The Mothman And A Man Called Cold

As a boy growing up in Southern West Virginia, I spent most of my days swimming and fishing in the New and Greenbrier Rivers, and hiking and hunting in the hills and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains. On those rainy or cold days, when the weather was too bad to go outside, I would wind up at our local library.

I have now since realized that it was an inexpensive way to get my younger brother and me out of mom’s hair for part of the day. But, it was on one of those days, I found the first book that introduced me to a life long fascination with the paranormal. It was also the reason I would never venture into the deep and dark Appalachian Woodlands alone at night, or ever feel comfortable around any stranger wearing a dark suite and a grin. The name of the author and of the book has long been forgotten, but I will never forget the story that it told.

It’s a tale that begins with a salesman named Woodrow Derenberger and a strange encounter on Highway I-77 near Parkersburg, West Virginia, and ends just over a year later, in Point Pleasant, West Virginia with the deaths of 46 people in one of the most shocking roadway tragedies in American history.

The odd events began on November 2, 1966, around 7:30pm when Woodrow Derenberger, a salesman for a sewing machine company was returning from Marietta, Ohio to his home in Mineral Wells, West Virginia along Highway I-77. When out of nowhere near Parkersburg, West Virginia another vehicle flew up and passed him. Woodrow described the vehicle as the strangest thing he’d ever seen and said it resembled a “kerosene lamp chimney” and that it was “flying” six inches off the ground. The vehicle came around him, turns sideways across both lanes of the road in front of him, gradually made him slow down to a stop onto the side of the road.

After that, a door opens, and a grinning man steps out of the vehicle, the door shuts with a loud “thunk” behind him. A few seconds later the vehicle climbs 40 feet into the air above the highway. Derenberger says that the dark suited man walked to the right side of his truck, spoke to him telepathically, and asked him to roll down his window and was saying that he meant Derenberger no harm.

The grinning man asked what he was called. Puzzled, Derenberger figures that the man is asking him his name, so Derenberger tells him. In response, the strange man said that he was called “Cold”. Derenberger said that he could see that Cold noticed the lights coming from Parkersburg, West Virginia off in the distance in the night sky. Cold asked Derenberger “What is that over there?” Derenberger tells him that what he was seeing was the city of Parkersburg. Cold then asked if that is were the people live, Derenberger said “No, Parkersburg is more of a place of business and most of the people live on the outskirts of town.”

Cold went on with his strange questions for a little while longer. After Cold seemed satisfied with what he had learned, he looked at Derenberger and said “It’s been nice talking to you Mr. Derenberger. We will be seeing you again,” and turned and started to walk away from Derenberger’s truck. As Cold did so, the strange craft began to descend back to the highway and the door opened. Cold climbed back inside and the door shut behind him with the same audible “thunk” that Derenberger had heard before and the vehicle sped away into the cold November night.

Indrid Cold has been linked to real phenomenon and many people claimed to have encountered him. Some say that there is only one grinning man, some say that there are many, but all eyewitnesses agree on one thing, he will scare the hell out of you. Eyewitnesses believe that Indrid Cold is one of the mysterious men in black, an alien, some other unknown creature or all of the above. Wherever Indrid Cold has been seen, UFO sightings, disasters, or other strange phenomenon seems to follow.

Just ten days after Woodrow Derenberger’s encounter with Indred Cold, another series of bizarre events began to unfold all around the region, receiving the world wide attention of the press at the time, and Indred Cold seems to be involved.

On November 12, 1966, near Clendenin, West Virginia, five men were in the local cemetery, digging a grave for a burial, when something that looked like a “brown human being” lifted off from some nearby trees and flew over their heads. The men were perplexed. It did not appear to be a bird, but more like a man with wings. This incident would be the first of many to come.

Late in the evening of Nov. 15, 1966, two young married couples, Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette had a very bizarre encounter as they drove past an area of town known as “the TNT area”, the site of a former World War II munitions plant near Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

The couples saw two large eyes that they said “glowed red” in the cars headlights and were attached to something that “looked like a man, but bigger, maybe six or seven feet tall”. It had wings folded against its back”. When it moved toward the plant door, they panicked and sped away. Just a short time later, they saw the same creature on a hillside near the road. It spread its “10 to 12 feet” wings and flew into the air and gave chase to their car, which was now traveling at over 100 miles per hour.

When they got into town, they made a report of the horrifying event to Deputy Sheriff Millard Halstead. They reported that, whatever it was had followed them down Highway 62 to the Point Pleasant city limits. They would not be the only ones to report the strange creature that night. Another group of four witnesses claimed to see the same thing, three different times. Another sighting had even more inexplicable results.

At about 10:30pm on that same evening, Newell Partridge, a building contractor who lived in Salem, which is about 90 miles from Point Pleasant, was watching television when the screen went dark. He reported that an eerie pattern filled the screen and that is when he heard a loud whining sound from outside that raised in pitch and then stopped. Partridge said “It sounded like a generator winding up”. Partridge’s dog, Bandit, began to howl on the front porch, and he grabbed his flashlight went out to see what was going on.

When he got outside, he saw Bandit looking at the barn, 150 yards from the house. Partridge shined the flashlight in that direction and spotted two red circles that looked like “bicycle reflectors”. The red orbs were not like any animal’s eyes he’d had ever seen, and the sight of them frightened him to the core.

Bandit, a hunting dog and protective of his territory, took off across the yard in pursuit of the glowing red eyes. Partridge commanded him to stop, but Bandit was hot on its trail. Partridge turned and went back into the house to get his shotgun, but realized he was too scared to go back outside again. That night he slept with his gun propped up next to his bed. The next morning, he realized that Bandit had not come back. Two days pass and Bandit still had not shown up when Partridge read in the newspaper about the sightings in Point Pleasant the same night of his own strange sighting.

One statement that he read chilled him to the bone. Roger Scarberry, one member of the group who spotted the strange creature at the TNT plant, said that as they entered the city limits of Point Pleasant, they saw a large dog lying on the side of the road. A few minutes later, on the way back out of town, the dog was gone. They even stopped to look for the dog, knowing they had passed it just a short time before. Newell Partridge immediately thought of Bandit, who was never seen again.

Read more here: http://whofortedblog.com/2012/09/11/mothman-man-called-cold/