Photos of Sutton, West Virginia, and the Flatwoods Monster Museum

In late-August 2020, Ashar and I got out of the house for essentially the first time since the start of the pandemic and traveled to a state park in West Virginia to visit my dad and stepmom, who similarly needed a chance to fend off coronavirus cabin fever (by traveling to an actual cabin in the peaceful woods). 

On the way back home to Pennsylvania after the visit, Ashar and I passed a sign for the Flatwoods Monster Museum, and we immediately knew that we had to leave the highway and see where this very rural West Virginia exit took us. 

The answer was Sutton, a town of fewer than 1,000 people in Braxton County.

And it is indeed home to a monster museum. The Flatwoods Monster doesn't have the same level of notoriety as Mothman in United States urban legends, but it's pretty interesting. The Braxton County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, which would very much like your tourism dollars, describes what a group of teenagers purportedly saw on a night in 1952:

"Upon reaching the site of the crash, the group saw a pulsing red light. Lemon shined his flashlight up the hill, and the group witnessed a terrifying sight — a ten-foot-tall creature, with a head shaped like a spade and what appeared to be a dark, metal 'dress'. The creature’s hands were twisted and clawed, and what seemed to be its eyes glowed an eerie orange color. It appeared to levitate off the ground. A strange, sickening mist hung in the air. The creature hissed and glided quickly toward the witnesses, the group then turned and fled in terror."

Here are some pictures I took at the museum...

The sign says, "Absolutely no Seances."

Sutton itself, which sits on a hillside, was just as interesting as the museum. I wish we'd had more time to explore, but we still had many hours of driving to get back to Dover. These are some of my snapshots of the struggling Appalachian town (I played around with filters on a couple of them.)

Past photography posts

• Sonoran Desert snapshots
• Ephemeral artwork seen on a late-night stroll through Brooklyn
• Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Virginia
• Oak Hill Cemetery in Vermont and Phoenix Cemetery Tioga County, Pennsylvania
• American Autumn (a 2014 photo essay)
• American Autumn 2020
• 2015 York Fair: My favorite photos
• Psychogeography, snickelways of Miami, Arizona: August 2021
• Alpine Road Cemetery (Bender Burial Ground) in York County, Pennsylvania
• Snapshots from a foggy morning at Prospect Hill Cemetery
• Return to Prospect Hill Cemetery
• Mount Zion Lutheran Church cemetery
• Manipulated photos of a graveyard at dusk
• Dilapidated structures of Southern Jersey
• The abandoned Great Barrington Fairgrounds (Massachusetts)
• Creepy & dilapidated structures of the eastern United States, Part 1
• Creepy & dilapidated structures of the eastern United States, Part 2
• Old house in Coudersport, Pennsylvania
• Artsy-fartsy photos from a night on the town with real artists
• Instagram snapshots of Ruins Park in Glen Rock, Pa.
• Atomic Warehouse photo gallery
• Timeline Arcade photo gallery