Chicago Mothman

On October 13, 2011, Lon Strickler, a self-described Fortean researcher, put up a post on his website Phantoms and Monsters titled “Photo: 2nd Mothman / Bat-Like Object Witnessed Over Chicago.” The same post carried an account from a University of Illinois Chicago student who wrote in about something seen on Sept. 30, 2011. That is where All That’s Interesting starts the story of the Chicago Mothman, while Cryptid Vault dates the first reports to the spring of 2017.

Either way, 2017 was the peak. That year there were as many as 55 reported sightings around Chicago of a large, winged humanoid, along the Lake Michigan shoreline, near the Chicago River, in the suburbs and around O’Hare International Airport.

Witnesses described a shadowy figure with bat-like wings spanning more than 10 feet that flew at considerable speed without flapping. Accounts differ on its height: six to seven feet in one, six to ten in another.

One of the 2017 witnesses, John Amitrano, was working a Friday night security shift at The Owl, a bar in Logan Square, when he stepped outside. “I saw a plane flying, but also something moving really awkwardly under it,” he told VICE. “It didn’t look like a bat so much as what illustrations of pterodactyls look like, with the slenderness of its head and its wing shape. I know what birds and what bats look like. This thing didn’t have any feathers or fur, and it didn’t fly like anything I’ve ever seen.” He later contacted Strickler and learned he was one of 55 people that year with the same story.

Strickler’s tip line became the main clearinghouse for reports, and Cryptid Vault says he cataloged over 100 sightings between 2017 and 2019. “This group of sightings is historical in cryptozoology terms,” he told VICE.

Strickler rejected the idea that Chicago Mothman was an omen of disaster, the reputation that local folklore gave the creature reported around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966 and 1967 after a bridge collapse there in 1967. “These beings are less aggressive than the one in Point Pleasant, for the most part,” Strickler said. “I think they’re flesh and blood beings that aren’t of this world.”

Dr. David A. Gallo, a University of Chicago psychologist whose research deals with memory, told VICE that Strickler’s collection is a “selective sample,” because he’s counting people who voluntarily came forward, and the people likely to visit a paranormal site may be more inclined to believe in a Mothman. “There’s a phenomenon where there’s basically some real witnessed experience, but if there are holes or gaps in that original experience, sometimes the mind is unable to fill in the gaps,” Gallo said. If something like a Mothman is suggested to them afterward, he warned, “that person might be inclined to fill in the gaps with that.” Strickler disagreed, saying the reports he has documented seem genuine.

Others point to birds. Great blue herons, common along the Chicago lakefront, have wingspans of up to 6 feet and can look surprisingly large in low light, and great horned owls have reflective eyes that can appear red or orange. Sandhill cranes and drones equipped with lights have also been suggested.

The creature also goes by “Chicago Phantom” and “O’Hare Mothman,” and it has turned up in local media, rap songs, Halloween costumes and speculative Facebook groups. Strickler is still fielding reports, with alleged sightings as recent as April 2024.