GATEWAY TO THE SOUTH

The Silver Bridge was a gleaming suspension bridge over the Ohio River, connecting Point Pleasant, West Virginia to Gallipolis, Ohio. It was built in 1928 and charmingly got its name from the color of its metallic aluminum paint. But the “Gateway to the South” became infamous for reasons other than its charm.

At 4:58 pm on December 15, 1967, while full of rush-hour traffic, the bridge collapsed. Forty-six people died in what remains the deadliest bridge disaster in American history.

The bridge failed due to a 0.1-inch crack in a single link of chain on the one-third of a mile long structure. To be technically precise, it was fretting wear in the single chain link and stress corrosion cracking, exacerbated by residual stress, which led to insufficient redundancy, ductile overload, and the eventual and inevitable collapse of the Silver Bridge – in less than a minute, according to witnesses.

But the collapsing bridge was just one of the many strange and horrible things that locals had witnessed around Point Pleasant in the months, weeks, days, and even moments before the tragedy.

BEELZEBUB VISITS WEST VIRGINIA

For the uninitiated, here is a quick primer on the birth of one of America’s foremost monsters.

In November of 1966, folks in Mason County, West Virginia started seeing things. More specifically, they began seeing what they near-universally described as a large bipedal creature with wings and glowing red eyes. A gravedigging crew of five men was startled when this man-like being buzzed over their heads. A pair of young couples in Point Pleasant saw “a large flying man with ten-foot wings” following their car. Volunteer firemen saw “a large bird with red eyes.” One man reported strange buzzing noises, the disappearance of his dog, and strangely reflective eyes in the night. The local police held a news conference, national media picked up the story, and the legend of the Mothman flapped to life – but it only got weirder from there.

As more and more people came forward with reports of sightings of the Mothman in Point Pleasant, something else began to happen. There were simultaneously reports of other strange and paranormal activities in the area. There were unidentified flying objects. There were suspicious men dressed in black suits. These “Men in Black” allegedly interrogated and even harassed locals about their Mothman sightings, acted strangely, and had unnatural eyes. Theories still abound as to whether the Mothman was a wayward avian (snowy owl or sandhill crane) or a legitimate cryptozoological entity and if these Men in Black were government agents, alien visitors, time-traveling informants, or something else.

By 1970, author John Keel had penned his theory that the Mothman was a harbinger of doom; claiming even that the demonic winged entity had been spotted on the Silver Bridge near the time of its collapse – whether it caused it or portended its demise. Keel’s 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies recounts his investigation into the 1966-1967 Mothman sightings and correlates them with the ongoing encounters with UFOs, Men in Black, ghostly apparitions, livestock mutilations, phantom sounds, and other high strangeness occurring in the vicinity of Point Pleasant area leading up to the collapse of the Silver Bridge.

While Keel and other authors were putting pen to paper to record the events of the Silver Bridge disaster, busy too were musicians tuning their guitars and harmonizing their voices in an effort to commemorate and memorialize the tragedy through song.

COLD WAR CROONER

Ray Anderson was born in West Virginia in 1924. His early love of music led him to fastidiously learn guitar from an uncle and dream of a life as a country musician.

He ended up rejected by the Grand Ole Opry and writing songs about orbiting satellites and the dogs who inhabit them, the paralysis and death of an foreign Communist dictator, and, eventually, families drowning in the tragic collapse of a beloved West Virginian bridge.

After being discharged from the U.S. Air Force following World War II, Anderson bounced around the music industry. He flubbed a Grand Ole Opry audition in Nashville, got a job at a West Virginia radio station hosting a show known as the “Hillbilly Jamboree,” and secured a recording contract, which kicked off his musical career.

By 1953, with the Cold War era underway, the World War II veteran Anderson cut a track that put him on the map. The story goes that Anderson was contracted to record an album of country music covers or religious songs, but that all changed when an international event caught his attention. Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and that nation’s Premier and de facto dictator, died in March 1953 and Anderson decided the occasion needed to be commemorated with song – a theme he would revisit in Point Pleasant 15 years later.

So Anderson recorded some unusually cheery music and coupled it with an unusual set of lyrics, calling it “Stalin Kicked the Bucket,” in which his thoughts on Stalin are painfully evident:

“While near the end, he couldn’t talk,

He’s paralyzed and he couldn’t walk,

He died with a hemorrhage in the brain,

They have a new fireman on the devil’s train

Although he was a man of power,

He was scared of Eisenhower

So now the devil can retire,

‘Cause old Joe Stalin will keep the fire”