The Grafton Monster: a headless white figure on Riverside Drive (1964)

Grafton sits on the Tygart Valley River in Taylor County, West Virginia. On June 11, 1964, the Grafton Sentinel ran a UPI wire story about a monster hunt in Sister Lakes, Michigan. Five days later, Grafton had a monster of its own.

Tuesday, June 16, 1964. A little after 11:00 p.m. Robert "Bob" Cockrell, a young reporter for the Sentinel, was driving home from work along Riverside Drive, now Yates Avenue, on the west bank of the river.

His headlights caught something on "a cleared off section of grass" on the river side of the road. A "huge white obstruction." It stood "between seven and nine feet tall" and "four feet wide." It had a "seal like skin or covering." It had "no discernable head." One retelling says he swerved and sped home.

Cockrell came back shortly afterward with two friends, named by one source as Jerry Morse and Jim Mouser. The figure was gone. There were "no tracks," only grass "mashed down" where it had stood. Then came a "low whistling sound" that "appeared to follow" them along the road. Author Rosemary Ellen Guiley later wrote: "It was as though the monster was there and then instantly not there, without ever leaving the area."

Word spread. In a letter to the writer Gray Barker, Cockrell said more than 100 teenagers "took up the search" and "over twenty" claimed glimpses. Searchers patrolled Riverside Drive with flashlights, bats and crowbars. Some said it had been seen at the city stone quarry. One teenager suggested it "might be an escaped Polar bear."

On June 18 the Sentinel reported on "Teen-Age Monster Hunting Parties." Authorities, it said, took "no official notice." A day later the paper called the creature "the personification of the active imaginations of a number of teenagers." A "routine check" pointed to a person pushing a "handcart loaded high with boxes."

Barker, the Clarksburg writer later known for popularising Mothman, suggested an extraterrestrial lab animal or probe. He and Cockrell began an article for UFO Magazine that was never finished.

In April 2014 the series Mountain Monsters aired an episode on the case. Cockrell answered with "Requiem for a Monster," a letter in the Mountain Statesman. He named the figure as Tommy Peters, a local man who rode an unlit bicycle around town at all hours with boxes piled high. "The fact is there is no Grafton Monster and there never was a Grafton Monster," he wrote. In Skeptical Inquirer in 2024, Daniel A. Reed noted the mismatch between the handcart and the bicycle, and concluded that "the monster never existed."

The legend did not need the monster. It appears in the video game Fallout 76. A town sign went up in 2018, was stolen by a WVU student, and was recovered. In June 2024, for the 60th anniversary, Grafton opened the Grafton Monster Museum and held its first Grafton Monster Festival. There was a whistling contest.