Behold the Cryptid Art map!

The inspiration for my Cryptid Art map was growing up hearing tales of the Mothman and the Braxton County Monster (also called the Flatwoods Monster or Braxxie to her friends). The Mothman has risen in fame in the last decade, and yet most people I talk to who know the Mothman is from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, only know that as a general factoid or from the video game Fallout 76. Most have no idea the Mothman has any connection to the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse, which is a shame.

It may seem strange to connect a massive infrastructural disaster that ended in the deaths of 46 people and the creation of the National Bridge Inspection Standards to the celebration of a cryptid. But the lore of both is deeply intertwined. The Mothman was seen perched on the Silver Bridge the day before it collapsed, and so has taken on the status of an omen or, more charitably, the idea that he was “trying to warn us.” The tragedy was also caused by systemic infrastructure failure, a reason not to trust what the government tells you, a common theme in West Virginia stories. The danger of trusting the faceless people in power is echoed in the phrase that I heard most during the Mothman Festival hayrides and have a pin repeating: “Don’t fear the Mothman. Fear the Men in Black.” The Mothman behaved like an animal, and so could hurt someone, but never with malice. The Men in Black who came after from the government were the ones who threatened people. Admittedly, it’s a paranoid viewpoint. But given West Virginia’s history, from the Mine Wars to vote buying, and most recently the opioid crisis, I don’t think it’s a misplaced view.

I used Google My Maps¹ for the Cryptid Art map, but I also explored Knight Lab’s StoryMapJS.² I chose My Maps because it focuses it’s display on place, while StoryMapJS prioritizes content. Many of the artworks and related sites have very little information available, so a small description and image work well. For pins with more information available, it is nice to be able to focus on the most unusual or helpful source, like using the Braxxie lantern documentary for the Exxon station where they are sold. StoryMapJS is better for focusing on the object first and the location second, particularly in how it pulls up a large secondary window for the embedded material for each pin. When I was thinking of projects that might work with it, I was thinking of comparatively looking at falconry gloves within different archives and museum collections: where they were found, where they were made, where they were used, and where the material was sourced. This is also reflected in how StoryMapJS uses fixed icons that are tied to the type of material embedded and also the ability to control the order that pins are navigated through.

I think there is some baked-in skepticism of the accuracy and completeness of maps that maybe isn’t there for museum exhibitions, and that skepticism is valuable to engage with. Because we’ve probably all had a GPS app try to take us down a closed road or otherwise lead us astray, it’s all the more illuminating to notice how much maps can be used to both enforce and question authority. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel in her chapter for The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, uses the example of how nationalists (including the Nazis) use “artistic geovisualization” to claim spaces, heritages, and artworks as their own and to justify their crimes.³ Joyeux-Prunel continues by explaining how art history is returning to cartography via digital mapping because it allows new questions to emerge “that had been buried for a long time, either because they could be embarrassing (such as the place of origin of a style, too often understood as a ‘center of influence’), or the geopolitics of art, or because they could not be given satisfactory answers[.]”⁴

An excellent example of case studies that ask all three of those types of questions and investigate them with “Historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) methods” is Paul B. Jaskot and Anne Kelly Knowles’ “An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany.”⁵ In my opinion, the case studies have the added benefit of dejustifying Nazi crimes by picking them apart and not allowing them to hide in historical assumption. Mapping the SS camp system and the architecture of the SS camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Knowles and Jaskot used different sources of information and visualization approaches. What they had in common was how GIS was able to shed new insight even in a field as highly studied as the SS camps and raise new questions because it was able to connect information to a spatial context.⁶

Building my own map, I was surprised by how difficult many of the decisions I needed to make were and how they immediately made me realize I was creating from a position of authority whether I wanted that or not. One of my earliest decisions was whether to pin the Silver Bridge Wall mural. The Mothman and Silver Bridge stories are connected, but they are not the same. Still, the Mothman stripped of the Silver Bridge is stripped of an important part of its history in Point Pleasant. So I included the mural, with a simple description focused on the purpose of the map: “The Mothman was seen on top of the Silver Bridge the day before it collapsed, leading some to believe he is an omen of doom or was trying to warn the town of the approaching tragedy.”

I plan to continue to work on my Cryptid Art map with the mission that there should be art of cryptids in their hometowns (as long as those communities want it). So in the future I plan to add cryptid origin points even where there isn’t art yet. I may also add local artists who make cryptid art. Lately, instead of worrying whether something fits a set of rules or parameters, I’ve been asking whether it’s kinder to include it than to leave it off. Being messier but kinder in action is perhaps how we keep tools with an inherent authority, like cartography, from having so much power to warp or control. The future of transparency in digital tools may be to strip back the veneer of clean data and UIs without losing the purpose of the tool, embracing messiness and a degree of friction so that questions naturally arise about where the information comes from and who decided its presentation.