Mothmen and missing girls: When the mysteries were just down the road

When I first heard about the mothman, I thought he was just down the road, and I was sure I could hear him flying overhead on quiet winter nights.

I first read about the whole mothman thing in a kids book about creepy cryptoids which I found in the Temuka Primary School library in the mid-1980s. That's where I first heard of the strange events that plagued the area around Point Pleasant 20 years earlier. I soaked it all in - the weird phone calls, the bridge collapse, the sightings of the beast itself. It was a deeply eerie story, and some of it might even be true.

But the one thing that somehow scrambled my nine-year-old brain was that the book didn't actually say it happened in the US, and I thought it was a misprint and it was talking Pleasant Point, a small town about 15 kilometers away from where I lived.

Pleasant Point is a tiny town with a big steam engine. One of my best mates comes from there and she turned out okay. My cousin Donald used to live there and got arrested for crucifying himself on election day in 1984 (he's the artistic sheep of the family); and it used to have the best adventure playground in South Canterbury. It was was also the only place within driving distance I could get Avengers comics at one point (and they were Bob Harris Avengers comics, for Christ's sake).

What it doesn't have is a creepy creature spooking up the joint. But to this bemused kid, the mothman was real, and just down the road.

It seemed quite plausible that it could ride high on the nor' wester that howls above the Canterbury plains, and soar high above my town. And if I went outside in the night, I might see those deep red eyes looking back at me.

When I found out Point Pleasant was in West frickin' Virginia, it was a bit crushing, and the world seemed a bit farther away.

I lived on the arse end of the world, and places like New York or London were as far away as Asgard or Gotham City, but you always think you're at the centre of the universe when you're a kid. I even got excited when a cinema called the Majestic showed up in a Morbius comic. I was amazed that the living vampire was passing through my home town, because there definitely weren't any other movie theatres called the Majestic in the world.

And not far from Pleasant Point, there is a place by the Opihi River called Hanging Rock and while it often offered a decent swimming hole, I never wanted to go there either, because I'd also heard about the group of schoolgirls that vanished during a picnic there. 

(I'd never seen Picnic From Hanging Rock, but I had read about it in the late, great Unexplained magazine, so the fiction got mixed in with my facts.)

Those strange events weren't happening in familair places, but sometimes - just sometimes - it really, really felt like it did.