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Flatwoods Monster

From Kook Science

The Flatwoods Monster (also referred to as the Green Monster, the Phantom of Flatwoods,[P] &c.) was an unknown entity that was first encountered on the property of G. Bailey Fisher in the town of Flatwoods in Braxton County, West Virginia during the evening of 12 September 1952 by a group of six youths and one adult woman, this group having been drawn to the location, according to their accounting, by a pulsing light that had been seen crossing the sky at around 19:15 local time.

Press Coverage

"It looked worse than Frankenstein. It couldn't have been human."

Kathleen May

Reading

  • Barker, Gray (1956), "A Hilltop, West Virginia & Flatwoods, West Virginia", They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, New York: University Books, p. 15-35 

    The irate waitress should have jerked the paper from under the ash tray that morning of September 15, 1952 and hidden it. She might have saved me a lot of trouble — and work!

    Waitresses are usually irate when they must set the orange juice down on top of an opened newspaper. But I was lost in thought, amazement, and disbelief. I was reading a U.P. story written in my home town.

    POLICE SAY BRAXTON MONSTER PRODUCT OF "MASS HYSTERIA”

    SUTTON, Sept. 14 — (U.P.) — Seven Braxton County residents vowed today that a Frankenstein monster with B.O. drove them from a hill-top near here, but police figured the smelly boogie-man was the product of "mass hysteria.”

    The thing, described by witnesses as “half-man, half-dragon,” had not been reported seen since Friday night but residents of the area said a foul odor still clung to the hill-top yesterday.

    All of this started when Mrs. Kathleen May of Flatwoods said she and six boys, one a 17-year-old national guardsman, climbed the hill to investigate her two small sons' report that a “flying saucer” landed there.

    She said they found a “fire-breathing monster, 10 feet tall with a bright green body and a blood-red face,” that waddled toward them with “a bouncing, floating” motion and sent them scurrying down the hillside.

    . . . She said the monster exuded an overpowering odor, “like metal,” that so sickened them they vomited for hours afterward.

    “It looked worse than Frankenstein,” said Mrs. May.

    “It couldn’t have been human.”

    No wonder, in a listing of the ten biggest feature stories of the year, as judged by ABC, this phenomenon was described later as “the land-locked Loch Ness Monster.” No wonder West Virginians, often credited with going barefoot, were heartily laughed at once again around the nation.

    I didn’t believe the story myself.

    But then, I reasoned, a story as good as this one surely had some basis in fact. Such a story should be exposed, if it were a hoax. Better still I might get some publicity out of it.

    Being a frustrated writer, I thought here was an opportunity to get my name in print again. Then, if I were doing an article for a magazine, I would have a logical excuse for going around questioning people.

    Since Fate magazine, with which I was familiar, printed a great many articles about supernatural happenings, I decided to telegraph them, asking them if they were interested in a story. They wasted no time flashing back a wire:

    STORY PROBABLY HOAX BUT INVESTIGATE RIGOROUSLY. DON’T SPECULATE SIMPLY STATE FACTS. 3 OR 4 PICS UP TO 3000 WORDS MONDAY DEADLINE.

    I quote this wire to show the careful attitude Fate maintains about material it publishes. It was in the spirit of these instructions that I undertook to find out just exactly what had happened on that dark Braxton County hilltop.

    You don’t just pick up your brief case and leave a booking office at a moment's notice. Because of business problems I was unable to leave my office in Clarksburg, West Virginia, until Friday evening, exactly one week after the event had occurred.

    Flatwoods is a small town with a population of only 300, six miles from Sutton, the county seat I arrived late, but found an acquaintance’s house lighted. I went in and he made some coffee.

    This acquaintance did not believe the story at all. Some of the witnesses, as he put it, were “highly excitable,” The skid marks editor A. Lee Stewart had seen were made by a tractor operated by Brooks Fisher, of Sutton, and the same tractor also could have left the odd, gummy deposits described as lying on the ground and foliage like oil.

    At least I was getting my feet back on the ground. I had one lead, that of the tractor, to check.

    Here was a story that could be checked separately with seven witnesses: Mrs. Kathleen May, a beautician; her two children, Eddie, 13, and Fred, 12; Gene Lemon, 17; Neil Nunley, 14; Ronnie Shaver, 10; Tommy Hyer, 10.

    I went to bed determined to crack the story wide open the next day.

    The next morning it developed that three people I wanted to see were not immediately available for interviewing. A TV snow, “We the People,” had contacted Mrs. May, and she, Lemon and editor Stewart were still in New York, after appearing on the program the previous night. They would return Sunday, I learned.

