Two miles under West Virginia, in a cave that appeared on no map, eight scientists heard something crying in the dark.

They turned their lights toward the sound. Wedged by one bare foot in a crack between two rocks was a boy. He stood two feet tall and weighed nineteen pounds. His amber eyes were twice normal size, and the zoologist in charge compared his ears to satellite dishes. When Dr. Ron Dillon freed the foot, the boy fought like an animal in a trap. The team sedated him and carried him out.

That was in the spring of 1992. The world found out in the issue of June 23, from the only newspaper that had the story.

This is his biography. It is authorized, in the sense that nobody has ever objected.

Early life

Little is known about Bat Boy’s childhood, since he spent it underground. Dr. Dillon, pictured in the paper as a serious man in heavy glasses, put the boy’s age at three or four and believed he had strayed from a whole race of people living miles below the surface, who had evolved bat-like features to survive in the dark. There could be many more down there. Dillon declined to say where the cave was.

In a private hospital, the boy communicated in squeaks and refused human food. He would eat only flying insects, and only ones he caught himself. So researchers got bugs from insect laboratories and released them into his room by the millions. He ate his own weight in them every day.

The escape years

Captivity did not suit him. In September 1992 he twisted a heavy steel padlock off his holding cell at a research facility in Wheeling and was last seen downtown on the tenth, heading south. Dr. Dillon warned that the boy was dangerous, with sharp teeth and an ape’s strength. He also denied a rumor that a drunken custodian had beaten the creature the night before he fled. The paper asked readers who saw Bat Boy to write in. The address was in Lantana, Florida. Keep that in mind.

The next few years were eventful. In July 1993 FBI agents cornered him on the roof of a flooded farmhouse in eastern Missouri, during that summer’s very real Mississippi flood. In January 1995 the federal government said he was dead, and that April he was sighted in Texas. By 1998 he was learning to talk.

Public service

In 2000 he endorsed Al Gore for president. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he met with President George W. Bush at Camp David, and by the paper’s Christmas issue he was on the ground near Kandahar with an initial force of 500 Marines. A Pentagon official said he had become more or less the unit’s mascot. The paper’s war correspondents reported that he had bitten one terrorist leader 150 times and snipped the beards off two dozen men in a Taliban camp. Earlier that month he had bitten Santa Claus. It was a busy December.

In 2003 he went to Iraq, and in January 2004 the paper revealed that he had led American troops to Saddam Hussein. That spring he lobbied to be John Kerry’s running mate, and that summer he announced he would try out for American Idol. In 2007 Mitt Romney paid a call at his home.

All of this ran beside ads for psychics, lucky charms and, on the page facing Bat Boy’s war in Afghanistan, a full-page ad wondering whether bees hold the secret to fighting disease.

The authors

About that address in Lantana.

It belonged to the Weekly World News, whose newsroom sat inside the offices of the National Enquirer. By the late 1980s, under an editor named Eddie Clontz, a tenth-grade dropout from North Carolina, it was selling about a million copies a week. The newsroom ran on typewriters, cigarettes and, by several accounts, a great deal of laughing. One former staffer has guessed that 30 to 40 percent of what it printed had any basis in fact.

Bat Boy’s face was made there. Dick Kulpa, the paper’s graphics man and later its art director, had been asked for a picture of a space-alien baby. By his account the face was a baby’s, with the eyes enlarged on the computer and a pair of pointed ears he credited to Mr. Spock. The computer kept crashing, so the job took most of a day. Then the picture was set aside. About six weeks later it came back as something else.

Who turned it into Bat Boy depends on whom you ask. The writer Bob Lind remembered a colleague, Sal Ivone, suggesting that the creature be half human and half bat. In the Washington Post’s version, Ivone came up with the name, and the editor handed the story to a reporter named Derek Clontz, who made up the rest. The byline went to someone called Bill Creighton. Kulpa, for his part, said Bat Boy was an accident. And I could not find out who posed as Dr. Ron Dillon.

So Bat Boy, like any self-respecting cryptid, has several origin stories and no birth certificate.

The editor, at least, knew what he had. “Eddie fell in love with Bat Boy,” Lind said in 2007. Clontz kept the stories coming, and readers kept calling. Former staff say the FBI’s switchboard eventually filled with callers demanding that the Bureau let Bat Boy go, and an agent phoned the paper to complain. As Lind tells it, Clontz promised it would never happen again, hung up, and went straight on to the next Bat Boy story.

The afterlife

Bat Boy outlasted the paper he was printed in. On Halloween 1997, Bat Boy: The Musical opened at the Actors’ Gang theater in Los Angeles. It moved to off-Broadway in 2001 and to London’s West End in 2004, and the Weekly World News covered the London run as news. Kulpa said he never saw it, and that he was not publicly credited as Bat Boy’s creator until 2007.

Clontz died in 2004. The print edition ended with the issue of August 27, 2007, though new owners brought the name back online in 2009. Kulpa died in January 2021.

And West Virginia, which never asked for him, has taken him in. Somewhere along the way his address moved to Lost World Caverns, a show cave near Lewisburg, whose owner pinned a yellowed clipping of the original story in the gift shop and lent climbing gear to the musical. Lewisburg is almost a hundred miles from Seneca Rocks, where the paper first said he was found. But then, that cave was never on a map.

Next in the Archive: back to West Virginia, for real this time. Flatwoods, September 1952. A group of kids, a mother, a light on a hilltop, and a story that, whatever it was, did not start in a newsroom.