The Van Meter Monster

This week, we head to a sleepy coal mining town in Iowa to dig into one of the strangest and most underrated cryptid cases in American history, the Van Meter Monster, a 9-foot, bat-winged, beak-faced, horn-headed creature with a literal blinding searchlight beam shooting from its forehead and a stench so overwhelming witnesses nearly dropped, that terrorized the small town of Van Meter across five consecutive nights starting September 29th, 1903.

We walked through every sighting night by night, starting with U.G. Griffith watching a strange light leap between rooftops on Main Street and vanish into the sky, through a banker, a doctor, a hardware store owner, and multiple other credible townspeople all firing guns at something that simply would not go down, and ending at the old abandoned coal mine where the whole town collectively decided to go see what was happening, which is exactly the decision you’d expect from a town that apparently did not own a single horror movie.