Has Bigfoot Been Spotted In Iowa? The Strangest Sightings On Record

 

Most people don’t think of Iowa when they think of Bigfoot.

 

They think of the Pacific Northwest. Giant pine trees. Fog. Mountains. Hairy creature stomping through the woods of Washington or Oregon.

 

Iowa gets left out of that conversation. We’re supposed to be cornfields, small towns, and tractors rolling down two-lane roads.

 

That’s what makes the stories fun.

 

Over the years, stories have leaked out about Iowans seeing something big, dark, hairy, and not quite right. It’s not just campfire talk either. Some of these stories made the newspapers and TV. Regular people went on record, saying they saw something they couldn’t explain.

 

Bigfoot made a front-page appearance in the Des Moines Register in August 1977. Their source was Cliff LaBrecque, a self-styled Bigfoot specialist who said he’d spent twelve years tracking the creature through Iowa.

He hadn’t caught it. Couldn’t say whether or not it was real.

 

Now, do I think a family of Sasquatches is living behind a dumpster outside Mike’s Fun Foods in Clinton?

 

Probably not.

 

But I think Iowa has the right places for stories like that to grow.

 

Take Ottosen. A tiny town in Humboldt County. Back in the 1970s, locals reported seeing a large, hairy creature near town. Once talk like that starts, it takes on a life of its own. Somebody sees something tromping along the road. Somebody else hears crashing in the trees. Then your cousin finds tracks down by the creek.

 

The next thing you know, everybody’s talking about the monster in Ottosen.

 

And that’s where it gets interesting. In a big city, weird stories get swallowed up. In a small town, they stick.

 

In July 1978, Humboldt County got a fresh round of scares. People reported weird screams in the night. Fences were found broken. Some cattle were dead or injured. A creature watched Anna Dodrill through her kitchen window. It wandered into Robert Newell’s barn. Mark Thompson saw it in his soybean field. A group of high school kids saw it, too.

 

That’s how legends spread. Not all at once, but house by house, field by field.

 

Then, in 1979, Byron Davis told the Des Moines Register he saw a strange creature by the Boone River. It was seven feet tall and weighed upwards of 450 pounds, with long, thick red hair. And it didn’t look like a man or an ape.

 

That’s the detail that always hooks people. Not just that something was seen, but that the witness insists it didn’t fit anything familiar.

 

The Des Moines Register didn’t stop there. In its November 12, 1978 issue, the paper cataloged ten Bigfoot sightings from around Iowa. A woman in Knoxville saw one standing eight to ten feet tall and weighing as much as 700 pounds. Some high school students saw one on a dirt road in the Dean Bottoms. The next day they found strange three-toed footprints.

The Daily Nonpareil ran a story in September 2013, detailing the findings of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization out of Montana. They had documented 62 reported Iowa Bigfoot sightings between 1970 and 2013.

 

That’s a lot of Bigfoot sightings for a state better known for seed corn.

 

Something happened in West Bend several years later. In 2014, the Storm Lake Times ran a story with the headline "Bigfoot Lives Near West Bend." Area residents talked about odd noises, tracks, and sightings in the countryside.

 

What I love about this one is that people didn’t describe a giant monster. It was smaller, around five feet tall.

 

That feels more believable somehow.

 

Not because I think there’s a short Bigfoot wandering around Palo Alto County, but because real sightings are normally messy. People don’t all report the same neat movie-version creature.

 

They report quick glimpses. Shapes. Movement. Something crossing a ditch line faster than it should. Something in the shadows. 

 

And if there are pictures, they’re grainy. Black and white. With maybe a hint of something you can barely see.

 

That’s how these things usually work.

 

If Bigfoot ever wandered Iowa, it wouldn’t be standing in the middle of a cornfield waving at traffic. It’d stay as far away from crazy farmers toting shotguns as it could.

 

People who’ve never been in Northeast Iowa picture the state as flat. Just fields of corn and beans. Then they drive up into the Driftless Area and realize that’s not true. There are steep ridges, heavy woods, deep hollows, limestone bluffs, cold streams, and roads that twist through dark valleys. Some of it feels more like Wisconsin or Appalachia.

 

That’s why TV crews came to Yellow River State Forest. If you’re looking for spooky woods, that’s a good place to start.

 

And if you’ve ever been in timber like that after dark, you know how little it takes to get your imagination moving. A branch snaps. Something splashes in the creek. An owl hoots. You hear footsteps that are probably deer but sound heavier—like a monster lumbering out of the woods.

 

Every shadow turns into a hairy monster, ten feet tall.

 

That’s the real fuel behind most Bigfoot sightings. Not monsters. Atmosphere.

 

Still, not every witness should be laughed off. Most people who report strange things aren’t trying to get their name in the paper. They’re embarrassed and know what they're saying sounds crazy. They usually start out saying something like, “You can believe me or not, but…”

 

That’s not someone perpetrating a hoax. It’s someone who saw something odd and can’t fit it into a box.

 

Most sightings probably have normal explanations.

 

A deer can look shockingly strange in low light. If one rears, jumps, or turns sideways in headlights, it can look like a creature from another planet. Bears are rare here, but they crawl out of the woods occasionally. Large dogs, people in heavy coats, shadows, distance, nerves—given the right circumstances—they can look like monsters.

 

Memory matters too.

 

Somebody sees a shape at dusk. Ten years later, the story becomes clearer, bigger, hairier, and more dramatic than it was on the night it happened. That’s human nature.

 

But I’ll say this.

 

Mississippi River towns have steep, timbered hills and ravines. Southern Iowa has rough brush country and creek bottoms. Old railroad grades vanish into the woods. There are places where you can be a hundred yards from a road and feel lost.

 

That’s where legends grow.

 

And maybe that’s why people like Bigfoot stories so much. They remind us that the world isn’t fully explained. We still like the idea that something unknown might step across a gravel road and disappear before we get a good look.

 

A little mystery keeps the blood pumping.

 

Personally, I don’t think there’s a large population of them hiding in Iowa. But do I think people have seen things they couldn’t explain.

 

That’s enough to spark a story. And once a place gets a story, every strange sound after that belongs to it.

 

That’s how Ottosen and West Bend became Bigfoot country. It’s why people still whisper about strange creatures in the Northeast Iowa woods.

 

Do I believe in Bigfoot?

 

Maybe.

 

Do I believe Iowa has produced some great Bigfoot stories?

 

Without question.

 

And if you find yourself driving a lonely gravel road some fall night, with timber on both sides and your headlights barely cutting the dark, and something big moves just beyond the ditch line…

 

You’ll understand why the stories never quite die.

 

If you’ve ever said “I remember that place”… this blog is for you.

 

I dig up the stories, the lost stores, the old Iowa you don’t see anymore. No clickbait. No junk. Just real nostalgia.

 

If you enjoy it, consider tossing a few bucks in the tip jar. It helps keep this thing going.

 

Buy me a Big Gulp / Support Retro Iowa