Many are familiar with West Virginia’s famed cryptids. From Mothman and Batboy to Sheepfoot and Braxxie, aka the Flatwoods monster, these folklore legends have exploded in popularity among contemporary Appalachian culture. One toymaker even sells Lego-style kits where kids (and adults, duh) can build these classic creatures.
Jay Young, a photographer and videographer based in Fayetteville, has long been enamored with the Mountain State’s monster myths. As a visual designer, he often lets his imagination run wild and started thinking about what else might be out there lurking in the misty hollers, murky waters, and dark woods that characterize the creepy aspects of our state’s wild places.
It all began a few years ago while he was driving across the New River Gorge Bridge early in the morning on his way to work. There’s often an impenetrable sea of fog filling the gorge before the sun burns it off; sometimes the fog laps against and over the bridge deck like ocean waves. “I started imagining a giant whale breaching out of the fog,” Young says.
One morning, he stopped at an overlook and snapped a photo of the foggy gorge, then went home that evening and found a stock image of a whale online. “I kind of painstakingly photoshopped it in there, not really knowing what I was doing,” he says. “If you zoom in on the high-res file, you’d see all kinds of errors. But I posted it on Facebook, and people ate it up, they loved it.”
Young immediately knew he was on to something. He got an aerial shot of the foggy gorge, but this time he added a giant 1950s-style robot emerging from the fog, adding fire and lightning bolts to up the cheese factor. “I had even more fun with that one, and it just took off from there,” Young says. “All of a sudden, I had this idea to do a “Monsters of the New River Gorge” calendar and set off on the quest to create twelve unique monsters.”
Young mostly uses his original photographs for each creation and photoshops in all sorts of elements, like the monsters, visual effects, lighting, and color changes. “I obviously didn’t take a picture of a kraken at the foot of the Summersville Dam, but I did take the original photo of the dam,” he says.
At first, he scoured his archive to find existing photos where he could add monsters. As the project progressed, he started coming up with concepts and would go out to shoot photos with a specific monster in mind. For Young, it’s mostly about having fun, although he does strive to achieve the element of realism with his imaginative creations. “I want the end result to look like it’s an actual photo of this actual thing, and I think I’ve achieved that with varying levels of success,” he says.
All following photo illustrations were created by Jay Young. Young is a photographer and videographer who lives in Fayetteville with his wife and two kids. Check out his full Monsters of WV calendar: ironarchphoto.com/monsters-of-wv-1.
Bridge Day is West Virginia’s biggest one-day festival, with nearly 100,000 people attending each year to watch BASE jumpers huck themselves off the country’s third-highest bridge. While jumping off a thousand-foot-high bridge into a gorge with only a parachute to slow your descent would be considered exhilarating by most, imagine doing it while a giant archaeopteryx swoops down to try and gobble you up.
“I knew I had to have a Bridge Day image in there, and first I had the idea of a giant frog in the river below with its mouth open, but wasn’t able to find the frog image I needed. I was browsing pterodactyl images and found this archaeopteryx, and it had the same lighting as the bridge in my image,” Young says.
Remember the spooky scene in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when Frodo locks eyes with the deceased Elf in the Dead Marshes and falls into the water, only to be dragged down into the murky depths by decrepit ghouls? Well, now you can think of that every time you fall out of your raft! But instead of the tortured ghosts of Elves, you’ll be escaping the cold grip of zombie mermaids, which seem to be a new species of monster endemic to the New River.
“I was originally thinking of a sunken pirate ship, but the scale of the photo wasn’t working for anything like that, so I thought what about scary mermaids,” Young says.
Located in the bucolic setting of Pocahontas County, the Green Bank Observatory is the world’s largest steerable radio telescope and has been an instrumental part of the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Welp, it looks like that search was successful, because contact was made, and it turns out that aliens really love hamburgers. Beef me up, Scotty!
“This is one of my favorites, even though I don’t think it looks horribly realistic,” Young says. “Finding a whole bunch of stock photos of cows in weird positions was definitely the hardest part of this one. When I found that stock image of that cow with that look on its face, it was perfect. That cow is totally thinking, Are you kidding me?”
When the Gauley River was dammed in 1966, the town of Gad was flooded as the lake rose. The convention at the time was to name the dam after the nearest town, but “Gad Dam” didn’t sit too well with the powers that be, and thus the barrier was named the Summersville Dam. The pool at the foot of the dam is familiar to folks putting on to run the Upper Gauley during the fall paddling season. But when this giant cetacean rose from the depths, it’s safe to assume someone shouted, “Look at that Gad Dam kraken!”
“The pool below the dam is kind of eerie to begin with, it’s such a weird landscape to see, especially in the morning with the fog there,” Young says. “You can totally imagine something in there, and I think this kraken is one of the most realistic looking monsters.”
Thalassophobia is the intense fear of deep bodies of water—especially when dark and murky—and whatever might be lurking under the surface. West Virginia has plenty of mountain rivers with deep pools, dark water, and submerged boulders that could be hiding whatever your mind can conjure. If you weren’t scared of water before, this shot of gargantuan koi heading toward two kayakers on the New River might instill some thalassophobia deep in your brainstem.
“This one was easy to create because there are a lot of stock photos of koi in water, and all you gotta do is make the water look like river water,” Young says. “The ripples were a little trickier as each set was a different image I had to incorporate.”
Perhaps the most famous of West Virginia’s cryptids, the Mothman is associated with Point Pleasant and the deadly Silver Bridge collapse of 1967. Fortunately, the bridge was rebuilt and still stands today despite the Mothman making another nighttime appearance.
“I went to Point Pleasant specifically to get this photo. It was actually taken in raw daylight, but I darkened the photo and added in the night sky.” Young says. “I bought a Mothman figurine and hung it with fishing line off my deck, created the lighting conditions I wanted, and took a photo of it to add in.”
