The Flatwoods Monster
On the evening of September 12, 1952, a group of boys, a mother named Kathleen May, and a 17-year-old National Guardsman walked up a hill outside Flatwoods to look at something that had come down. Braxton County has since built a free museum and a set of giant monster chairs on what they said they saw.
Field Guide Entry
The evening
Boys playing in Flatwoods saw a bright object come down on a hilltop on the evening of September 12, 1952. They went to fetch adults, and the group that walked up included Kathleen May and Eugene Lemon, a 17-year-old National Guardsman.
What they described afterward was a metallic smell, a hissing sound, and a tall figure with a dark face and folds around it that seemed to glide rather than walk. They ran. Several reported nausea and irritated eyes that night, and the account was in the local and then the national press within days.
What investigators proposed
The reading that has stuck is a barn owl in a tree, its eyes catching a flashlight beam, its perched shape and wings read in the dark as a hooded figure. Add a meteor reported over the region that evening and the red aircraft warning lights on a tower nearby, and the pieces are accounted for without anything else.
It is a proposal that fits, not a verdict anyone signed. The witnesses did not accept it, and May repeated the same account in interviews for decades.
What the county did with it
Braxton County made the story its identity rather than an embarrassment. There is a free museum on Main Street in Sutton, and a set of giant chairs shaped like the figure placed around the county so that visitors drive between them.
The hillside where it happened is private land, and it is not part of any of it.
Visiting Information
The Flatwoods Monster Museum is on Main Street in Sutton, a couple of minutes from Exit 62 on I-79, and admission is free. It opens Tuesday through Friday, 9am to 5pm, and weekends 10am to 4pm, closed Mondays. The phone is (304) 765-6533, and calling ahead is worth it because hours shift around events.
The collection is memorabilia, press coverage, and locally made objects rather than evidence, and most people need about 30 minutes.
The giant monster chairs are spread around Braxton County, with several up Highway 19 in Flatwoods itself, which is why most visitors make a loop of the county rather than a single stop.
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Nearby Strange Places
TNT Area
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Mothman Museum & Research Center
79 miA storefront museum in downtown Point Pleasant dedicated to the red-eyed, winged figure first reported by five witnesses in November 1966, sightings that preceded the collapse of the Silver Bridge thirteen months later.
Silver Bridge Site
79 miThe site of the December 15, 1967 Silver Bridge collapse, which killed 46 people and became permanently linked in popular folklore to the Mothman sightings reported in the same area thirteen months earlier.
Lake Shawnee Amusement Park
93 miAn amusement park that opened in 1926 on Mercer County land where a settler family had been attacked in 1783, closed after a girl was killed on the swing ride, and was later found to be sitting on a Native American burial ground. The swing frame and the ferris wheel are still standing in the grass, and the family that owns the land runs tours by appointment.