    J. Holt Byrne, mayor of Sutton, and also editor of The Braxton Central, had first assured reporters and his constituency the phenomenon was caused by a meteorite, gases from which had almost suffocated the witnesses and might have formed an image they described as a monster.

    But when I saw him about 10 a.m. he wasn't so sure, was ready to talk with Ivan Sanderson, a New York naturalist who had arrived to investigate ihe incident for a newspaper syndicate. Byrne suggested I first interview the Nunley boy and his grandfather, A. M. Jordan, of Flatwoods, with whom he lived. He had heard these people told a level-headed story. Later he was going to Flatwoods with Sanderson and look into the matter further himself.

    The strange event had taken place simultaneously with sightings of aerial objects over several states. These, reported generally as meteorites, flashed across West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. Within a 20-mile radius of Flatwoods numerous persons saw what they described variously as shooting stars, flying saucers, and aircraft in distress. Evidently these objects were different from the one seen in Flatwoods, although some of their courses could be mapped for some distance, and, if some imagination were called into play, one of them could be traced to Flatwoods.

    Sanderson said he could trace the flight of the so-called meteorite seen at Flatwoods from Baltimore, Maryland, to Charleston, West Virginia, during which time it passed over Flatwoods in a curving route.

    A. M. Jordan is no longer concerned with strange fiery objects that pass, out of place and reason, over his house. He died one year ago. But while still living he had seen the object which later landed on the hilltop, and was able to describe it in a matter-of-fact manner.

    It was difficult for him to describe such a thing when I talked with him. For he had read no science fiction. Nor had he heard of flying saucers, nor Fate magazine. His reading material was restricted to newspapers and the Bible.

    As he was sitting on the porch the thing had come over the horizon from the southeast. He did not look up until it had come into his view overhead and flashed in a south-westerly direction toward the hill opposite him. It was an elongated object, he said, The top of it was a light shade of a red, and the bottom bright red. From the rear shot red balls of fire. At the time he thought it was a jet plane, though he saw no wings. He did not see the nose of the object clearly. It proceeded across the sky, halted suddenly, then seemed to fall rapidly toward the hilltop.

    While Jordan was pondering what he had seen, Braxton County Sheriff Robert Carr, in Sutton, received a frantic telephone call. A piper cub plane, an excited hitchhiker was reporting, had crashed into a hillside near Frametown and was burning. He had seen it from a car in which he had received a ride and had been driven to the first available telephone to report the accident.

    Sheriff Carr and a deputy rushed the seventeen miles to the scene, but could find no trace of the burning plane. He could find no one who had witnessed the supposed crash. The sheriff did not cross the river between the road and hillside to investigate, for he felt sure nothing had happened, since no smoke was visible. By the time he had returned to Sutton the nearby excitement about the “monster” was the talk of the town, so he drove on to answer the call received while he was at Frametown.

    Anywhere from one to one and one-half hours after the appearance of the “monster” Sheriff Carr climbed the hill to investigate.

    But no monster.

    He could find no trace of it.

    Had anyone, I asked myself, investigated earlier? For I wished to establish just when, and how, if possible, the “monster” had left.

    I found that two persons, Junior Edward (about 18), who lived near the hill, and Joey Martin (about 20) were the first known investigators. They had been on the hilltop half an hour after the weird occurrence.

    What, I asked them almost breathlessly, did they see. They shook their heads. They had seen, heard or smelled nothing.

    Max Lockhart, a Flatwoods appliance dealer, drove his pickup truck up the narrow road to the scene about an hour after it happened, and before the sheriff arrived. Neither he nor the people with him could find any evidence of the elusive “monster.”

    That the “monster” could have left the scene any less spectacularly than it arrived seemed illogical. Yet nobody had seen it leave, and it had only 30 minutes to make its exit. What were we dealing with? A flying saucer that could make itself invisible?

    Or a demon that had sunk into the ground, finding some dark niche in the bowels of the earth, where one science fiction writer thought lay the abode of the unlucky citizens of Atlantis, who had missed the last rocket to the stars when the chosen were evacuated to the cold blackness of space? Or more likely it was a hoax! But how a hoax? Someone might rig up a monster on the hilltop and persuade some gullible kids to come up and get scared at it. But how could this prankster arrange for a meteoric display to accompany it? The coincidence of the two events surely ruled that out.

