Gallia County, Ohio

Located directly across the Ohio River from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, home of the iconic Mothman, Gallia County is no stranger to the supernatural. Like the rest of Ohio, the area has been host to Sasquatch sightings, and like other colonial-era settlements, there have always been legends of hauntings and Native American curses. Perhaps most notorious in the town of Gallipolis are the UFO sightings which became relatively common during the Mothman era of the 1960’s and continue to this day. Many people in our area know someone who has witnessed at least one of these phenomena. But as my good friend Dustin Beach describes in our interview, throughout his life he has encountered many strange presences in our small hometown.

We began our interview by discussing why Dustin considers his experiences to be supernatural in nature. He says at the very least, his sightings were outside of what he “would consider ‘normal.’” Dustin tells his stories in order of “it-could-be-possibly-explained as something, you know natural, to…this-is-really-weird-and-I-have-no-good-explanation-for-it kind of situation.” What he means by this is that his encounters with Bigfoot or spirits could be ruled off as another large animal or a strong draft through a window, while the observed UFO activity spanned years, was much more vivid, and involved multiple witnesses. Dustin says for him- a scientific thinker with a religious background- these memories are definitely not of what he would consider “natural occurrences.”

Bigfoot by Raccoon Creek

Dustin first describes an encounter with an “unexplained creature” in the late 1990’s when he was between the ages of 11 and 14. Like most kids in our rural, Appalachian community, Dustin spent much of his childhood playing in the woods around Raccoon Creek, a large stream well-used by most locals (in fact, it’s where my own father learned to swim). On the summer day in question, Dustin and his cousin Brad set out from Brad’s home to explore a bridge built by a local farmer so that his tractors could traverse an offshoot of the creek. I laughed as my friend described how seriously his 11-year-old self took this endeavor:

After Dustin and Brad walked a long distance (“…there again, when you’re a kid, everything seems bigger [and] further”), they came to a sandy spot on the creek bank they had been using as a guide to find the bridge. Immediately, the pair noticed a bizarre collection of footprints. Dustin describes the impressions as around 15 inches in length, vaguely resembling human tracks, but with toes five or six inches long.

“And uh, you know, ‘course, both of us, [we] were aware of…the Bigfoot legend everything and…we joked, it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s Bigfoot!’ And you know, it’s like either Bigfoot or Shaquille O’Neal has been in the woods behind our house.”

Dustin says he and Brad both immediately looked for a possible explanation. The sand was wet, so perhaps somebody had lost a boot while climbing the bank, and the shifting earth distorted their prints. Spooked, the boys continued their journey, only to find that the bridge they had been trying to reach had been flipped, completely separated from the ground, by someone…or something. Dustin remembers suggesting to his cousin that perhaps the stream had flooded and shifted the bridge, but Brad reminded him that it had not rained at all since he had first discovered the path a week before. Not only that, but the bridge was upstream from its original spot, not traveling with the current. Spotting even more of the strange footprints nearby, the two decide to take a shortcut through a field to get back to Brad’s house as quickly as possible. But after only walking for a few minutes, the pair saw not far ahead of them a large, approximately eight-foot-tall creature stand up in a cluster of brush. Without hesitation, the boys began running for their lives, Dustin even falling and losing his backpack along the way.

The next day, Brad took his stepdad to the spot where the boys had their run-in with the creature, he showed him the footprints, and they retrieved Dustin’s backpack. Despite having each other to corroborate the story, neither boys’ parents gave the encounter much credit.

“…that’s the thing about these experiences is- it’s interesting because, you know, I was at the age where it’s like…you’re starting to be a teenager, and you’re starting to be taken a lil more seriously, but still no one takes you seriously when you…have a story like that,” Dustin says. “But you’re […] also getting to that age where it’s like, you know, monsters aren’t real anymore…you’re actually kind of taking the world as it is. And [to have] weird things happen, it, it kind of messes with ya, I think, a lil bit more because it’s like, you think you’re figuring it out.” Dustin laughs as he says, “And now all the sudden, you know, something happens, and it’s like ‘Okay, I guess I don’t have- no idea!’”

