Megan Engelhardt

If your teen asks you to take him to a cryptid museum, take him to three.

A few years ago we were driving through Georgia and I convinced my husband to stop at Expedition:Bigfoot! The Sasquatch Museum. Our two oldest boys were with us. K2 hated it; it was scary and he buzzed through it as fast as he could. K1 also buzzed through it as fast as he could, but that was more ADHD than boredom, and he professed to like it. So much so, apparently, that he asked me this spring if we could go to another cryptid museum.

OBVIOUSLY I was going to say yes.

We were able to arrange schedules so that I could take him on an overnight trip to West Virginia, which is a veritable hotbed of weirdness.

Being on a road trip with just my 13 year old was…weird. It was good! But weird! Usually there are six of us, and my attention is spread so thin over everyone’s needs I can’t really focus on any one person for any length of time. I think K1 really appreciated having a captive audience. When he got tired of talking at me, though, we listened to the Hadestown soundtrack on his request. Parenting win!

Our first stop was at the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant, WV. Mothman is having a moment lately, but I was into him before it was cool.

Actually I love the current surge in cryptid interest. It makes getting merch much easier, plus there are always more podcasts and articles and books available.

This quilt was pretty amazing.

The Mothman Museum is relatively small, but they have a ton of stuff there and they keep adding more. This was my third visit to the museum and there was an entire room of things that I hadn’t seen before. Including this model, which K1 walked right under without noticing.

I like the big newspaper print wall murals.

I’m sure these were here before, but I hadn’t noticed them until this trip. I geeked out a little and then had to explain to K1 why I was excited. He’s a big fan of analog horror and Indrid Cold shows up in some of that, so we were able to make a connection there.

We stayed about ten minutes outside of Sutton, WV. K1 was suitably impressed by the hotel room. (I thought it was mid, as the kids say, but I really didn’t need it to be more than functional and it was that.)

The next day we started off at the Flatwoods Monster Museum, and I said hello to an old friend.

Then we went to the West Virginia Bigfoot Museum, which I had never been to before. This dude waits at the end of the ramp to go into the museum. I love him.

All three of the museums on this trip are pretty small, but like the other two, the West Virginia Bigfoot Museum packs in the exhibits. There was a neat mural, a few Bigfoots to take selfies with, and lots of footprint casts.

It took us *time* to find the bigfoot in the mural.

Now, I’m going to be honest. We spent probably forty-five minutes in the three museums combined. K1 was definitely interested but not enough to spend more than a few minutes looking around at things and then declaring that he was done.

The drive was over four hours to get to West Virginia.

Whenever I’d start to get irritated about the time disparity, though, I would remind myself that the point of the trip wasn’t to actually look at the stuff in the museums. The point was that my teenage son wanted to spend some time with me. And it was even sweeter in that it was framed in the context of something I really love.

We didn’t actually get a single picture together on this trip, so just imagine this Mothman statue is my oldest son. He’s not that much taller than me, but maybe some day.

Listening while walking update: A constant stream of information about video games, black holes, biology, and one brief interesting conversation about our deepest fears.

(And hey, if you’re interested in cryptids and strange creatures, allow me to recommend my collection of short stories about those very things! Phantom Menagerie has stories about a jackalope, a sasquatch, rusalkas, and much more.)