Original subtitles

♪ ♪

Sam: This is his car.

Sam: That's our boy.

Sam: Hey man!

Sam: Well, that happened.

You might be wondering how I ended up here.

I know I am.

I was just planning to get on a plane and knock back a

Gin and tonic or a couple of sambucas,

And after a nice turbulence-free flight we're in west virginia.

I'll take a whimsical look at the curse of a mythical winged

Creature called the mothman.

I was gonna, you know, maybe stake out a haunted house,

Take a boat ride, do a rock skipping contest.

I'm pretty good at skipping rocks.

But then, just like senior prom,

Nothing goes quite as you hoped.

Crew: Our tires got slashed?

Sam: Yeah.

Dan: Chief cornstalk said, "may the stain of our blood

Curse your lands and your industry."

Peggy: The mothman appeared.

Dorsel: And boom! The ubb mine blew up.

♪ ♪

Sam: We are down in the holler now.

Here's a quick story about point pleasant, west virginia,

A town with a terrific name.

So, it's November 1966, and a couple of guys are digging

A grave at the local cemetery.

Don't worry, it's their job.

When suddenly they see a large winged creature with

Red eyes hovering over them.

Three days later, some teenagers are playing

Grab (bleep) at the local abandoned tnt storage facility,

You know, where we all had our first kiss,

And they see this humanoid winged creature,

But this time it follows their car going 100 miles an hour.

Next thing you know it's taken another guy's dog,

And then here's where the story gets really weird.

People all over town started reporting these strangers in

Suits and a waitress in a diner says they ordered food

But didn't know how to use their hands to pick up their utensils.

No, seriously, she said that.

And then, in December of '67, people said they saw the

Mothman circling a bridge.

Seconds later, the unthinkable happens.

Peggy: It was December 15th, a Friday.

It was really gray and overcast that day.

It was cold.

Sam: Right.

Peggy hubert was 21 years old and driving her brand-new

Red convertible the day the curse of the mothman really took off.

Peggy: Traffic was extremely heavy,

And two semis went by, and they wouldn't give me

A break in traffic.

Sam: Were they kind of giving you, like, a little bit of a hard time?

Peggy: Yeah.

I couldn't make the green light,

So I stopped, and I had reached down to check the

Knobs on the radio and heard this awful noise.

And when I looked up, the bridge was falling.

It just looked like tinkertoys.

The cars fell and the steel beams fell on top of the cars.

Sam: Do you know how many people died on that bridge?

Peggy: I believe there was 46.

Sam: 46 dead? Peggy: Mhm.

Sam: I mean, if those guys had let you in,

You know, you must think about that sometime.

Peggy: Yeah, I would have been right between them on the bridge.

That would have changed my whole life.

Sam: It was the deadliest bridge collapse in american history.

And some locals say it was caused by the ultimate

Harbinger of doom.

Peggy: They said that he appeared before the bridge fell,

And it got labeled the mothman.

It's like a legend, and the story was that,

Wherever he was, that there was going to be a disaster.

The following year the point pleasant courthouse

Had an explosion.

They blamed the mothman for that, too.

Sam: Do you believe it?

Peggy: I think there's reason behind it,

It just didn't happen to happen.

Sam: So, if you see the mothman on your bridge,

Peggy: Don't cross the bridge. Sam: Don't cross the bridge.

That's good advice.

Now here's the thing, I'm not here to rain on your parade

About the mothman or any other fusion of human and

Nocturnal insect of the order lepidoptera,

But this part of west virginia has seen an awful lot of

Tragedies since the curse of the mothman began:

Rivers of black sludge wiping out entire towns,

Mines collapsing, apocalyptic factory explosions?

Is it all caused by the mothman?

This may be not the most obvious first culprit that

Comes to mind, but I'm not carrying a gavel and, hopefully,

Neither are you, so instead of getting all judgey,

Just take my hand and let's jump down this rabbit hole together.

Faye: This is the statue here.

Have y'all seen it?

Sam: There it is, what do you think?

Is that what it looked like?

Faye: No, that's not what it looked like.

It was not musclebound like that,

Nor the wings weren't like that.

Sam: This is faye leport.

In the fall of '67, she's one of the many people in

Point pleasant who say they say the mothman.

How old were you at the time?