Ghost at the Our House Tavern

Dustin goes on to describe another summer day a few years later with his same cousin, Brad. Dustin says that when he was around 15 years-old, his history-buff cousin volunteered as a docent at Gallipolis’s Our House Tavern, a colonial-era establishment which currently operates as a museum.

“The Our House Museum,” Dustin begins reading from notes he prepared. “It was built in 1819. Um. It was a tavern, a river tavern. People would come down the river, stop, spend the night, you know, there was rooms upstairs. There was a ballroom, you know, full kitchen, everything like that. Um. It was a popular stopping point along the river for many years. Um. Uh- the Marquis de Lafayette stayed there in 1825. Um, you know, there’s a whole lot of history about it.”

Dustin jokes that as with any building in Gallia County over fifty years-old, Our House has always been rumored by locals to be haunted. He also jokes that he did not exactly look forward to visiting the Tavern with Brad: Brad was the history guy, but Dustin was into Nature and Science. Regardless, one hot, summer day, Dustin joined his cousin on a trip to the nearly 200-year-old building, “’cause [Brad] put up with [my] stuff. And it was only fair. We were two nerds, just trying to, you know, get along.”

As Dustin looked around the first floor of the Tavern, his cousin went to the attic to get permission from a curator, a local history professor, to show Dustin some of the antiques not on display. Dustin describes the layout of the first floor.

As Dustin waited for Brad, the only other person in the room, the lady at the ticket booth, left. It was hot and stuffy as Dustin walked into the hallway, and he emphasizes that the building did not have air-conditioning at the time. Yet all of the sudden, Dustin felt a cold rush, as if he was standing under a vent. He began to smell something he could not quite place, like flowers or potpourri. The cold feeling left him, then shortly after, a table cloth a bit further down the hall began to wave, but Dustin felt no breeze. Seconds after, the back door, which had been shut the whole time, shuttered loudly as if something had slammed into it. Dustin took this as his cue to join his cousin upstairs.

When Dustin found his cousin and the professor-docent on the third floor, Brad began asking the prof to tell Dustin about the ghost stories of the Tavern.

“Well, you can tell [he was] kind of annoyed,” Dustin said. “…it’s like ‘everybody wants to hear about the ghosts. Nobody wants to hear about the…‘boring history stuff.’ So he starts talking about, you know, different sightings and everything like that. And he had mentioned how [the] original, um, owner of the hotel Henry [Cushing], his wife, Elizabeth, people had, you know, said that they’ve seen her ghost.”

The professor mentioned that when people report encountering Elizabeth Cushing’s ghost, they also smell lilacs, the scent of perfume she was known to wear during her life.

“And when he said that I realized that was…the flower smell that I’d smelled because I grew up with a big lilac bush right outside my back window, so I know what lilacs smell like. And at the time, like, I think I turned very pale,” Dustin said laughing. Upon seeing Dustin’s face, Brad asked him, “Dude, what happened?”

As Dustin described what happened before he joined them upstairs, the others agreed that Dustin may have encountered the spirit of Elizabeth Cushing. After nearly 20 years, he remembers it clearly and has not had another ghost encounter since.

Years of UFO Activity

Of all Dustin’s bizarre retellings, his encounters with Unidentified Flying Objects may be the most vivid, not to mention the most frightening. This series of encounters spanned his childhood and teen years, from the early 90’s to the early 2000’s. Dustin is sure to emphasize that had others not witnessed these events alongside him, he would have thought he was losing his mind.

As any reader may have guessed by this point in the blog, my friend was a fairly adventurous child. This curiosity combined with the bizarre history in our area led a young Dustin into the world of Ufology (the study of UFO phenomena), specifically the works of John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies. Dustin describes graduating from R.L. Stine and searching for media that would “really” scare him. As many from our area know (including myself), learning as a child about the local events of the 1960’s- Mothman, UFO sightings, the mysterious Men in Black- is terrifying. But for some like Dustin, these events become a source of awe and entertainment in a relatively sleepy small town.

