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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. January 15th of 1919 was an unusually warm winter's afternoon in Boston. In the North End near the waterfront, workers sat outside to eat their lunches. Firefighters were playing cards in the garage of the engine house and near a warehouse on Commercial Street, a group of children were gathering firewood for their families when they heard a strange metallic groan. It was coming from the 50 foot tall steel tank full of molasses that towered over the North End. The tank had been built a few years earlier by the Purity Distilling Company and locals were used to its regular leaking and rumbling. But this time it sounded different. The rapid warming weather was causing the molasses in the tank to expand the putting increased pressure on the poorly constructed walls. The quiet groan grew into a deep growl and then with a sudden bang, the rivets shot out of the tank, ripping the sides open and sending a 25 foot wave of molasses crashing down the street. The sticky brown wave rolled through the North End at a shocking speed of about 35 miles an hour. It was powerful enough to crush buildings and knock an elevated train off its tracks. The firefighters at the engine house ducked for cover as the walls collapsed around them, leaving them trapped in a waist deep puddle of molasses. A truck was picked up and hurtled all the way into Boston harbor and down the block. A man woke up in his third story bedroom to see a flood of molasses several feet deep surrounding his bed. He had to climb on top of the bed frame to keep from drowning. In total, about 2.3 million gallons of molasses poured into the streets, covering several blocks in two to three feet of gooey sludge. Within minutes, police, firefighters and Navy sailors rushed to the scene. They had a hard time maneuvering through the sticky streets, especially as the molasses began to thicken in the cool winter air. But they worked through the night pulling survivors and bodies out of the ruins. Despite the best efforts of the rescue crews, 21 people died in the Great Molasses flood, including two of the children and who were collecting firewood nearby. Another 150 people were injured. It took hundreds of workers weeks to clean up the molasses in the immediate area and even longer. To clear the residue from the rest of Greater Boston, cleanup crews had to fill a fireboat with water from the harbor and spray the streets with salt water to dissolve the molasses. The Boston harbor was stained brown until summer, and for decades after the disaster, the syrupy smell of molasses lingered over the North End, becoming a distinctive part of the Boston atmosphere. In the aftermath of the great molasses flood, survivors filed one hundred and nineteen separate lawsuits blaming the explosion on the tank's poor design and shoddy construction. This led to massive changes in construction laws nationwide, including a new requirement that engineers and building inspectors had to sign off on every project. More than a hundred years later, those new regulations have successfully ensured that such a sticky tragedy will never happen again. On November 15th of 1966, two young couples were driving past an abandoned National Guard armory in West Virginia. It was a dark night, with only the headlights on their car to guide them. The armory was a strange place. Underground storage bunkers lay covered in graffiti with their big metal doors lying open like gaping, yawning mouths ready to swallow someone up. Looking at one, you wondered what strange weapons might have been stored inside them and what might remain. West Virginia was already a sufficiently spooky place all on its own. The Blue Mountains feature deep canyons dotted with thick tangles of trees and hiding strange monsters and occasionally strange people. It is truly both beautiful and sinister. And that night, these two couples, Roger and Linda Scarbery and Steve and Mary Millett, were about to learn this in spades. As they traveled along the highway, something strange came into focus. Several feet ahead of them, two bright red pinpricks of light shot out like flares in the dark. At first they thought these might be the taillights of another car, but. But the red lights hovered off the ground as if they weren't attached to any vehicle at all. Because they weren't lights. They were eyes. Buggish orbs set into the gray fur covered head with no neck. And below that, a gray bipedal body with long insect like wings stretched out hideously behind it. The couple screamed and the driver slammed on the gas. They plunged forward, growing even more shocked as this hideous creature simply jumped up into the sky, watching, turned around and followed them, flapping its wings with ease. They drove as fast as they could to 100 miles an hour, desperate to escape the strange creature. But it seemed to keep up with them with no problem. Everyone in the car looked eagerly toward the approaching lights of the city. It was their last hope. They crossed over onto the main thoroughfare and looked behind them, and the creature was gone. The most sinister part of this now infamous Mothman story is isn't the eerie details of that first encounter, but the fact that several other people claimed to see the exact same thing in the coming days before the initial sighting was well reported on. There was no opportunity for these witnesses to corroborate their stories and get the details straight. It seems they really did see this creature. One man even claimed that it ate his dog. Within a few years, a journalist named John Keel traveled across West Virginia documenting these strange occurrences. He noted the Mothman phenomenon as being a part of a larger UFO sighting phenomenon going on throughout the United States at the time. But the Mothman sightings seemed to come to a climax on December 15th of 1967. That was when the silver bridge connecting Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed, killing over 40 people. There are claims that the Mothman was seen flying around the bridge just before the accident, as if it could predict what was about to happen. John Keel ultimately came to a conclusion that's arguably stranger than the initial phenomena. He believed that UFOs, the Mothman, and every other strange sighting at the time could be attributed to the work of extra dimensional beings who were causing people to hallucinate all of these different creatures. Of course, nothing has ever come of this theory. The bridge collapse can be attributed to structural failure, UFO sightings to human aircraft, and mass paranoia. And the Mothman, well, the Mothman is harder to explain away. At the very least, it's difficult to provide a rational explanation for those rapid initial sightings when the individuals involved had no chance to build off each other's stories. And as I mentioned, West Virginia can be a spooky place. There's a long tradition in the area of folklore relating to different kinds of monsters in the woods. Maybe the people of Point pleasant in the 1960s were just primed by those earlier stories and ready to create a monster of their own. After seeing a large owl or a crane in the dark, Mothman is now a beloved cryptid on par with Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. And the people of Point Pleasant have fully embraced the legend by erecting a statue in the center of town and holding an annual Mothman festival. Still, you're more likely to see it depicted as a cutesy plushie on Etsy than as something sinister. But with no satisfying answers to the original sightings, folks always will be curious about whether the monster could have been real or not. Maybe it will come back one day to chase down some more cars or to warn us of impending doom. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting curiosities podcast.com this show was created by me, Aaron Manke, in partnership with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series and television show and you can learn all about it over@theworldoflore.com and until next time, stay curious. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.