With just over a week left before the release of Fallout 76, Bethesda has released a new teaser video series. Taking the form of five episodes of an ongoing radio play series, each episode tells an old-fashioned tale of horror and dread centred around one of the new Fallout 76 creatures; the Snallygaster, the Beast of Grafton, the Flatwoods Monster, and the Wendigo. The final episode is for perhaps the most well-known new monster; the Mothman.
Fallout 76 Creatures: The Mothman Cometh!
In “The Mothman Cometh!” Bethesda depicts the Mothman as a monstrous moth-like creature and hints at its supposed supernatural abilities. The story seems to even be unsure whether the monster was really bad or not… until the end. This flying predator appears to be a vicious killer, and likely a dangerous foe to face in Appalachia.
Reported sightings of the Mothman began in 1966. Within the span of a few days there were several different reports of sightings, depicting a; “large flying man with ten-foot wings [… and with] glowing red eyes.” These sightings occurred near Point Pleasant in West Virginia. At the time, the county sheriff said that eyewitnesses had likely seen a large heron or sandhill crane. The story might have disappeared into the mists of time then and there, were it not for the collapse of the Silver Bridge, nearby, the following month. The event left 46 people dead.
Nine years later, a ufologist named John Keel published, “The Mothman Prophecies”; a supposed investigation into the mothman sightings and the bridge collapse. Keel claims that the mothman is some sort of harbinger and has a supernatural connection to the bridge. (The official investigation four years earlier had found that the bridge collapse was caused by “stress corrosion cracking.”) The Mothman has since become one of the best known elements of West Virginian folklore. A museum about the monster is in Point Pleasant, and also features in Fallout 76. Similarly, a statue depicting the mothman has been erected in the town (and in the game world).