Eleven years of sulfur complaints from Braxton County say more about us than they do about it.

Since 2013, the Braxton County environmental office has received forty-seven formal complaints citing a persistent sulfurous odor in the vicinity of Flatwoods, West Virginia. Forty-seven. I have read each one. They describe the smell as eggy, industrial, wrongly organic, like something burning that should not be burning. Several use the word ‘unbearable.’ One resident, a retired schoolteacher named Doris Hench, submitted her complaint on lavender notepaper with a pressed violet in the corner, which I think deserves acknowledgment even if the sentiment does not.

The source of the odor has not been formally identified. Local officials have at various points attributed it to a gas main, seasonal bog activity, and what one report memorably called ‘an uncharacterised subsurface event.’ None of these explanations have held. I am not going to tell you what is causing the smell, because I do not think that is the right question. The right question — and I recognise this may not be a popular position at the county office — is whether forty-seven people submitting complaints about how something smells constitutes a crisis, or whether it constitutes a failure of a rather basic kind of consideration.

Community Notice

The Flatwoods Monster, first reported in 1952, was described by witnesses as emitting a choking, acrid mist. This has been documented consistently across decades. It is not a new development. It is not a malfunction. It is, as far as anyone can establish, simply part of the arrangement. The creature exists. It has a smell. These are not separable facts.

I would ask the residents of Braxton County to consider, briefly and without defensiveness, what they themselves smell like to something that has been here considerably longer.

— Evelyn Crowe, WTC Field Correspondent

I am not being flippant. I keep a small bag of dried herbs in my left cardigan pocket and I am under no illusion that this is because the world smells entirely neutral and fine. We accommodate. We adjust. We carry what we need to carry. Forty-seven formal complaints, eleven years of documentation, and not a single one of them asks what we might do differently — only what might be done to the smell. I find that telling. The odor is moderate. The incuriosity is, I would argue, rather worse.