Mothman Producer Dies

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.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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