    I was less skeptical after talking to the Nunley boy, one of the eyewitnesses, and the observer nearest the “monster” when it was discovered. He tells the story without emotion, a story devoid of holes. If I can tell it as he did I'm sure you'll believe every word of it. As I did.

    Neil Nunley is unspoiled by sophistication. He talks with the honest accent of West Virginia farm people, caught half-way between their staccato-voiced neighbors to the north, and the sleepier drawl of the south. He had read no science fiction, though in school the year before a teacher had read die class something (probably an account of a saucer sighting) from a "true magazine — but if it was true, you couldn't hardly believe it.”

    He and some other youths were at a nearby playground when they saw the strange object flash across the sky.

    The boys were unanimous in disagreeing with Jordan about its color and shape. They said it looked like “a silver dollar going through the sky,” and that it was not elongated. A trail of fire did shoot out behind it, however. The object was flying low, just above die hilltop over which it hovered, and “looked like a door falling down flatwise.”

    After it fell they could still see the light at the hilltop. Overwhelming curiosity overtook them, so they hurriedly gathered a party, ran up the railroad track toward the foot of the hill. They stopped at Mrs. May's house to get a flashlight, for it was then almost dark. The two May children described the object to their mother, who didn't believe them until she went to the porch and saw the light, pulsing from dim to bright, on the hill. She agreed to go with them, and Lemon led the party.

    Motivation for the investigation was not to discover the terror that awaited them. There was little fear; it was mainly a lark. They thought it was surely a meteorite and they might see what it looked like.

    Even when they encountered a strange mist near the hilltop, now smelling faintly like some kind of gas, they were not greatly perturbed. They had no idea what they were running onto.

    Just at the hilltop there is a fence from which the gate has rotted away. This gateway is a vantage point from which can be seen the entire limits of the happening, none of which are more than 100 feet away.

    It was here the Lemon boy shrieked with terror, fell backward. The entire party fled.

    “It looked worse than Frankenstein,” Mrs. May said later. “As long as I live I'll wish I had never seen it.”

    I have carefully investigated the hilltop where seven people may have seen something out of space, and I have taken measurements. Whatever they saw was viewed from a short distance.

    Nunley, from whose tape-recorded account I am taking much of this narrative, noticed the thing when he and Lemon, leading the party, had just stepped through the old gateway. Events described here must have taken place in a matter of seconds. Nunley, however, was able to relate the sequence with apparent accuracy.

    The first thing they saw was a huge globular mass down over the other side of the hilltop, to their right, about 50 feet away. “It was just like a big ball of fire,” Nunley said, which seemed to dim and brighten at regular intervals. He didn’t know how large it was; some of the others said it was “big as a house.” It is not clear whether a complete sphere was seen, or a hemisphere, resting on the ground.

    Nunley heard no noise. Others said it made a low thumping or beating sound, "like someone hitting on canvas,” and there was another noise, half-way between a hiss and the noise made by a jet plane.

    It must be pointed out that the time you consume in reading these descriptions bears no relation to the length of the experience itself. You can see many things in one second, things you might need an hour to describe. I make this comment so that you will not assume a period of observation longer than the facts indicate.

    Not everyone saw the globular shape. This can be understood when one considers that the others were behind Nunley and Lemon, and that their positions might not have afforded them a view down over the hillside. And what they next saw might have been so terrifying it eradicated memory of the globe.

    Distracted by the globular mass Nunley did not see a huge figure standing to their left. Lemon said he thought he saw animal eyes in the tree and flashed his light on them.

    Fifteen feet away, towering over their heads, was a vast shape something like a man. The face, everyone agreed, was round, and blood red. No one noticed a nose or mouth, only eyes, or eye-like openings, from which projected “greenish-orange” beams of light. These light beams pierced through the haze pervading the scene. In the excitement some of the group thought the beams of light were focused upon them, but Nunley was specific that they were not. “They went out over our heads.”

    Around the red “face” and reaching upward to a point was a dark, hood-like shape. The body was seen only from the “head” down to the “waist.” It appeared dark and colorless to Nunley, though some said it was green, and one child drew a picture with an outline of fire. Mrs. May said it lighted up when the flashlight beam touched it as if there were some source of illumination inside it She also saw clothing-like folds around the body, and terrible claws. No one is sure whether the shape rested on the ground or was floating.

    The “monster” could not have been more than fifteen feet tall, for it was under the overhanging limb of a tree, and the limb was of that height.

