5G
I really like this chapter, so this one is going out for free to all my subscribers.
In late 2021, during the interval between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I found myself driving down the Ohio River in West Virginia to see about a newspaper job. Dismal cloud cover defined the weather, precisely what you’d expect from this part of the country at this time of year. This did nothing for my mood.
I got the tip from my ex-girlfriend. She’d kicked me out of the house, and I think this was her way of saying sorry. Or her way of getting rid of me; who knows? It was a dismal, overcast day in the Ohio River Valley, and the majority of the route was just far enough off the beaten path that it took well over two hours to travel the ninety-nine miles.
Sistersville was originally settled in the late 18th century, and named after sisters Sarah and Delilah Wells, who inherited the land. (The name Wellsville was already taken.) Due to its location on the Ohio River, Sistersville became a hub for transportation and trade. The discovery of oil in 1891 transformed the town, leading to fast wealth that lingered in the area only as long as it had to before fleeing to the East Coast. This era, which lasted maybe 100 years, saw the construction of impressive Victorian-style homes and buildings, many of which still stand today, many of those apparently derelict. The town was sold to me as a charming outpost with hiking and camping and a cozy inn, sort of like Stars Hollow from the show Gilmore Girls. Really, it was more of a squat cluster of old buildings along a largely vacant main street.
The newspaper currently had two employees: the publisher, who’s stuck writing the thing until he can replace a reporter who left at the onset of COVID-19, and the editor, a veteran of the newspaper business who was raised in West Virginia and decided to return later in life.
Let’s call the publisher Harvey, because my first thought was that he looks like Harvey Pekar. Tall, wide-eyed, slouched over, shaggy hair defined by a well-receded hairline. Baggy hoodie, t-shirt, and jeans, indicating that he lost a lot of weight but never updated his wardrobe. Loose skin on a round head. The more I looked at him, the more I saw another face: Michael Aquino, the infamous Satanist and Lt. Colonel, Psychological Operations, U.S. Army (Retired). Aquino was known for his cherubic face with weird eyebrows that pointed up like devil’s horns. Harvey had the same chipmunk cheeks, bug eyes, and weird eyebrows. I decided that by superimposing the faces of Harvey Pekar and Michael Aquino, we’d get a more-than-reasonable facsimile of the newspaper publisher.
When you apply for a job at a newspaper, they generally have you go out and report a story. So we jumped into the publisher’s pickup and drove to a city council meeting at Paden City, four miles upriver. City Hall was a one-story prefab building, rather nondescript. The meeting was in a small room; too small for the eight council members, mayor, secretary, and twenty-odd members of the community who argued for forty minutes about whether they should paint parking lines on Main Street.
If I was casting this scene for a TV show, I couldn’t have done better. The peanut gallery consisted of retirement-aged men and women mostly, the town undertaker, and one well-dressed, effete dude with a neatly trimmed beard who gave the gathering some class. For me, the highlight of the meeting was Lone Ranger (I’ll call him that because he was the only person wearing a Covid mask). Apparently, the Lone Ranger’s neighbor was a local reverend. The reverend’s labradoodle regularly slipped off its leash and entered the Ranger’s house through the dog door, scaring the hell out of his own dogs in the process. The mayor agreed that it was a problem, although he did point out that the labradoodle was “precious.” There was also a report from the chief of police about some guy who kept turning his water back on after the utility company shut it off for nonpayment.
When I looked at the agenda, one item caught my eye: “5G TOWER LEASE ON THE DOWNTOWN SOFTBALL FIELD.” I perked up right away: 5G, of course, is the new mobile phone technology that conspiracy theorists claim causes brain cancer, plagues, and any number of other ailments.
“I’ve been researching 5G,” the mayor said when it was time for new business. “I know some of you have concerns over whether or not it’s safe.”
Yes! I thought. Keep going…
“So I did some research. You know, just on Google, looking up different things.”
Here it comes, I thought.
“And it looks perfectly safe to me. I think we should lease the space for the tower.”
The city council sort of shrugged, as if it was the least controversial opinion one could have—which, of course, it is, outside of certain paranoid corners of the internet. After that one interesting agenda item, the council president ended the meeting. As people started to stand up and stretch out a bit, editor and publisher Harvey Aquino walked up to the mayor to tell him about the dangers of 5G.
I had finally found my conspiracy theorist, and I wanted him to hire me.
The newspaper operated out of the hotel Harvey owned with his wife. The pay wasn’t great, but it was basically a part-time gig with free housing, and I’d have plenty of time to work on other projects.
The Wells Inn was established by Ephraim Wells in 1895. It was once a reflection of the wealth and stability that natural resources brought to the area, although now it’s mostly a shabby man camp for workers at the nearby gas fields. In the unused hotel bar, Harvey told me his life story. He was some sort of political fixer in Albany, the capital of New York State, before he and his wife decided to buy a historic hotel, sight unseen, and move to this quaint West Virginia town; apparently, he’d been given the same Stars Hollow/Gilmore Girls rap I had.
