way. If I'm crying, I'm also laughing a lot, and that's good too.