    Originally the group said the strange, nauseous odor resembled burning metal, or burning sulphur. Under questioning none could remember having encountered anything similar. It was finally described only basically, as sickening, irritating to the throat and nasal passages. “It seemed to grip you in the throat and suffocate you.”

    Nunley was definite about the thing’s movement, although other accounts conflicted. All said it was moving toward them, but according to Nunley it was describing an arc, coming toward them, but circling at the same time. His description indicated the “monster” was following a circular path which would take it back to the globe.

    I asked him to walk around the room where he was being interviewed and to imitate the movement.

    That was impossible, he said.

    "I couldn’t move as it did. It just moved. It didn’t walk. It moved evenly; it didn’t jump.”

    He was partly commenting on other reports which had the "monster" bobbing up and down, jumping toward the witnesses.

    But it must be remembered that all these details were observed within one or a few more seconds. The party didn’t know how long they looked. According to Nunley it was “a very short time. We just got a good look at it and left.”

    “Left” here is an understatement, for the retreat was swift and disordered. No one bothered to open the gate of another fence they encountered on their return to the house.

    The dog had shown no greater bravery.

    They found it crouched under the porch, trembling and whining.

    That a dog will take on the personalities of those around it is an observation of many, particularly among those who like to psychoanalyze animals—and people. Maybe the dog saw nothing, its great fright being motivated by the sensation of fear among the company it was with. Or maybe, as some think, animals, particularly dogs and cats, are somehow more aware of the unknown, and more sensitive to it. Some think they can see ghosts when we cannot. If there be ghosts.

    I have heard the legend that there was once war on the Moon, and that the dogs and cats who lived there were banished and put down, to live on Earth. Here on Earth they still have memory of that great strife, and only superficially hold truce. And when the moon is full, and the night is warm, the dog still laments its long lost heritage with a fitful howl Maybe it is the canine who has called the saucers down upon us.

    But that is a fairy tale and a digression. If there be such things as fairies and tales and realities.

    But of the “monster” the reader will think of many questions he would like to ask the witnesses. I, too, wanted to know many things. If Lemon had dropped the flashlight, as he claimed, how did they get an apparently longer look at the "monster" Nunley said light from the globe illuminated the figure. Others said it was lighted of some source within itself. Contradictions were minor. All agreed on certain basic data I have reported, and I have noted where the stories did not agree.

    I next turned to what appeared to be another very important source of information, and a vital link between the witnesses’ stories and the happening. An owner of a certain funeral home in Sutton, had arrived during the first excitement, reportedly had administered first aid to some of the seven.

    Here would he someone who could relate some of the first faltering descriptions these people gave, before they had any opportunity to compare experiences.

    At the funeral home, while I waited for the owners return, another man, who had stopped into the office, told me he had seen a meteorite, at seven on the same night, shoot across the sky in the direction of Flatwoods, but his story was interrupted by the appearance of the man for whom I had been waiting.

    I asked him about his having treated the witnesses.

    “I was in church that night,” he told me, dismissing me hastily.

    I know of no churches in the vicinity which held services on Friday, Sept. 12. Throughout my investigation I found an incredulous attitude on the part of nearby residents. Many did not want their names mentioned in such a connection.

    “The Democrats,” one man joked, "stole the state capitol dome in Charleston, and were flying it through the air to Washington. Over Weston, Rush D. Holt took a pot shot at it and knocked off one of those ‘things.'” (Holt was a Republican gubernatorial candidate, was then trying to upset the Democratic majority in the state government.)

    A. Lee Stewart, Jr., co-editor of The Braxton Democrat, was the first outside observer, in order of appearance on the scene, to offer helpful information. He arrived about half an hour after the incident.

    He found some of the seven receiving first aid. Most of them appeared too greatly terrified to talk coherently. Hearing the fragmentary story, he finally was able to persuade Lemon to accompany him to the hilltop. At the moment he was skeptical, he said.

    Like other investigators, he saw or heard nothing. Neither did he smell the gas which shortly before had been suffocating. But knowing that some gases settle rapidly, he bent to the ground where he could smell the same pungent odor the others described. He too said it was irritating, and constricted nasal and throat passages. Although a veteran of the Air Force, where he had encountered gases used in warfare, he had never smelled anything like it before.

    To snuff for the scent at ground level had not occurred to the other investigators.

    Returning at seven the following morning, before anyone else visited the hilltop in daylight, he was amazed to find evidence which backed up the story he was hesitating to report in The Democrat.

    About ten feet apart, in the tall grass, were skid marks!