It is important to note that his preteen interests did not necessarily subconsciously inspire what he would come to witness- they allowed Dustin to connect dots from throughout his life. Dustin goes on to describe himself as a wuss when it comes to UFO’s, that he was certainly frightened by the concept but could not contain his interest. He recalls a scene from the film adaptation of The Mothman Prophecies (2002) in which the main character, frightened by his experiences, asks a paranormal expert, “Why me?” He responds, “You noticed them, and they noticed you noticed them.”

“This [movie] was after everything I’m gonna tell. And I just remember, like…‘That explains it. That explains all of it,’ because…I fell like people who get into this, who, like, get into UFOs and stuff, they all end up going a little bit crazy. Because it’s almost as if…whatever the phenomenon is, it knows.”

His last comment before beginning his tale is that sure, people tend to see what they want to see. But he reminds me that with every encounter, he was not the only witness.

Dustin’s first memory of strange aerial phenomena was when he was small, “young enough that I was still sitting in a- I think I was still in a booster seat.” He was riding in his grandmother’s truck, sitting between her and his mother, riding through a very rural, fielded area of Gallia County called Rodney. It was late at night and raining, and the trio were on their way home. Suddenly, over one of the nearby cattle fields, appeared a light, an odd light that Dustin describes as almost smoky. He said from what he could remember, it was around 500 feet above the ground. The source of the light was triangular, 50 to 75 feet in length on each side, and on each corner was another light.

Tiny Dustin was excited, asking, “Grandma! Grandma! What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?” while his mother and grandmother were both frightened by the presence. They tried to be dismissive and instead focus on the road as the rain continued to pour, and until Dustin was older and saw other UFO’s, he forgot about this event entirely.

When Dustin was older, he and his mother were in the backyard, feeding the chickens he was raising for 4-H. As a storm rolled in, he and his mother were putting a tarp over their homemade coop to keep the chickens dry. As the sky got darker, the two heard the familiar sound of the neighbors’ cows in the distance growing anxious before the rain. As Dustin watched the sky, an orange light appeared, and he pointed it out to his mom who simply wanted to get back in the house before the rain started. When he did get her to look, she grew frightened. Eventually, the two saw the light descend out of sight in the distance, followed by the even louder sounds of frightened cows, which was interpreted by a preteen Dustin as an alien abduction. Once the light ascended, it took off into the night without a trace.

Another one of Dustin’s more vivid encounters from middle school includes about a dozen other witnesses- he was riding the school bus. He describes one sleepy morning (he got on the bus around 6:15), as he tried to get some shut-eye on the bumpy, gravel backroads, seeing an odd light in the sky as the sun rose. As the bus got closer, Dustin was able to discern that the light was not another celestial body still visible from the night- such as the moon or Venus- but a triangle of lights on the underside of a dome-shaped apparatus, practically the image of the classic flying saucer. Thinking that maybe he was still half asleep, and even considering his previous UFO sightings, Dustin decided the vessel must be a helicopter scanning the surrounding fields for growing marijuana (a common routine by law enforcement in farm towns). But still unsure, he woke up one of his friends to show him the unknown thing that was then hovering over the road ahead of them, and his friend was equally stumped.

By this point, the whole bus of kids- and Dustin says even the bus driver- were all noticing this flying object under which they were about to pass. Children sticking their heads out windows, the driver yelling, as the bus passed under the UFO, it vanished without a trace.

Of his UFO sightings up to that point, the experience on the bus seemed the most frightening to young Dustin. But things continued to escalate. Dustin lived with his mother and grandmother on a relatively empty, rural road. Dustin’s grandma was a “busybody,” so when she would see a car coming down the road out her kitchen window, she knew the driver and where they were going. This was not the case with what she described as “government-looking vehicles”- unmarked, black cars- which would come down the road, slow down in front of their house as if looking for something, then drive off (Dustin clarifies this was prior to the Opioid Epidemic, because today, according to Dustin, there are frequently strangers around that area for the purchase and sale of drugs).

