The Van Meter Visitor

Van Meter, Iowa. Autumn, 1903. A Main Street of storefronts, a bank, O.V. White's hardware store, and the brick plant of the Platt Pressed and Fire Brick Company. Near the plant lay an abandoned mine shaft, said to be 257 feet deep.

Tuesday, September 29. About 1 a.m. U.G. Griffith, an implement dealer, was driving into town. He saw what looked like a spot light moving around on the rooftops. Then it jumped to another rooftop across the street.

The next night, Dr. A.C. Alcott woke to light shining through his office window. He went out gun in hand. He saw a tall humanoid with bat-like wings. He fired five shots at close range. It made no difference.

On the third night the bank cashier, Clarence Dunn (some accounts call him Peter), heard a noise. He was hit full in the face with a blinding beam. He fired a shotgun through the bank's front window. Large three-toed footprints were found, and Dunn cast them in plaster.

October 2. O.V. White, a hardware merchant, found the creature perched close by on the crossbeam of a telephone pole. He fired. Then came the smell. A stupefying odor that, by one account, knocked him unconscious.

His neighbour Sidney Gregg watched what happened next. The thing stood at least eight feet high, with a huge beak and a light as bright as an electric headlight. It descended the telephone pole after the manner of a parrot, using its huge beak. Then it hopped away like a kangaroo.

Shortly after midnight on the fifth night, J.L. Platt, foreman of the brick plant, heard a peculiar sound in the abandoned mine. The town kept watch. Presently the monster emerged from the shaft, accompanied by a smaller one. A score of shots were fired without effect. As the Des Moines Daily News put it, "The reception they received would have sunk the Spanish fleet, but aside from unearthly noise and peculiar odor they did not seem to mind it." Just at dawn, the two returned and disappeared down the shaft. The entrance was then sealed.

The story spread through the Des Moines Daily News and the New York World. "Every man, woman and child in the town is in a state of terror," ran one line. Some journalists mocked the townspeople as hoaxers, victims of a practical joke, or simply "all crazy." Skeptoid episode 1024, "The Van Meter Visitors," treats the whole affair as a century-old hoax revived after 2013. Other suggestions include an owl or great blue heron seen in poor light, mass hysteria, or natural gas venting from the mine. The gas would explain the smell. Not the sightings.

Chad Lewis, co-author of the 2013 book on the case, questioned the hoax theory given the firepower directed at it. People who knew the witnesses describe them as sensible, sober Iowans.

In 2013 Chad Lewis, Noah Voss and Kevin Lee Nelson published The Van Meter Visitor: A True and Mysterious Encounter with the Unknown. Today the town holds the Van Meter Visitor Festival every September, with monster walking tours. Expedition X brought its cameras in 2021. Bat-like sightings in Iowa have been reported into the 2010s.