    These marks proceeded from the tree where the “monster” was “standing” to the location of the globe. It was if some huge personage were on skis and had slid down the hill. But the summer skier surely was light in weight, for the “skis” had not indented the ground; they had only ridden down the tall grass, and tossed a few small stones aside. Where the globe had rested a huge area of grass appeared to have been crushed down.

    Unbelieving residents of Flatwoods gave me explanations of these marks. I checked the theory my acquaintance had earlier presented. Brooks Fisher, who owned the farm, had, he said, harvested hay at the location, and had used a tractor. Fisher had done just that, a telephone call disclosed, but he had used no tractor nor other farming implement where the marks were seen. That part of the farm, Fisher said, was too rough and steep for a tractor.

    Others said Max Lockhart, an old friend of mine from high school days, had made the marks when he drove up the hill to investigate. I telephoned him.

    He and some friends had driven up the hill, he confirmed, had been where the “monster" was seen, but they were not down over the hill, obviously too steep for a pickup truck.

    There was foxfire on the tree, or the witnesses had seen a buck deer under it, people said. I went over the location after dark. There was no foxfire. Stewart, who hunts deer with bow and arrow, emphatically asserted that deer would be extremely unlikely at the location.

    Without the interviews with the children, particularly Nunley, I would have been far more incredulous of the affair. When Mrs. May returned from New York, along with Lemon, I went to her house. By that time the story had taken on additional dimensions. Her account was far more terrifying than the one I have reported here. She had returned to the hill the next day and got grease on her beautician's uniform — a strange deposit which defied the washer. In New York she had talked to scientists who had convinced her the “monster” was a rocket ship.

    But she was hesitant to give me her complete viewpoint of the experience. Someone “from the government” had asked her not to give out information to anybody, and a lawyer had advised her the story might be worth considerable money if she found the right market. Her father warned me I shouldn't “write up anything about it.”

    I had another opportunity to visit her home, a few weeks later. She wasn't there, but her father told me Mrs. May had received a letter from the government, which explained all the phenomena, and advised that a report was to be released to the public that week, after which date she could talk more freely about it. However, since the release date had passed, he said he was free to tell me that the “monster” was a government rocket ship, propelled by an ammonia-like hydrazine, and nitric acid.

    I could hardly wait to look up editor Stewart, who, I was told, could give me details on the government report.

    Stewart chuckled as he held up an 8×10 photo, attached to a publicity release from Colliers magazine. The issue of October 18 was to contain the story of how a moon rocket would be constructed in the future, and the photo was the art work which was to appear on the cover. The release date for the press was during that week, he explained. He had shown the picture to the May family because there was some resemblance between the rocket ship art work and the descriptions of the “monster.” The release went on to explain how the ship could be propelled by ammonia-like hydrazine and nitric acid.

    There were only wild rumors of governmental investigation. If the Air Force was interested, their concern was a well-kept secret.

    I had worked three days running down leads the story involved. From a journalistic point of view the story would read better as an expose, and if it were a hoax, that was the fate it deserved. But I could neither find important holes in the evidence, nor break down the stories of the participants.

    I often puzzle, however, over one account I drove 50 miles to obtain. It was said that Bailey Frame, of Birch River, who had been on the scene, had witnessed a rocket ship take off from the hill I encountered him in a tavern at Birch River, where he hastily denied most of the report, but did say he had seen a strange object in the sky after the incident.

    It was a large orange ball, he said, flattened on top, from which jets or streams of fire shot out and down around the sides. It circled around the sky, and was seen from a small valley at Flatwoods, near the hilltop, where he had driven half an hour after hearing about the matter. After circling for about 15 minutes it suddenly left, at great speed, toward the Sutton airport.

    As surely as the “monster” came on wings of fire, so rapidly it had flashed away. Here, I thought, was the important link — the exit of the creature.

    Frame said he’d be glad to meet me at a restaurant that evening, drive to Flatwoods with me, and take me to the exact spot where he was standing when he saw the thing.

    He didn’t show up.

    I would like to clear something else up — if I were only able. On a nearby hill, in complete view of that fateful hilltop at enmeshed me in the saucer mystery, lives G. D. Hoard, an elderly farmer. Reports had it that Hoard had told an amazing story about seeing the entire incident, but editor Stewart said he shut up like a clam when he tried to interview him.

    When I talk to many people I lead off by telling them I "was raised on a farm,” which, incidentally, is true. That seems to disarm them, and country people soon lose their mistrust of "city folks.”

    Hoard said he’d be glad to tell me everything he had seen.

