Moth life cycle¶
The moth life cycle is what the team pieces together, mostly from Wilbur Whateley, about how the Radford Moth grew from an oversized caterpillar into a telepathic creature that is born pregnant and uses women as hosts, like a parasitic wasp.
| Type | Lore / biology |
| Aliases | moth hosting; egg count; Morpho menelaus |
| Subject | The Radford Moth |
| Sources | Wilbur Whateley; Wilbur's journal |
| First appearance | Radford Horror 07 |
Born pregnant¶
In the old church, with a gun to his head, Wilbur tells the team: "I've been with it for so long, and it's more sentient than we are. It's not wrong if it kills us. Like, it's not wrong when you eat a chicken. And it has to breed. They're born pregnant." Once he is cuffed, he turns to Andrew and says, "You, of all people, you have to understand" (Radford Horror 07).
Larva to moth¶
Wilbur's journal in Radford Horror 08 gives the timeline: he found a larva resembling Morpho menelaus, but much larger and abnormal, on June 3rd, fed it beef, and wrote that "she hatched hungry" on August 15th. He began to hear a voice that he could barely tell from his own ("She's talking all the time now"), and he adored it ("She's so beautiful ... she's mine"). The journal does not give a year. The creature is a huge moth with a proboscis and razor claws, raised first in the Whateley basement and then moved to the old church (Radford Horror 08).
Hosting¶
In Radford Horrors 04 the team questions Wilbur at the Roanoke mental hospital. He recognizes them "from the church", says he dreamed of "drowning in blue", that something was "wearing" him, and that he found a Morpho menelaus caterpillar in the woods that was somehow wrong. After Kurt's partial success on a Manipulate Someone roll, Wilbur says it felt "like the ocean ... like a mother", in the basement: "It was pregnant. It needed to breathe. It need--oh god, it needed hosts, like a parasitic wasp. Those women--". As the staff escort them out he adds, "I found it under a white oak." (Radford Horrors 04)
Later in the episode Andrew asks the others how many young a moth has at a time. Kurt rolls a 10 on Sharp, and Andre, saying he saw it on the Discovery Channel, tells the table the answer is between 40 and 500 eggs (Radford Horrors 04).
Trivia¶
Wilbur's line "It needed to breathe" is probably "it needed to breed", given what he says in Radford Horror 07. In Radford Horror 08, Kira jokes about "no possibility of there being eggs anywhere" after the church fire, and the moth's body is gone when the team returns. Whether any eggs survived is never answered in the episodes, although Kurt's working theory in Radford Horrors 04 is that the Emporium intruder was a juvenile moth or a thrall; the episodes do not confirm it.