Before Bigfoot, There Was the Lockridge Moster

Tracks in the mud, scatnottered turkey feathers--not human

October 1975. Lockridge, Iowa. Population small enough to know who’s in church and who’s not. Then something started killing turkeys. Not clean kills, either—these birds were torn apart, like something angry had come out of the timber hungry for chaos.

A farmer named Bill Beavers made the first call. Said he found ten-inch footprints stamped deep in the mud, wide as a man’s palm. “Didn’t look like no animal I ever seen,” he told the Fairfield Ledger. The cops came out, looked around, scratched their heads, and left with nothing but cigarette smoke and a few plaster casts that didn’t make sense.

Beavers said he saw it one night—black, hairy, broad shoulders, eyes catching the light. He fired his gun, it ran. Left behind that smell every farm kid knows: wet fur and something rotting. The Des Moines Register ran a short piece about it—“Iowa’s Own Monster,” they called it—and suddenly the little town of Lockridge had more reporters than cattle.

The deputies walked the woods, found broken branches, more tracks, nothing living. Kids dared each other to camp in the fields. Farmers kept their dogs close. Nobody slept right for a week.

Then it ended. The thing—whatever it was—just stopped coming. The tracks dried out, the stories faded. Maybe it was a black bear, someone said. Maybe some kids in a costume. No one ever proved it.

The file closed like it never happened, but the name stuck—The Lockridge Monster. Ask an old-timer in Jefferson County and they’ll tell you it was real enough to make grown men grab their shotguns. Real enough to make the sheriff mutter “Jesus Christ” under his breath.

That’s Iowa for you—flat fields, straight roads, and every once in a while, something crawls out of the dark to remind you this land still has teeth.