    At about seven p.m. he had been in his front yard feeding his chickens. His attention was drawn to a fiery object coining over the horizon, though in a slightly different direction than others reported. It did not land, but went on across the sky.

    "It went over the Bailey Fisher cistern and as it was about here (and he pointed to a location roughly in line with his house) a piece of fire broke off it.” As it neared the other horizon, toward the Sutton airport, "it exploded and went out.”

    Now if this were the same object, one would believe it didn’t land at all. And if Hoard were in his yard at the time when the "monster” appeared, why did he not see the amazing occurrence on the nearby hilltop, easily within his view?

    One person, who also investigated, feels that Hoard saw much more than he wishes to relate, that he does not want publicity.

    I would really like to know.

    * * * * *

    In completing my investigation I went to Frametown with Sanderson and his assistant. We slashed our way up the brushy hillside with machetes, hoping to find evidence of the mysterious plane crash” the hitchhiker had reported.

    We spent the entire afternoon canvassing the hills. Now and then we thought we saw tree limbs broken off unnaturally, but really we found nothing concrete.

    The hitchhiker had not been afforded a clear view of the burning object. A piper cub was the first thing that came to his mind, he said, and he didn’t know what it was. In interviewing other people who saw what most of them termed “meteorites," I found most of them thought these crashed into nearby hills.

    Probably no one may ever know exactly what seven people saw on a West Virginia hilltop. The following, however, is in my opinion definite:

    (1) Widespread aerial phenomena, generally interpreted as meteorites, were observed at approximately the same time over a wide area.

    (2) The seven witnesses did see something that was terrifying and unfamiliar, something rather similar to that which they described.

    It is the interpretation of these points that is difficult.

    Because of the widespread talk of and belief in flying saucers, I was inclined to connect the incident with that vast mystery. The appearance of the thing before it presumably landed was similar to many so-called flying saucers, though it presented different aspects to different viewers. The aerial object seen by Mr. Jordan and the children did not behave like a meteorite.

    If saucerian in nature, why did it land? Was it in mechanical difficulty? Or did its pilot wish to make observations?

    The strange figure evidently was connected with the globular object. The spot where it was viewed was a vantage point, from which the surrounding countryside could be observed, if some interplanetary or intergalactic visitors were interested in sightseeing.

    Why and how did it leave so suddenly?

    Could it have been a robot, controlled mechanically? Its movements and the skid marks could indicate such to someone who might use science fiction or scientific conjecture as a standard. Or was it a man, or a “thing,” in a space suit? It is possible that on some fantastic planet some fantastic being is writing a book on some sort of marvelous typewriter. Typewriters there are so far advanced in development they have only to be spoken into. They click out words in wild staccato while a metallic hand inserts fresh pages. It is a horror study. In super-purple words the author tells how he made a forced landing, and was attacked by seven strange bipeds of configuration too terrible to describe.

    One of them shot at him with a ray.

    * * * * *

    Three years have passed since some people were almost scared out of their wits in Flatwoods. Passing there recently I ran across the Nunley boy walking along the road. He didn't seem to be interested in talking further about the “monster,” but was greatly concerned about a plane crash that had occurred at a nearby airport. We drove to the airport, looked at the wrecked plane, while I tried to get back on the subject.

    “You weren't pulling my leg, were you,” I asked him, and again he assured me he was not.

    “I just don't know what it was, but I saw it.”

    The excitement has about died down, but West Virginians in the reach of radio singer Cindy Coy still love to hear the inevitable ballad composed by announcer Don Lamb.

    To the lonesome chords of the steel guitar Cindy sings, over and over, for enthusiastic listeners:


    “THE PHANTOM OF FLATWOODS”
    (Sing to tune of “Sweet Betsy From Pike”)

    One evenin’ in Flatwoods, a mother and her boys
    Saw a great light and heard a great noise.
    They ran to the hilltop, didn’t know what they feared.
    It was there in the dark that the Phantom appeared.

    (CHORUS)
    Oh, Phantom of Flatwoods, from Moon or from Mars
    Maybe from God and not from the stars.
    Please tell us why you fly o’er our trees
    The end of the world or an omen of peace?

    The size of the phantom was a sight to behold.
    Green eyes and red face, so the story was told.
    It floated in air With fingers of flame.
    It was gone with a hiss just as quick as it came.

    (CHORUS)

    The people were frightened and started to pray
    They were living in hopes of another new day.
    There’s no end to this story, except just to say
    This world will go on for it’s written that way.

    (CHORUS)

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