Iowa: Bigfoot & The Van Meter Visitor

Way back in episode 147 we spent a full night in Van Meter, Iowa, where in the autumn of 1903 a winged, horned, glowing thing walked the rooftops at 1 a.m., shrugged off the town doctor's 5 shots and the banker's buckshot, and finally backed a whole armed posse down into an abandoned coal mine before vanishing for good. If you never heard it, or you want the full nightmare start to finish, go back and pull up 147. It's one of the best-documented cryptid cases in America, and it deserves the whole hour.But the Visitor is the freak case. It's the outlier.

Tonight we park in the Hawkeye State for a different reason, because the thing Iowa actually reports, quietly, all over the map, for more than 100 years, isn't a winged devil. It's big and dark and covered in hair and it walks on 2 legs, and it's been hiding in the last place anybody'd think to look for it. We dig into the Lockridge Monster and the partially eaten turkeys that started it, the Skunk River Wildmen, a 13-year-old boy who watched one drink from the river with cupped hands, a turkey hunter who locked eyes with something in the morning fog, a bow hunter with 5 separate run-ins on his own land, a viral photo out of White Water Canyon, and a string of encounters from people who never told a soul, the mushroom hunters and the night fisherman and the farmer with a clump of coarse dark hair in his kitchen drawer.

Then we take the long way home through the rest of Iowa's strange country, the cursed Black Angel of Oakland Cemetery, the Fort Dodge house whose builders invited the dead in on purpose, and the phantom cougars the state swears are gone and people keep right on seeing. As always, your host walks it through an evidence-first, flesh-and-blood lens, with the eye of a former lawman who spent years learning the difference between a man telling a story and a man telling you what happened to him.


Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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