Faye: I was about probably 12, 13 and about

Where that green sign is.

Sam: Alright.

Faye: That's when my brother noticed something was beside my window.

Sam: What was it?

Faye: It was between a human and a bird put together,

And the eyes it had, they were really big and red.

You could just see it plain as day,

It was just right there.

Sam: Were you scared? Faye: Yes.

Sam: So, what happened? What'd you guys do?

Faye: My brother starts speeding up and this was

The tnt area, where they made the weapons for the war.

So he jerked up in here.

He slammed on the brakes, and then it jumped right on

The hood here, and it just turnt sideways and it took off

And opened up the big bird-like wings that was big enough to

Carry it up, up in the air like that,

And it just went off into the night.

But my brother wanted to go back out there,

So the next day we come back down here and

There was the military already there.

Sam: Really? Faye: Yeah.

Sam: Wow!

It's not just faye and her brother,

Other people in town say they saw the military swarm

The mothman's lair.

Faye: There is a bunker up here.

People say the mothman lives inside of.

But I've never been in to it.

Sam: So this is mothman's lair?

Faye: Yeah.

Sam: You want to come look, faye?

You coming in with us?

Faye: No, I'll leave that all up to y'all.

Sam: Alright, alright.

Faye: Don't bring him back.

Sam: Maybe I'm gonna walk in there and find visual proof of

The mysterious bird-man and make tv history, fame at last!

Or maybe, maybe more like geraldo storming al capone's

Vault utter national permanent disgrace,

A mustachioed laughingstock for eternity.

If only I could swing the mustache.

This is it.

This is the mothman's lair.

Advertise your product or brand here contact www.OpenSubtitles.org today

Hello! Mr. Mothman?

Sam: Deep in the mountains of west virginia,

The people of point pleasant pinpointed this particular

Place as the palace of the pothman.

Sorry, the alliteration, just I couldn't stop it.

As the palace of the mothman, a flying humanoid creature

With a terrible curse.

If you see him, something awful is gonna happen.

Do I knock?

(door screeching)

Hello? Mr mothman?

So, this is it, the mothman's lair.

Wow!

This is a tnt storage facility,

And this whole area is dotted with these storage bunkers.

There was 30 or 40 of them.

This whole facility was producing tnt all through

World war ii, and right at 1945 as the war ended,

They shut this place down.

In 1983, this was declared an epa superfund site.

So, there's no mothman here, but there is chemical poisoning.

From a sudden bridge collapse that killed 46 people to the

Military allegedly swarming a remote tnt bunker in the woods,

There's no doubt that strange events have gone down

In point pleasant, but is a supernatural monster really to blame?

Let's dig deeper into some of the other mysterious disasters

From this area.

The hills in this part of west virginia are a honeycomb

Of coal mines.

It's a dangerous industry, one that's no

Stranger to catastrophe.

Toni: I had a real good friend got killed.

You know, sometimes you're just within seconds of being a fatality.

Sam: Wow!

Sam: Killed him?

Sam: Ugh!

Sam: What happened there?

Sam: There was an explosion?

Sam: The upper big branch, or ubb, mine exploded one

Afternoon in April of 2010,

Deep in the heart of west virginia's coal country.

It was the deadliest mining disaster in

The us in more than 35 years.

Well, it seems like it's a super dangerous job.

Dorsel: That is a fact.

Toni: Coal mining is dangerous but still,

You know, I hate to say this, but most of the fatalities are

Here in west virginia.

Sam: No (bleep).

Toni: It makes you wonder. Sam: Right.

Toni: Knock on wood.

Sam: West virginia often leads the nation in annual

Coal mining fatalities, and that's a contest nobody wants to win.

But the truth is, the majority of the fatalities inside the

Coal mines of west virginia happened long before the

Mothman was even a whisper.

So, could there be something else going on here,

Something more ancient?

Could it be that the rabbit hole goes deeper than we thought?

Now, faye mentioned something to me yesterday in the car,

And I had originally dismissed it as witty banter.

Sam: Wow!

Sam: So, who exactly is this chief cornstalk,

And could the legend of the mothman be a distraction

From another curse?

Something much older, something written in blood

From our savage colonial history.

Well, for those of you in the back seat,

Buckle up, I've got a theory.

