Mothman

Between November 1966 and December 1967 more than a hundred people around Point Pleasant, West Virginia reported a large winged figure with red eyes, often near the abandoned TNT-plant bunkers. Then on 15 December 1967 the Silver Bridge over the Ohio collapsed in rush hour and 46 people died, and the sightings stopped. The collapse was caused by a single cracked eyebar, a documented engineering failure, but the timing welded the two together permanently. Point Pleasant has a statue, a museum and a September festival, and the bridge disaster is memorialised separately and seriously.