Executive producer Barry Conrad (above, right) and his producer partner Lisa McIntosh (above, left) have been working on their documentary project about the Flatwoods Monster, Kelly Creatures, and Mothman for over five years. Their production company has completed several documentaries that have been broadcast on the Biography, A&E, Discovery, Sci-Fi and TLC channels.
When the crew visited me in Portland, Maine, on April 19, 2002, they were here to interview and tape me about Mothman, my book on the topic, and the then just-released Richard Gere The Mothman Prophecies movie. They did this, intriguingly, in a live production event in front of my University of Southern Maine documentary film class. They were very professional, and it served as an educational situation on many levels.
Barry Conrad has kept in touch, down through the years, to give me news on the progress of their project. Unfortunately, Barry’s update today was shocking:
I regret to inform you that Lisa McIntosh, my girlfiend & associate producer of the documentary “Mothman: Man, Myth or Monster?”, as part of my Monsters of the UFO project, died of a rare cancer called multiple myeloma on July 25, 2006. Strangely enough, she began having fainting spells while in Point Pleasant during our visit in September 2004. She was only 42 years old. Doctors said it was a textbook case, extremely unusual that this type of cancer would affect someone as young as she was. Only 1 out of approximately 200,000 people contract this disease. She will be greatly missed.
Lisa McIntosh was involved with the field production of the project (as illustrated above in the Point Pleasant newspaper), setting up interviews with many eyewitnesses, connected with these cases, including Lonnie Lankford & Elmer Sutton, Jr. (Kelly) and Kathleen May, Gary Harris, others (Flatwoods). The Mothman segment contains several of the original people that encountered the creature in 1966, during the McIntosh-produced filmmaking in September 2004.
The mystery death of people associated with Mothman films and investigations is a topic that I have documented for some time, including authoring an article about it and maintaining the list online. The August 2004 issue of Fortean Times went on sale in London, with distribution to the USA, late in July. It contained the first publication of the article “The Mothman Death Curse.”
July has not been a kind month for those who have experienced these strangely Mothman-related deaths. After the publication of my article, on July 30, 2004, Jennifer Barrett-Pellington, 42, wife of The Mothman Prophecies director Mark Pellington, died after a never-identified “brief illness,” in Los Angeles. She was involved in costume design, and received a “thank you” credit on The Mothman Prophecies. On July 16, 2005, Mark Chorvinsky, 51, editor of Strange Magazine of Rockville, Maryland , died after his relatively quiet battle with cancer. Three investigations of Chorvinsky’s overlapped with Mothman mysteries – his interest in the missing Thunderbird photograph, his debunking of the Owlman reports of Tony “Doc” Shiels, and his interviews with people who sighted what Chorvinsky called the “Potomac Mothman.”
Now comes word of the death of this young 42-year-old producer, Lisa McIntosh dying this summer. Our thoughts and sympathy to Barry Conrad, and Ms. McIntosh’s family.
Richard Gere and Laura Linney appear in a scene from The Mothman Prophecies.
I’ll try to answer various questions in this one comment response:
No, I am not afraid of the Mothman Curse touching me. I have always gone in the direction of mysteries, not away from them. Why would I change my approach now?
I’m not sure what the basis of the “coincidences” of the deaths are. I started observing them, felt they outnumbered the relative number often associated with the so-called “Poltergeist movie curse” (which only numbers four), and decided someone should document them for Mothman. So I did. I was struck by how many presented themselves, without me having to dig too deeply at all.
Several, as you can see by looking at the list linked in the posting, are of people related to the Mothman witnesses, researchers, and filmmakers. This seems to be the case, somewhat, for the McIntosh and Pellington deaths.
Why the Flatwoods Monster image from the 1950s? If you read the news above closely, you will see that Ms. McIntosh was involved with that part of the documentary too. It is a compelling image.
Oh yes…
“Do you suppose that’s why these articles get so few comments, relatively speaking?”
People are afraid to talk about death. I never have been.
Globally, I think death can be a good measure of other mysteries and some insights on people’s deaths often have me pondering other avenues of thought.
Individually, death is a milestone. It serves as a moment to pause and appreciate the life of someone that has had an impact, one way or the other.
When deaths crosses the path of or collides with cryptozoology, I often want to remember and/or wish to celebrate the person who has influenced the science and passed away. People are too soon forgotten, unless they are a celebrity and I thinking speaking of someone at their death, no matter whom they were, honors them.
Of course, I also have a special interest in psychology and death, so for me the overlaps here are natural and not unusal ones.
For others, who more strictly define cryptozoology, they are surprised by my interest in this subject, and may find that I would even talk about this on Cryptomundo troublesome.
However, I think the tent is better if it is bigger, so as to allow all kinds of ideas inside. The more creative the possibilities, the more possible that some overlooked answers will be revealed.
Sadly, after a difficult fight with myelodysplasia, Carl Sagan died of pneumonia at the young age of 62 on December 20, 1996, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington.
His last book published before his death is his personalized skeptical attack against pseudoscience, including swings at the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. (I am not sure if he discusses Mothman or any Keelian ideas in that book.)
The name of the book is Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Some have written that this volume is Sagan’s epitaph.
I make no association between any certain type of death, terminal illness, or disease, and the so-called “Mothman Death Curse.”