I'm not saying it's brilliant, but I'm also not saying

It's not brilliant.

Sam: I came to west virginia to look into the curse

Of the mothman, a winged harbinger of doom

Who first appeared in 1966.

But there's a laundry list of tragic events going down here,

Long before the mothman even appeared.

And now I'm hearing about a lesser known but much older curse,

That some say is the origin of west virginia's tragic history.

Sam: Wow!

Sam: Okay, chief cornstalk and a deathbed curse

Hundreds of years before the mothman?

I'm listening!

Dan: In the 18th century, the british governor met this

Shawnee chief called cornstalk.

He asked cornstalk for 100,000 acres of indian land,

And cornstalk told him, "I can't give you what I don't own."

The governor told him, "if you don't give me the land,

I will come up here and attack your towns."

Sam: Because the shawnee refused this perfectly

Reasonable offer to just give their land to the british like

God intended, the governor and the colonists attacked.

They launched a nasty, six year struggle,

Culminating in the bloody battle of point pleasant at

The confluence of the kanawha and the ohio rivers,

The very spot where the silver bridge would collapse

Nearly 200 years later.

The colonists captured acres of land and

Slaughtered hundreds of shawnee.

Three years later, chief cornstalk was taken hostage,

And soon met his final fate.

Dan: Cornstalk was said to have raised up one arm, and said,

"I have never warred with you save to protect my wigwams

And my lands, and I have been murdered.

For this I call on the great spirit to blight your

People and your industry and your lands.

May the stain of our blood curse anything you try to do."

It was the last thing he said.

Sam: That's insane, wow!

Dan: The european community was scared to death of that.

Sam: Right.

Although there's no written record,

Some have interpreted cornstalk's final words as a curse,

A decree that all who would inhabit this land were doomed,

And if you ask people around here,

They may be inclined to agree.

Dan: I have to say, all kinds of disappointments

Has happened here.

This is a old industrial area and there's tons of things

That went wrong.

Silver bridge was just one of the things they blamed on the curse.

Sam: Interesting.

The collapse of the silver bridge might have more

Of a connection to chief cornstalk's curse,

Blighting the people and industry,

Than it does to any 8 foot tall half man, half moth.

Well, at least there's a real grievance, right?

I need to keep digging.

Kerry: This is it!

Sam: You were how old?

Kerry: Nine months old. Sam: Nine months.

Kerry: My mother and brother heard a truck coming,

And my brother came out and he was seeing this,

Just like a tsunami.

It was about 20 foot of black water that was just like

Rushing through the valley.

Sam: Wow!

Kerry: So, he went back in and he told my mother,

You know, "run for the hills!"

So, they grabbed me as fast as they could and ran,

And the water had gotten to their ankles,

So they couldn't pick their feet up anymore because it's,

It's a sludge.

So, the only thing that they knew to do was to grab one arm

And one leg, count to three and throw me as far as they could.

Sam: And that's what they did, they just threw

You as far as they could?

Kerry: Yeah.

And after they threw me, both of them drowned.

Sam: Ugh!

Thanks to his mother's heroism,

Kerry survived.

He was one of the lucky few.

Kerry: It was totally devastating because,

In this area, there's about 5,000 people and

4,000 left homeless, not to mention that it was 125 that were killed.

These were all coal camp houses.

Sam: Okay.

Kerry: Coal industry kind of built them where they owned the place.

Sam: They owned everything, right?

Kerry: Yeah.

And when they clean the coal, they have to put the

Waste behind a dam.

Sam: Mhm, right.

Kerry: And, of course, they're all made of dirt.

Sam: Right. Kerry: But the rain came.

And, of course, they all broke.

Sam: Wow!

Kerry: Everyone in the community kind of knew that

Those dirt dams weren't stable,

But they're very trusting.

Everyone is very loyal.

Coal is a good job, and you know,

You put faith in your employers.

Sam: Right.

What was the coal company's excuse?

Kerry: To get out of it, they said that, you know,

It rained so hard that that's an act of god,

So it was an act of god that caused the damage.

And it's insulting just to think that all the people

Here are that stupid.

Look, anybody can see through that.

Sam: Right.

Just trying to weasel their way out of it.

So, is this just another isolated tragedy,

Or does the data support a larger pattern of

West virginia's industry leading to disaster?

