On the Thursday evening before Halloween, two of West Virginia's most famous residents will be standing in the Great Hall of the West Virginia Culture Center in Charleston, available for photographs. Neither of them is human. One is a winged figure with glowing red eyes from Point Pleasant. The other is a ten-foot-tall visitor from a hillside in Braxton County with a head shaped like a spade.
The West Virginia Department of Tourism's Halloween Bash runs from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on October 29, 2026, in the Culture Center on the State Capitol grounds. Admission and parking are free. Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster will greet visitors and pose for pictures. Children can take part in a cryptid scavenger hunt through the West Virginia State Museum, searching for images of legendary creatures tucked among the exhibits; those who find an icon receive a prize. There is also a six-hole Halloween-themed miniature golf course, craft stations, and storytelling sessions drawn from West Virginia folklore. Families are encouraged to come in costume, with prizes for the best-dressed in three age groups: preschool and younger, kindergarten through second grade, and third through fifth grade.
The event is, in a sense, a homecoming for two legends that have spent decades being treated as curiosities and have lately become something closer to state mascots.
The Flatwoods Monster arrived first, on the evening of September 12, 1952. Four boys were playing on the lawn of the Flatwoods Elementary School when, around 7:15 p.m., a bright light crossed the sky and appeared to come down on the farm of G. Bailey Fisher. The boys ran to tell their mother, Kathleen May, who gathered a National Guardsman named Eugene Lemon and the family dog, Richie, and went up the hill to look. What they reported seeing was a tall figure with a spade-shaped head, a dark, metallic-looking body, clawed hands, and eyes that glowed orange. It seemed to hover. There was a sickening mist. The creature hissed and moved toward them, and the group fled.
Several of them later suffered throat irritation, nausea, and vomiting that lasted for days. Those symptoms were generally written off as hysteria, though they are also consistent with exposure to mustard gas, a detail that has kept the case alive among researchers. Local authorities searched the area that night and reported finding nothing. The story drew widespread newspaper coverage and became one of the most recognizable alleged extraterrestrial encounters in the country. Paranormal investigator Joe Nickell later proposed a more earthly explanation: the light was a meteor, and the creature was likely a barn owl perched in a tree, its shape distorted by shadows. Flatwoods, whatever it believes, has made its peace with the thing. The creature, sometimes called Braxie or the Braxton County Monster, now appears on public displays and souvenirs and anchors a small tourism trade in and around the town.
Mothman's story began fourteen years later and about a hundred miles west. On November 15, 1966, two young couples near the former West Virginia Ordnance Works outside Point Pleasant reported a large winged creature with red eyes. The Point Pleasant Register put the story on its front page the next day under the headline "Couples See Man-Sized Bird ... Creature ... Something." Sightings continued around the region for about a year. On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge connecting Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed into the Ohio River, killing 46 people. No evidence connects the sightings to the disaster, but the two events became fused in the popular imagination, a link cemented by John Keel's 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies and the 2002 film of the same name starring Richard Gere.
Point Pleasant leaned in. The town is now home to the Mothman Museum, which bills itself as the world's only one, and a downtown statue that draws visitors year-round. The Mothman Festival, founded in 2002 by museum director Jeff Wamsley and the late Carolin Harris to bring people downtown, is held on the third weekend of September and now draws tens of thousands of visitors. Some arrive with a sense of humor about the creature's reputation as a bad omen; one recent attendee from Maryland joked to WCHS that a car breakdown on the drive down was Mothman delivering the doom they had foreseen. Others come for the same reason people visit any landmark: the story is strange, it belongs to this place, and nobody else has it.
That is roughly the calculation behind the Halloween Bash. The Department of Tourism has spent years promoting the state's cryptids as genuine cultural assets rather than embarrassments, and the Great Hall event puts them where a state's official hospitality usually puts its best-known figures: at the front door, shaking hands. The scavenger hunt sends children through the State Museum looking for the creatures among the exhibits, which is a fair description of what the state has done with them over the past half century.
The setting suits the occasion. The Culture Center opened in July 1976, during the nation's Bicentennial, and this year marks its 50th anniversary. The building's gray, stone-clad exterior gives little away; inside, the soaring Great Hall has welcomed millions of visitors and houses the State Museum, whose exhibits cover the state's natural, cultural, and industrial history. The center's roots go back much further than 1976. The West Virginia Historical and Antiquarian Society was organized in the 1890s to collect documents and artifacts, and in 1905 the legislature created the Department of Archives and History under state historian Virgil A. Lewis. From 1929 the museum and archives operated out of the State Capitol itself, until overcrowding, poor climate control, and a small, underpaid staff forced the move into a dedicated building. The museum once had to turn down an offer to take the entire Headsville Post Office building for lack of room.
So the Great Hall has hosted a great many things over fifty years. On October 29 it will host a six-hole putting course, craft tables, a storyteller working through the state's folklore, and two monsters standing by for photographs. The Department of Tourism is framing the evening as free, safe family fun, and it is that. It is also a state formally embracing the stories it once merely tolerated, and inviting children to go find them in the museum.
Those who want more of the same can look beyond the two headliners. Near Fairmont, a hunter reported a 1968 encounter with a plant-like extraterrestrial that allegedly communicated telepathically and drew blood through its fingertips, inspiring the legend of the Vegetable Man, or Veggie Man. The Monongahela River has its own monster, the Ogua, described in historical accounts as an enormous amphibious creature that hunted deer along the riverbanks. None of them, as yet, have been booked for the Great Hall.
The Halloween Bash runs 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 29, 2026, at the West Virginia Culture Center on the State Capitol grounds in Charleston. Admission and parking are free, and the event is open to the public.