At first, life was good. His bar and restaurant were busy every night. He even started a newspaper because the town didn’t have one, hiring a nationally respected reporter to work for him. Then the pandemic happened, and the product of all their hard work evaporated. Harvey and Mrs. Harvey quickly grew disillusioned. Downright bitter, even. The hotel was a wreck, the bar and restaurant closed, and he couldn’t even get a writer for his damn newspaper. He also went from believing what they say on the mainstream news to becoming a hardcore Covid-skeptic. This was a stark example of the way that the pandemic turned damn near everyone bonkers for a few years.
Or did it? It seems like people with strong compasses found their way through the ideological swamp with minimal damage to their core values. The rest of us were sent flailing, looking for something to believe in.
After two hours spent watching the guy smoke his cigar, listening to him bitch about how everyone except he and his wife are assholes, and how his business failed because no one in West Virginia has a work ethic, I was utterly exhausted. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for a guy this bitter, even when life has dealt him such a crummy hand.
I spent the night in the hotel. It was supposed to be haunted, but unfortunately, the only thing I heard all night was Telemundo drifting in from a TV set down the hall.
The bulk of West Virginia’s problems are due to its status as a “resource colony,” a largely undeveloped region exploited by corporations for its natural resources. Wealth is extracted in the form of coal and natural gas, which the rest of the country uses for electricity and heat. In return, the people of West Virginia receive cancer and birth defects and mountaintop removal strip mining and, for a sizable minority, a pittance in the form of “crazy checks,” a quaint local term for disability payments. Of course, this is not everyone in the state. Many lead perfectly average, middle-class lives—but not as many as would, or should, had all their riches been handled in an even remotely fair manner. (I explored this in my short film The Key Point is Confrontation, embedded above.)
The Ohio River runs northwest from Pittsburgh to Ohio, more or less, then veers south-ish for 200 miles or so, where it defines the Ohio-West Virginia border. Then it turns northward again; the river here forms the border of Ohio to the north, and Kentucky to the south. Sistersville is situated on that river. So is Point Pleasant, which is closer to Kentucky than to Pennsylvania. It was here on December 15, 1967, that the Silver Bridge collapsed under the weight of rush hour traffic, killing forty-six people. The bridge hadn’t been designed to carry the weight of the seventy-five vehicles that were present at the time of the crash. A 2.5-millimeter deep crack in an I-beam was all it took to send the bridge into the river.
A year earlier, in November 1966, two young couples in Point Pleasant had encountered a terrifying creature with large wings and red eyes near the old munitions plant. Sightings increased over the next year, so when the bridge collapsed, the two events were merged in the minds and imaginations of the locals. The creature came to be known as the Mothman, and the victims of the bridge disaster became the Mothman’s victims.
Peter Levenda has written a highly entertaining 1,300-page conspiracy exegesis called Sinister Forces that begins in the region. He makes much of the fact that Charles Manson was raised for a time in McMechen, West Virginia, on the Ohio River, while his mother served time at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville on the same river, five miles to the south. The prison was decommissioned in 1995, and it currently hosts “ghost tours” and serves as a shooting location for movies, TV, and video games.
The prison is so close to the Grave Creek Mound that the first time I saw it, I thought that the mound was located inside the prison yard itself. This enormous burial mound—one of the largest in the country—was built by the pre-Columbian Adena culture roughly 2,200 years ago. It is part of a network of pyramids located in present-day Ohio and West Virginia that’s largely gone unnoticed because the structures blend into the landscape in a way that the Egyptian pyramids never could.
Levenda takes a mystic’s view of the area. A magician’s view. Or, if you prefer, a superstitious view. According to the author, if the United States were a Venn diagram, the point where Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky overlapped would be a nexus of unspeakable evil, much like H.P. Lovecraft’s remote New England woodlands. And if that wasn’t enough to freak his readers out, what was to be made of the 18th-century Kentucky colony named Transylvania?
The whole region, apparently, is pure evil.
But it didn’t seem all that evil to me as I drove south along the river. The natural country was beautiful, while the outposts of human society, Dollar General, Walmart, and McDonald’s, etc., were banal. The latter had its flag at half mast. (I didn’t even know that the Hamburglar was sick.)
The Levenda stuff is an extreme form of the weird anti-West Virginia propaganda that I’ve been hearing all my life; cue “Dueling Banjos.” The people in the region are always being portrayed as some sort of flyover-state goons, dehumanized so that they’re easier to exploit.
I was still disappointed that I hadn’t seen a ghost, however. I could’ve used a little action in my life at the time.