I have just made an unsettling discovery.

I am 370 miles from Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

“But Ursula,” the reader may say, “why on earth do you care? Your entire opinion of West Virginia is that it’s an unneccessary two hours between you and your parents. They have great natural beauty and instead they advertise about the quality of their outlet malls.* If West Virginia was transported to the moon tomorrow, your only thought would be the hope that the bastard who dinged your car in the parking lot in Summersville and didn’t leave a note got left outside the airlock.”

And these are all good points. Except for one key fact.

Mothman.

I am scared of Mothman.

No, I don’t know why. The other cryptid monsters don’t bother me in the slightest. Jersey Devil? Well, I’d take photos if I saw it, but it looks like something strung together by an artist who’s gotten bored with gryphons and moved on to bigger and better mishmashes. Bigfoot? I have a sneaking suspicion that if anything like that really lived throughout the Pacific Northwest, one would have gotten hit by a car by now. Chupacabra? Hey, most of you have already met Chu.

But Mothman scares me. In the dark, paranoid hours of the night when I can’t sleep and am afraid to look out the windows for fear of what may be pressed against the glass, the thing I suspect is there is first cousin to Mothman.

I don’t think it’s real. I’m fairly sure it isn’t. That has little bearing on the matter. I’m also fairly sure that there are no monsters under my bed, but you don’t catch me hanging my ankles over (although since writing “Irrational Fears” I’ve been less worried about that, I admit.) This is not logical. If I was going to pick something logical to be scared of, it would look cooler. There is a respectability in fearing creatures designed by H.R.Geiger. But Mothman looks like a giant bat-winged tribble. He looks like something a five-year-old would draw.

Actually, maybe that’s part of why it’s scary.

Anyway. 370 miles. By road, no less. As the moth flies, perhaps less. He could probably make that in a few hours with a good following wind. And with global warming, the range of Mothman may spread dramatically in the next few decades. We just don’t know, do we? This time next century, we might not be able to step outside without swarms of Mothman dropping from the sky and gibbering at us! It could happen.

I’m gonna go make me a tinfoil hat. And buy a really BIG can of Raid.

*The tourism board of West Virginia, not my parents.