There's an agency that has the answers.

The department of environmental protection in

This state has to have a responsibility to communicate

With the public and to take calls with the press.

So that's exactly what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna make some phone calls,

Get in touch with someone at the department of environmental protection,

And set up a meeting so I can ask a high level government official

About a 240 year old shawnee curse

And maybe hit him hard with some follow-ups

About the mothman because, yeah,

That's what I do now.

Sam: I came to west virginia to look into the curse

Of the mothman, but in just a few days the situation on the

Ground has radically changed.

Dan: Cornstalk said, "I call on the great spirit to blight

Your people and your industry and your lands".

Toni: Sometimes you're within seconds of being a fatality.

Sam: Wow!

So, we have claims of a 240 year old native american

Curse blighting the land and its industry.

Coincidentally, we have bridge collapses,

Failed dams and coal mine disasters all in the same area.

So my question is, is there an actual pattern?

Is there a statistical connection between

West virginian industry and calamity?

The key to answering that question is austin caperton,

The head of the state's department of environmental protection

And, believe it or not, he's agreed to speak to me.

It's not every day you get a meeting with one of the most

Powerful people in the state and,

As my sixth-grade teacher, miss zenaski used to say,

"luck happens when preparation meets opportunity."

Because I'm, looking to get lucky,

I'm doing my homework before I sit down with austin in a

Couple of days.

♪ ♪

But you come from a coal background, right?

Dustin: Yeah, yeah.

So, I grew up with coal miners on both sides of

My family for generations, right to my own father.

Sam: Dustin white, from the ohio valley environmental coalition,

Has been one of the loudest voices policing the

Practices of big business here in west virginia.

But it turns out loud voices aren't necessarily welcome.

Dustin: We've had folks who have had their pets poisoned,

Homes shot at, tires slashed.

My life has been threatened.

Sam: Really?

Dustin: That comes with the territory.

You know, growing up, I was very pro-coal,

But I really had my eyes opened when I took a fly-over.

I knew strip mining existed, but when I saw it from the air

It just blew my mind, because it was literally like every other

Mountain had just been completely devastated.

Sam: Strip mining, also called mountaintop removal,

It took off in west virginia in the '90s.

It turns out sending a bunch of people into caves to remove

Coal by hand is expensive, so the coal companies

Got a brilliant idea.

Dustin: They move onto a site, they bulldoze all the trees.

They bring in these drill rigs,

Pack the holes with ammonium nitrate,

Which is also toxic, and just blow up the mountain.

Sam: It's got to go somewhere, right?

Dustin: Exactly.

So, of course, now all the stuff is toxic,

It goes into the valley and now creates just a channel

For run-off of toxic water.

At last count, we had over 300 streams in west virginia

That have been biologically impaired because of the

Fossil fuel industries.

Sam: You know, the longer we spend here and the more we learn,

Whether the curse is real or not,

The industries are the blight, and the things that are

Destroying the environment are the things that,

You know, the whole state is geared around.

Sam: Although not exactly scientific,

In this part of west virginia there certainly does seem to

Be a pattern of catastrophic events and

Environmental turmoil at the hands of industry.

And whether or not there's any connection to cornstalk's curse,

His words still ring eerily true.

Sam: A whistleblower who used to work at one of the

Major coal companies has agreed to give me the lowdown on what

Really goes on behind the scenes.

So we're not gonna film his face or use his name.

I'll just call him "bobby."

Sam: Right.

Crew: Yeah, yeah, let's get you back.

Sam: Bobby's clearly on edge, and I've made enough people

Edgy in my life to know when it's time to just call it a day.

Hopefully, he'll be willing to talk to us more in a couple of days,

After our meeting with austin caperton.

(phone ringing)

Crew: Hey? What's going on?

We just wrapped up.

Yeah, no, it went well.

Yeah, okay.

Alright um, well sam's not gonna be stoked.

Yeah, I'll break the news, I'll let him know. Bye.

Um so, I just got off the phone with patrick.

Sam: Yeah. Crew: Caperton bailed.

I wonder why he bailed.

Sam: Two short sentences is all it takes to throw a major

Wrench into our gears.

Caperton was my seat at the table.

A meeting with him gave me access to the highest levels

Of state government.

