Mrs. Mary Hyre entertained the first
of her long string of peculiar visitors early in January 1967. She was working
late in her office opposite the county courthouse when her door opened and a
very small man entered. He was about four feet six inches tall, she told me in
a phone call soon afterward. Although it was about 20°F. outside, he was
wearing nothing but a short-sleeved blue shirt and blue trousers of
thin-looking material. His eyes were dark and deepset, and were covered with
thick-lensed glasses. He was wearing odd shoes with very thick soles which
probably added an inch or two to his height.
Speaking in a low, halting voice, he
asked her for directions to Welch, West Virginia, a town in the southeastern
tip of the state. She thought at first that he had some kind of speech
impediment. His black hair was long and cut squarely "like a bowl
haircut" and his eyes remained fixed on her in an unflinching, hypnotic
way.
"He kept getting closer and
closer," she reported. "His funny eyes staring at me almost
hypnotically."
He told her a long-winded,
disjointed story about his truck breaking down in Detroit, Michigan. He had
hitchhiked all the way from Detroit. As he talked, he inched closer and closer
to her, and she became frightened, thinking she had some kind of a nut on her
hands. She pulled back from her desk and ran into the back room where her
newspaper's circulation manager was working on a telephone campaign. He joined
her and they spoke together to the little man.
"He seemed to know more about
West Virginia than we did," she declared later. At one point the telephone
rang, and while she was speaking on it the little man picked upa ball-point pen
from her desk and examined it with amaze ment, "as if he had never seen a
pen before."
"You can have that if you want
it," she offered. He responded with a loud, peculiar laugh, a kind of
cackle. Then he ran out into the night and disappeared around a corner.
The next
day Mrs. Hyre checked with the sheriff's office to find out it there was any
mentally deficient person on the loose. The answer was negative.
-The Mothman Prophecies, (1975) pp. 44
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