The Van Meter Visitor - Terror in Small Town Iowa
The Van Meter Visitor is a legendary winged cryptid that reportedly terrorized Van Meter, Iowa, for five nights in 1903. Witnesses described a towering, bat-like creature with a terrible stench and one truly bizarre feature: a glowing horn capable of projecting a blinding beam of light.
losZorros
8/12/20265 min read
Eerie forest glow
U.G. Griffith couldn't sleep.
It was late September 1903, and the small town of Van Meter, Iowa, had gone quiet hours earlier. Griffith, a respected local businessman, was accustomed to the ordinary sounds of a Midwestern town after dark. But something outside his window wasn't ordinary.
There was a light moving through the darkness.
At first, Griffith reportedly assumed someone was prowling around town with a lantern. Then the light moved upward. He watched as it appeared near the rooftops, and eventually caught sight of something that didn't belong there. It was enormous! The figure appeared vaguely human but stood perhaps eight feet tall, with massive wings folded behind it. Stranger still, the light wasn't something the creature was carrying. Witnesses would later describe it as coming from a blunt horn or appendage protruding from its forehead.
Griffith did what apparently seemed reasonable in Iowa in 1903... He grabbed a gun. He fired at the creature. It didn't appear particularly concerned. Instead, the thing spread its wings, launched itself into the darkness and disappeared.
By itself, Griffith's story probably would have become little more than a strange tale told around Van Meter. But then other people started seeing it.
When Something Big Comes to a Small Town
Van Meter sits in central Iowa, roughly 20 miles west of Des Moines. Today it's part of the growing orbit around Iowa's capital, but in 1903 it was a very different place, it was farm country. Cornfields and open prairie surrounded a compact town connected to the outside world by railroad and telegraph. Electric lighting was still relatively new to small-town America, automobiles were rare, and once you moved beyond the lamps of town, an Iowa night could get very dark, very quickly.
There was also something beneath the ground. Coal mining was once an important part of central Iowa, and the area around Van Meter contained mines and shafts reaching into the earth below the surrounding countryside.
That becomes important because whatever residents thought was visiting Van Meter didn't simply disappear into the night. According to the legend, it eventually went underground.
What Is the Van Meter Visitor?
The Van Meter Visitor is one of the stranger creatures in American cryptid lore, which is saying something.
Descriptions from the 1903 events vary, but the creature is generally described as having:
A height of roughly 7 to 9 feet
Large, bat-like wings
A humanoid or vaguely human shape
Extremely fast flight
A terrible odor
A blunt horn or appendage on its forehead
A brilliant light apparently projected from that appendage
And apparently, it wasn't particularly worried about firearms. Several witnesses reportedly shot at the creature without producing any obvious injury. Even stranger, some versions of the story describe two creatures—a larger Visitor and a smaller one—appearing near the end of the encounter.
Bigfoot suddenly seems pretty straightforward.
The History of the Van Meter Visitor
The entire legend centers around an extraordinary series of events during several nights in 1903.
After Griffith's encounter, other residents began reporting strange lights and sightings around town. One of the best-known witnesses was a local physician, commonly identified as Dr. Alcott. According to accounts of the incident, a bright light outside his home drew his attention. When he investigated, he encountered a large winged creature perched nearby. Like Griffith, the doctor reportedly opened fire. Like Griffith, he apparently accomplished very little.
Other townspeople soon reported their own encounters. Hardware store owner O.V. White was said to have spotted the creature during daylight, while another resident reportedly watched it flying toward an abandoned coal mine outside town. By this point, Van Meter had a problem. Residents armed themselves and eventually organized a group to investigate the mine. According to the story, the men approached the entrance and encountered not one creature, but two—a large Visitor and a smaller version of it.
There was more gunfire.
The creatures retreated into the mine. The townspeople reportedly returned the following morning, where they again encountered the creatures before watching them disappear underground.
Then... Nothing.
After several nights of extraordinary activity, the Van Meter Visitor seemingly vanished as quickly as it had arrived. For decades, the story faded into local history before being rediscovered by researchers and writers interested in Iowa folklore. Today, Van Meter has embraced its peculiar visitor, even holding an annual Van Meter Visitor Festival celebrating the events.
Not bad for something that allegedly terrorized the town.
Field Notes: Van Meter Visitor Quick Facts
📍 LOCATION: Van Meter, Iowa
👀 FIRST SIGHTING: 1903
🐍 CLASSIFICATION: Flying Cryptid
💀 THREAT LEVEL (1-10): 6
📖 STATUS: Unconfirmed
So, What Were People Seeing?
Well...
We've got some problems, including the creature itself. There is no known animal in Iowa—or anywhere else—that closely matches a seven-foot bat-like creature equipped with its own biological searchlight. Large birds provide the most obvious conventional explanation. Sandhill cranes can stand around four feet tall with impressive wingspans, and large birds viewed at night can appear considerably stranger than they actually are.
Great horned owls and other large nocturnal birds can also look surprisingly humanoid under poor lighting conditions.
But neither explanation gets us very far once we reach the glowing forehead.
Another possibility is that the mysterious light and the creature were actually two separate things that became connected through storytelling. Someone sees an unusual light. Someone else sees a large bird. Stories spread through a frightened town, and before long the bird has acquired the light.
There is also the possibility that the whole affair was exaggerated—or simply fabricated.
The Van Meter story largely comes to us through newspaper accounts from an era when sensational stories sold papers, and the tale contains several elements that should make a modern reader suspicious: an apparently bulletproof monster, enormous wings, a horrible smell, a biological spotlight, multiple armed confrontations and, finally, a retreat into a mysterious abandoned mine.
That's a lot of cryptid for one week.
And yet, there's something intriguing about the story.
This wasn't supposedly one terrified farmer glimpsing something across a field. The legend names multiple residents, including established members of the community, reporting unusual events over several nights.
Maybe they weren't seeing a monster.
But something apparently had Van Meter talking.
Our Take
We love this one.
Not necessarily because we think a giant bulletproof bat with a headlight lived underneath Iowa. What makes the Van Meter Visitor fascinating is how beautifully weird the whole story is. Most cryptids give us one or two unusual characteristics. Van Meter apparently walked up to the cryptid buffet and said, "We'll take everything."
Giant? Yep. Wings? Absolutely. Glowing horn? Why not? Bulletproof? Apparently. Lives in an abandoned mine? Now we're talking.
There are perfectly reasonable reasons to be skeptical. Newspaper sensationalism, mistaken identity, exaggeration and more than a century of retelling could explain quite a bit.
But Van Meter itself hasn't forgotten.
More than 120 years later, the town still celebrates the Visitor that supposedly dropped in for a few nights, scared the hell out of everybody and then vanished beneath the Iowa countryside.
Maybe the residents of Van Meter encountered a large bird.
Maybe a strange light sparked a story that grew considerably in the telling.
Or maybe, on several nights in 1903, something genuinely unusual flew over the rooftops of a little Iowa town.
Whatever happened, we'd offer one piece of advice if you're wandering around Van Meter after dark and notice a light moving above the rooftops.
Check to see if it's attached to anything.