I mean, I was hoping he would be the gatekeeper to precious

Data and reveal what is actually going on with all the

Disasters here in west virginia.

So, I just can't take no for an answer.

At least not in writing.

Sam: Good morning, mr. Caperton,

This is sam sheridan, and I was just gonna try one more

Time to see if we could have a conversation and you know,

I'd love to hear your take on things.

Give me a call back on this number if you get this message

And have any interest, thanks.

And that's a beautiful friendship started.

Although I'm clearly not above begging,

I can tell when I'm beating a dead horse.

So, we got to move on, to one more meeting that I hope will

Explain why there seems to be so many strange disasters here

In west virginia.

Crew: Let's do it, get on the road.

Sam: Alright.

♪ ♪

Crew: The (bleep)? Sam: What happened?

Crew: Look at this!

Sam: Oh, (bleep) our tires got slashed?

Crew: Yeah.

Sam: (bleep).

Crew: What the (bleep)?

Sam: What happened?

Crew: Look at this!

Sam: Oh, (bleep) our tires got slashed?

(bleep).

Could be a coincidence, or it could be that word got out

That a film crew was poking around asking questions that

People just don't like.

Crew: That's not accidental. Sam: That's not accidental.

Now it's getting creepy.

So, to review, our whistleblower gets skittish

On the mountaintop, and then a high-ranking

Government official sets a meeting and then cancels it.

And now the air is let out of our tire.

I have no idea what's going on and I, you know,

I'm not saying austin caperton snuck into our

Hotel parking lot during breakfast and slashed tires,

But I do feel a little unwelcome.

I am a little concerned now.

It's getting weird.

I'll probably never know why our tires got slashed,

But we're here to figure out if a curse is connected to all

The disaster here in west virginia,

And that's what we'll continue to do,

With a fresh rental car.

Driving through the appalachians,

You're just really hit by the two contrasting

Faces of west virginia.

One minute, god's green earth, right out of a postcard,

Beautiful mountains covered in happy little trees,

Just bob ross everywhere.

And then you turn a corner and it's chemical factories and

Coal plants billowing particulate and smoke

Of an unknown origin.

It kind of looks like tim burton's take on

The industrial revolution.

(carnival music playing)

And, whether it's tnt chemicals left behind inside

The mothman's lair, or mine explosions or a flood of

Black sludge that wipes out an entire town,

This is a place that has seen a lot of human tragedy.

You can bundle it up under the blanket of a curse,

But you can't deny that there is something at work here,

Some relationship between west virginian industry and a

Seemingly endless cycle of calamity.

And since austin caperton won't be providing any answers,

I'm turning to a trusted old buddy, science.

Matt: So what we do in this lab is we build stuff and we

Break it to figure out how to make it stronger.

Sam: What a cool job, man.

No disaster is woven into the local folklore of

West virginia quite like the collapse of the silver bridge.

Peggy: I think there's a reason behind it.

It just didn't happen to happen.

They said that the mothman appeared before the bridge fell.

It's like a legend.

Sam: Although I'm fairly certain a flying cryptid

Didn't case this disaster, the silver bridge did collapse at

The exact spot where the battle of point pleasant was fought,

And some say that was the cause of

Chief cornstalk's dying curse.

Sam: So, what does science have to say about

That peculiar coincidence?

Matt: This is a model of the silver bridge.

Sam: Cool!

Matt: So, the silver bridge was similar to a suspension bridge,

Except that the suspension cables were actually eye bars.

Sam: So, tell me exactly how the silver bridge failed.

What happened?

Matt: There was a flaw, it was actually located at the end of

The eye bar.

That flaw was extremely small and actually,

Wasn't visible because it was hidden under the cap of the pin.

And then this case, a very small flaw initiated a fracture.

Sam: Can you show me what that would look like?

Matt: Yeah.

Okay, so we're gonna apply a tension load,

Meaning we're gonna pull on this.

Sam: What's this "kip"?

What is that?

Matt: So, a kip is 1,000 pounds,

So we're at .21 thousand pounds,

Or in other words, 22 pounds.

It's incrementally adding load.

This no longer is contributing at all.

All the force that was in this component is now dumped

Into this one.

Sam: Right.

Matt: In the case of the silver bridge,

This happened so fast.

The first one failed and, immediately.

Sam: Let's do it on our model.