The mention of unmarked, black vehicles immediately sets off alarms for any Ufologist such as young Dustin was at the time, especially in Gallia County. The Men in Black are a phenomenon which tends to occur in unison with UFO sightings, or in the case of Gallipolis and Point Pleasant, the duration of the Mothman sightings of the 1960’s. These “men” are described as dressed all in black suits complete with hats and sunglasses driving black vehicles, and some believe them to be government agents while others claim they are alien posers. Typically, the Men in Black are seen by those who have witnessed UFO’s or other strange occurrences, and in some cases, they show up to the homes or places of work to threaten or even attempt to kidnap witnesses. In the 1960’s, one Point Pleasant resident- who has since kept her identity concealed from the world of UFO research- was grabbed by a Man in Black at her mailbox after discussing her Mothman sighting with a local newspaper, and as he attempted to force her into their vehicle, the sleeve was actually torn from her blouse.* Needless to say, at the thought of Men in Black, Dustin grew frightened. This was the point at which he felt his UFO sightings might have been connected.

There was a specific event around that time which Dustin says was “the final straw.” One night while eating dinner, the family’s phone rang. When Dustin’s mother answered, she listened, then, as Dustin describes, pulled the phone away, confused, then held it back to her ear. When she beckoned to Dustin to come listen, he heard on the line a pattern of strange noises: beeps, sounds similar to a fax machine or modem, static, and garbled, unintelligible, fast speech. This reminded Dustin of phone oddities mentioned repeatedly in his now many, many books on UFO phenomena, and on a hunch, he gave the phone to his mother and ran outside. He looked up. There, above his house, was a familiar vessel: a triangle of three lights with a larger light in the middle. Quickly, the triangle of lights disappeared, the central light turned red, then the object took off out of sight.

Dustin’s response? Gathering all his UFO research materials (save his copy of The Mothman Prophecies) and throwing them in a garbage bag. And he has seen nothing weird in the sky since.

Research Questions

At the beginning of our interview, Dustin said that, personally, he would define “the supernatural” as anything that remains unexplained by science, and by that definition, all the encounters he described during our meeting were supernatural ones. As we wrapped up our time together, Dustin essentially answered all our project research questions without my prompting. He said that he believes in the supernatural because of his own personal faith as a progressive, non-denominational Christian, and that his belief in supernatural beings because of his religion allows him to link these occurrences. He references a paper he wrote in college- the only time he ever went back to studying the paranormal. In his paper he discussed the theory that all paranormal occurrences change with human culture (for example, long before the time of UFO’s, people in earlier centuries saw “flying chariots”). Dustin connects this theory with his own theological views, that manifestations of paranormal occurrences do change over time, and that they come from a sinister or demonic source with the goal of discouraging belief in God. “The aliens and UFO’s are not actually UFO’s. It’s basically just, you know, just [a] hallucination forced on people…because if the Devil can get you to believe in aliens and ghosts [and] Sasquatch and stuff you’re less likely to commit and follow, you know, Christianity, God, the way you’re supposed to.” He gives an example to further explain. “Like when somebody sees, [like], you know, the spirit of a loved one, and they think, you know, ‘[My] dead sister came and visited me,’ you know, kinda thing, it’s really a demon playing a trick on you because it’s a distraction.” To be clear, Dustin does not mean believing in ghosts or Bigfoot makes someone evil: he sees parallels between these frightening occurrences and Biblical phenomena.

For Dustin, these events had the opposite effect on his faith, and he is more aware of what materials he consumes so as to not spook himself. He does not go looking for mysterious beings anymore, and it would seem they also have quit looking for him. But despite being a Christian himself, he feels other Christians may be judgmental of his stories in spite of the fact that many people have supernatural experiences.

”It’s kind of a weird, you know, living in the Bible Belt. […] A lot more people have probably seen and heard stuff, but they’re like, ‘Nope, nope, it can’t be that because the Bible says this,’ you know? ‘The Bible says ‘to be absent from the body is present with the Lord.’ That was not a ghost,’ you know. Well, you saw somethin’.”

(Full interview with Dustin below:)

*account recorded by local historians, names and dates archived