Did This Really Happen?! The Van Meter Visitor of 1903 and the Paranormal Legacy Sealed Inside an Abandoned Iowa Coal Mine


 In September and October of 1903 the small rural Iowa farming community of Van Meter was terrorized for five nights by an unknown winged creature that many described as being both half-bat and half human and, that some say, emitted beams of light from its forehead not unlike those of a coal miner's headlamp.  The creature was said to bounce from rooftop to rooftop, cackling and screaming like a banshee while emitting a foul smelling odor like sulphur or rotten eggs--an odor so awful that many witnesses became faint and passed out from terror and the overpowering stench.  

Each and every night for an entire week during October of 1903 the odiferous humanoid cackling creature, or creatures, appeared to terrorize the residents of Van Meter, Iowa who dubbed their cryptid the “Van Meter Visitor”.  And then, after a posse of local men armed with shotguns and revolvers chased the creature into the shaft of an abandoned coal mine on the outskirts of town, the Van Meter Visitor which had been impervious to gunfire (along with one of its young who had been waiting for it to return many reported) disappeared without a trace into the coal mine deep beneath the earth’s surface never to reappear again--or did it?

Downtown Van Meter circa 1900

Today, Van Meter, Iowa is a quaint all-American midwestern town that is home to about fifteen hundred people.  It is part of the greater Des Moines metropolitan area and is probably best known for being the hometown of legendary Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller and as the location of the Iowa Veterans Cemetery which honors the thousands of brave men and women from the Hawkeye State who have given their lives in service to our country over the past two-hundred fifty years.  

Back in 1903 Van Meter was even smaller than it is today.  Founded in 1869 and named after Dutch settlers who had only recently immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands,  Van Meter in October of 1903 was an extremely close knit rural community of just over four hundred people.

It would appear that the first reported sighting of the Van Meter Visitor occurred in late September of 1903.  Iowa’s own PBS station, PBS Iowa which did a short documentary on the Van Meter Visitor in October of 2024 stated, “The creature was first sighted by a respectable local businessman who saw it perched atop a building.”

Rendering from Newspaper October 1903

Many primary and secondary sources, as well, claim that the first sighting of the Van Meter Visitor was by a doctor, most possibly the only doctor in Van Meter, Iowa back in 1903, named L.L. Abernathy who went out walking his dog on the night of September 29, 1903 and reportedly saw the large creature perched atop the local bank.

After this initial sighting by one of the town’s most respected and learned individuals, over the next week sightings of the Van Meter Visitor took off in what may have been a great example of localized mass hysteria and hallucination.

Some said that they saw the winged Visitor perched atop telephone poles and others even reported that they saw the unknown creature almost casually strolling down mainstreet in Van Meter!

It’s interesting to note that at this time descriptions of the Van Meter Visitor were all very similar, though the size witnesses reported  did vary and ranged anywhere from seven feet in height all the way up to a massive twelve feet tall with a thirty foot wingspan--though all reports agreed that the creature, or creatures that the residents of Van Meter encountered at the beginning of October 1903, had a strong resemblance to a prehistoric pterodactyl with the ability to walk upright like a human being.

On October 3 after a week of being terrorized and with the town literally up in arms over it's supernatural or long believed to be extinct Visitor, the men of Van Meter--mostly small farmers and shopkeepers--banded together and formed an armed posse to capture or kill the creature.

On that night, about two townspeople armed with shotguns and revolvers, chased the creature outside of town to the entrance of an abandoned coal mine shaft that lay adjacent to a brickyard.

It seems that, while being chased by the armed townspeople, the Van Meter Visitor had alternately flown and ran for its life--while shooting beams of light out of its forehead.  The members of the posse shot at the creature but to no avail.  The Des Moines Register for October 4, 1903 reported though that once the Visitor reached the entrance to the coal mine, “The noise opened up again as though Satan and a regiment of imps were coming forth for the battle.”

Original article Des Moines Register 1903

At this point, witnesses reported that at the entrance to the mine two creatures emerged, one smaller than the other, and in a blinding flash of light disappeared down the subterranean tunnel (or flew away as some reports would have it) and left behind an overpowering stench that caused the armed mob of locals to retch and vomit where they stood.

The bravest of the men shot their weapons at the two creatures, and even chased them into the mine, but it was all to no avail.  As the Des Moines Register reported, “The reception they received would have sunk the Spanish Fleet, but aside from an unearthly noise, and a peculiar odor, they did not seem to mind it, but slowly descended the shaft of the old mine.”

Stunned by what they had witnessed, not one but two creatures descending into the mine like subterranean visitors from Hell itself, the residents of Van Meter set about sealing the mine with earth and rocks, never to be reopened again.

And so was born the Legend of the Van Meter Visitor, one of the most inexplicable, intense and frankly most unexplainable paranormal or cryptid encounters in American History.

Although the two weeks, or so, that spanned the end of September and beginning of October 1903, may have been the high point of the terror--they certainly were not the end of the Van Meter Visitor.

Each and every year, beginning at the end of September, the town of Van Meter to this day holds its “Van Meter Visitor Festival” to commemorate its cryptozoological/paranormal legacy.  The official tourism website for the state of Iowa, www.traveliowa.com  says of the event, “Come experience the legend of the Van Meter Visitor.  In 1903 the small town was attacked by a giant eight foot bat-like creature that terrorized the town for five nights.  Each year the town celebrates its unique history with the Van Meter Visitor Festival.  Complete with paranormal speakers, cool vendors, food & drink and guided walking tours where you get to see the spots where townsfolk spotted the monster and blasted at it with everything they had.”

Despite being embraced by the same townsfolk who blasted at it with everything they had and so unceremoniously tried to kill what they did not understand back in 1903--the Van Meter Visitor, at least according to some, has not lain dormant for the last 122 years.

In the 1980’s a new resident to Van Meter, who had never heard about the legend before, was out walking his dog by the old sealed up coal mine when he reported that a giant 8 foot long winged batlike creature flew right over his head.

In 2006 a Pastor with a congregation in Colfax, Iowa was driving through Van Meter at night when he reported seeing what he described as a, “Dragon-like” creature flying over his car as he drove down the road.  The Pastor said that upon reaching home he googled the words “Iowa Dragon” and came across a rendering of the Van Meter Visitor--the exact creature that he claims to have seen.

As recently as 2020, residents in rural Iowa around the area of Van Meter have reported sightings and encounters with what they have described as giant birds.


The truth about the Van Meter Visitor will probably never be known.  Was it a mass hysteria gone out of control; nothing but a simple case of rural townsfolk misidentifying a large flock of birds for something supernatural or unknown?  Perhaps, the Visitor was proof that dinosaurs did still exist beneath the earth millions of years after science had believed that they were long extinct?  Or maybe, the Van Meter Visitor is something the likes of which is not even known by science to this very day?

Unfortunately, the answers to these questions might just be sealed up inside an abandoned Iowa coal mine forever…

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