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