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Lesley

Grey Matter

2.3.9

My Mothman Story

For a long while I have been telling people that I would get around to telling this story and I never have. The main reason being that it isn't very exciting, it isn't like I actually saw Mothman. It happened about 1982, when I was around 15 years old.

As most teenagers did back then, I had a huge record collection. Mostly heavy metal, as it was very popular at the time, but also some Sex Pistols, Ramones, The Clash -- bands like that. I am sure most people know what records were -- they were the music media before mp3s and CDs. They were large black disks than spun on turntables and often become quite dusty. So one day while I was out shopping I found a "special" record dust cloth that promised to not only clean off dust, but to keep records from getting as dusty. It was only a couple bucks and I bought it.

I am not sure how long I had it before I actually used it, but I did eventually use it. When I was done, I folded it back up and put in back in the baggie it came in. It was at least a couple weeks before I used it again. I took it out of the bag and as I began unfolding it I saw that it had changed colors. Once it was totally unfolded I saw that it hadn't exactly changed colors entirely, it kind of looked like an ink blot -- they type psychologists use.

At first I thought the ink blot looked like a bat man, but then I decided the wings weren't right and it actually looked more like a mothman. For some reason the image on there scared me and fascinated me at the same time.

If anyone has seen the ink blot like Mothman they use on the Mothman Prophecies movie posters and now the book -- it was very similar to that. I would say the main differences being that the facial features were more defined and my mothman ink blot seemed to be wearing a crown on it's head.

Of course, that was years before the Mothman movie and I had never heard of Mothman at all, but I ended up calling that image The Mothman. Imagine my surprise, years later, when I saw that poster for the first time. It was spine tingling weird.

Trying to be logical, I decided this was caused by the dust I had cleaned off my records and if I were to clean more records and put it back in the bag for a few weeks the image would change again because there would be more dust on it. I used that cloth off and on for about 2 more years and the image never changed a bit.

I never threw it away, but when I moved from my sister's house in about 1985, I left some of my stuff to pick up later and she went through it and threw away what she thought was trash, including the mothman.

In a sense, I was happy to be rid of it. For some reason, I couldn't bring myself to throw it away, but I always felt that maybe it was bad luck. I don't feel like getting into the bad luck that came after the mothman appeared on that cloth, but it was bad. However, now that I know more about the mothman I realize that it was more likely warning me, rather than actually causing the bad luck. Maybe even it somehow caused my sister to go through some stuff and throw it away because it knew that it's job was done.

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