Matt: Okay.

Sam: And here's where we smash stuff in the name of science.

Matt: So we're gonna simulate the fracture of the eye bar by

Cutting one of the yellow strings.

When one eye bar failed, there just wasn't enough capacity in

The rest of the system to resist all of the weight of

The structure and, therefore, the entire bridge collapsed.

Sam: So, the silver bridge collapses.

What's the way this could have been prevented?

Matt: The original designs for this bridge called for a

Suspension cable, but they decided to opt for a less

Redundant system with the eye bar chains,

Which allowed them to dramatically reduce the cost,

But it also dramatically reduced the redundancy in the system.

Sam: For those of you at home who never took an

Interest in civil engineering, let me spell it out for you.

Redundancy equals safety.

So, if they hadn't done this with the lowest bidder,

There's a possibility that that failure would have happened,

But they would have had enough redundancy that the

Bridge wouldn't have collapsed.

Matt: That's right.

Sam: For decades, west virginians have blamed

An 8 foot tall winged creature or a 240 year old shawnee curse

For the pattern of death and destruction.

But it turns out the truth may be a lot scarier.

I do wonder, you know, how much of the local disasters

Can be thrown on the doorstep of general economic pressures

And lax government regulations.

If I was a government official that was part of the silver bridge fiasco,

I'd be all too happy to have the public focus

On the mothman or cornstalk's curse.

The supernatural is a way easier pill to swallow than

What might be the reality.

I mean, who wants to believe that their own government is

Putting their lives at risk for a couple extra bucks?

But, putting profits above people is by

No means unique to west virginia.

Hell, that's capitalism, which is as american as apple pie.

So, is there something special about this area that makes it

Susceptible to the perils of big business?

Thanks again so much for taking the time.

Ken: Sure.

Sam: I really appreciate it.

I don't always wear a linen sports coat,

But when I do, I look like a rugged james bond.

But you got to dress the part when you meet with a macarthur fellow,

Which is the greatest award for reporting there is.

Ken: West virginia and its coal industry helped build

This country and helped win two world wars.

We're not a poor state.

West virginia is a really rich state,

It's just that the wealth of it isn't shared among the

People who took that wealth out of the ground.

Sam: Right.

Ken ward is a reporter who spent the last 28 years going

Down the exact same rabbit hole we find ourselves in now.

How does one state get locked in a particularly bad cycle of

Capitalism and calamity?

Ken: You have, like, the department of environmental protection,

That's supposed to protect people and

The environment from the damages that the coal industry can do,

And you have a revolving door there of people who work in

The industry and then take their turn running the agency,

And then go back out working for the industry.

Sam: Which seems like a sort of shameless,

You know, conflict of interest.

Ken: Sure.

And those conflicts are so out in the open.

They don't hide them.

They're just so much more brazen.

I think people are increasingly getting fed up

With the way things are but, you know,

Power doesn't give up power easily.

Sam: Nobody gives up power, you have to take it.

Ken: That's right.

Sam: In every state in the nation,

There's supposed to be a system in place to provide oversight,

That's government regulations.

But, according to ken, west virginian business is

Operating particularly unchecked,

So why aren't more people taking notice?

Well, maybe they're too distracted by an 8 foot tall,

Stainless steel monument.

So maybe we just need a stronger visual aid.

Luckily, our coal company whistle-blower has agreed to

Help us try and get footage of illegal activity by one of the

Mountaintop removal companies.

I'm hoping that video proof of business run rampant in

West virginia will help us get the attention of state officials,

Like austin caperton.

This is it here, and this is his car.

Sam: That's our boy.

Sam: Hey, man.

Sam: I know.

Sam: And this is his car.

Sam: That's our boy.

Sam: Hey, man!

Sam: I know.

Hey, man! Did something go wrong?

Sam: Man.

There's nothing we can do to help.

Sam: No, no, we'll leave!

Sam: We'll leave, we'll leave, we'll leave, we'll leave.

Alright, we're leaving.

Sam: Well, that was short and sweet.

Sam: Short.

You know, we had our tires slashed this morning.

You know, you're starting to definitely feel not wanted.

That's not a great feeling.

Brett: We were not surprised that austin caperton didn't

Want to talk to us.

Sam: Yeah.

Brett: And dropped out.

