The Van Meter Visitor

Van Meter sits in Dallas County, Iowa. In 1903 it was home to about 1,000 people. Its coal mine had played out, and the workings northwest of town now supplied clay to a brickworks.

Late September 1903. Around one in the morning, farm-implement dealer U.G. Griffith was driving into town. On the roof of the Mather and Gregg's building he saw what looked like an electric searchlight. "The light jumped across the street and landed on top of another building." Then it vanished.

The next night a blinding light woke Dr. A.C. Alcott, who slept in his office on the principal street. Outside was a creature half human and half animal, with bat-like wings and a single blunt horn. The light came from the horn. He fired, then barricaded himself inside until morning.

On night three, Dunn, the bank cashier, sat up in the Van Meter bank with a repeating shotgun. He heard gasping, strangling noises. A flash blinded him and he fired through the plate glass. Next morning, three-toed tracks were reportedly found. Dunn made a plaster cast, but none is known to survive.

On night four, a rasping sound woke hardware merchant O.V. White. The creature sat on the cross-arm of a telephone pole. He fired and was overcome by a foul odour. His neighbour Sidney Gregg saw it at about 8 ft tall, with a beak and four legs. It lowered itself down the pole "in the manner of a parrot, using its beak," hopped like a kangaroo, then "extended its wings and sailed away."

Strange noises had been heard from the old mine for days. Before dawn on the fifth day, foreman J.L. Platt Jr. watched the creature fly out of the shaft. A smaller one followed. An armed posse gathered, and when both returned at dawn the men opened fire with no visible effect.

"The reception they received would have sunk the Spanish fleet," wrote the Des Moines Daily News. The creatures went back underground. The shaft was sealed with planks. The sightings stopped.

The Des Moines Daily News broke the story in early October. The St. Paul Globe carried it on October 11, 1903 as "Creature Emitting a Dazzling Light Terrifies Hawkeyes." Van Meter pushed back. On October 6, 1903, the Des Moines Daily Capital printed letters from angry residents calling it a fabrication built from "an incident or two." Most papers treated it as a joke, and no police or scientific investigation is recorded.

In January 2026, Blake Smith of Skeptoid concluded it was a hoax, perhaps by the original author, a Van Meter local. Chad Lewis, co-author of the 2013 book The Van Meter Visitor, began certain he would find a hoax, but did not. "These weren't town drunks," he said. Others suggest a heron seen in poor light, mass hysteria, gas from the mine or eyewitness memory error. Some townspeople believed the miners had dug too deep.

The story surfaced in Fate in the 1950s and Fortean Times in 2009. The 2013 book by Lewis, Voss and Nelson carried a foreword by Brad Steiger, and podcasts such as Astonishing Legends followed. Each September, the town holds the Van Meter Visitor Festival. Locals still call it the brickyard monster.