Town Hopes Believers Will Follow ‘Mothman’

Moviegoers who have seen the new psychic thriller “The Mothman Prophecies” can now order the Mothman Pizza.

They can munch on the cherry tomato eyes, the green pepper feet and mushroom wings while reading a new book on the legend during a visit to the West Virginia town where it all began.

In fact, with the film, starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney, making a strong early box office showing, townspeople are hoping for a tourist rush to this hamlet of 5,000 about 40 miles northwest of Charleston, the state capital.

“Dozens of people have already been here,” said Donnie Sergent, a local music store owner who is marketing his own book “Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend” for $18.95, plus a companion CD-ROM on his own Web site at www.mothmanlives.com. The site, similar to the movie’s official Web site at www.themothmanlives.com, features a home page beckoning browsers to “Enter Mothman Territory ... if you dare.”

At Village Pizza, the Mothman special is basically whatever kind of pie you want.

“We’ll put the wings and eyes on,” said Susie Woodall, the pizza chef in charge of the monstrous creation. “It’s pretty good. You’ve got to like mushrooms and green peppers.”

The film tells the story of a Washington Post reporter played by Gere, who is inexplicably drawn hundreds of miles out of his way to Point Pleasant, a dying town on the Ohio River, where he encounters a creature with moth-like wings whose appearance is the precursor of death and disaster.

The town owes its prominence in the film to a series of reported sightings that began in 1966 among people who believed they saw anything from a “giant butterfly” to a “brown human being” flying out of the trees. Legend holds that the sightings were a harbinger of disaster that occurred a year later when the town’s Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46 people.

Skeptics in Point Pleasant contend that the sightings were nothing more than a sandhill crane.

Whatever the case, even skeptics can be found hawking something based on the legend.

Austin herself is selling little gray Mothman dolls with red eyes and wings, and Mothman tree ornaments from her office and her Web site, at www.moth-man.com.

Rush Finley, owner of the Lowe Motor Inn, wants even more people to come to town. He suggests turning an empty storefront across from his hotel into a Mothman museum. He also doesn’t mind if those who visit town are a little odd. “We’re redneck enough to handle any kind of people that come,” Finley says.