But I was not expecting the guy who is supposed to be the

State's biggest watchdog.

Sam: This is a guy that you thought was bulletproof, right?

Like, this is a guy that's like a professional pot-stirrer.

Brett: Somebody got to him. Sam: Something happened.

It's bananas.

Brett: Yeah.

Sam: When I was a kid, there was another kid down the

Street from me who once held me at gunpoint with his

Super soaker full of pee-pee.

Those were his words, not mine.

I didn't really expect to relive that moment when we

Came to west virginia, getting into the curse

Of mothman and chief cornstalk.

Sometimes, when people are afraid to talk,

That's where the gold lies and, luckily,

I was able to find a few brave voices who dared to

Penetrate that silence.

I've tracked down a woman named susie worley-jenkins,

And she lives in a tiny town called minden and,

Unlike everyone else we've tried to talk to,

She and her doctor want their story told.

When did you become aware of, you know,

What was going on here?

Susie: About 38 years ago, because there was, like,

2,000 people lived here in this area and there's

460 some people that we're aware of that died with cancer.

Sam: Wow! Susie: Yeah.

Ayne: My dad was a hematologist/oncologist,

And his specialty was cancer, and a lot of the patients that

Were coming in were coal miners and he noticed that they all

Came from minden, and so he was wondering if

Something was in the environment affecting these people.

Sam: Right.

Ayne: So, he started looking into the pcbs.

Sam: What's a pcb?

Ayne: It's an organic compound that comes in this jelly-like substance.

It looks like oil.

They use it in mining equipment a lot.

They put it in transformers or equipment to transfer heat.

Susie: My husband worked fixing transformers for all

These coal mines and stuff.

He remembers all the stuff in those transformers,

And it had all of that pcbs in it and oils and stuff.

Ayne: By 1979 or so, they realized that pcbs as cancer causing.

Sam: Okay.

Ayne: So by the early '80s, they stopped letting companies use it.

So what happened back then is they put all these

Transformers or equipment in drums and buried the drums in the soil,

Or they just took the stuff themselves and buried them.

Sam: But they're burying them, just like in these barrels or

Even loose, so they're leaking?

Ayne: Yes.

Susie: They used to take all the pcbs and just dump it into

The mud wherever.

Sam: Just dump it?

Susie: And all of these different waterways we have

Underground was catching all that.

Ayne: And that is what our problem is,

Everyone that lives there has been kind of soaking and

Bathing in you know, carcinogenic matter.

Susie: We lost our parents, brothers, you know, and

My neighbors over here died with brain tumors.

Skin cancer, breast cancer, and kids, you know,

That was dying with leukemia, brain tumors.

My mom died with small cell lung cancer,

And my husband's had cancer, I've had cancer six times.

Sam: Oh my god!

Ayne: Right now, the main goal and the only goal is the

Residents want to move, and that's.

Sam: Because they just feel like they're being poisoned.

Ayne: Correct.

Toni: There's 250 people left out of about 2,000.

Sam: 2,000.

Susie: There's 199 houses left.

They don't have any equity, nothing in their homes,

Because they're worth nothing.

Sam: Yeah.

I mean, who's gonna buy anything down in a toxic area?

Susie: Exactly. Sam: Is there any hope?

Do you think anything's gonna happen,

Or is it just gonna keep getting worse?

Susie: I think it's gonna get worse if we don't get some help.

Sam: Do you expect any action?

Ayne: Truthfully, no. Susie: They don't care.

Sam: Right.

They're just waiting for it to go away.

Susie: Exactly.

Sam: The good news for the people of minden is that,

After 30 years of lobbying, the town has finally been

Added to the epa's list for further examination,

Which is great, because it's the first step toward actually

Getting their town relocated off this toxic waste dump.

The bad news?

There are 1,334 sites that join them on the list.

There is a blight on the land and the people of west virginia,

And it's not a winged creature or

The dying words of a native american chief.

Clearly, we've stumbled upon something much more tangible

Than the supernatural in the hills and hollers of west virginia.

And it seems to me that the perpetuation of a curse may

Just be a ploy to keep people from noticing that

Big business is ruining the land and destroying the

People in the name of profit.

The truth is, west virginia is cursed,

By the resources that lie beneath it,

And that's the real tragedy.

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