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.

The Strangest Creatures Ever Seen in Iowa (Real Sightings, Real Places)

The Van Meter Visitor

It usually happens fast.

 

A shape crossing a road. Something moving where nothing should be. A second too long to be a mistake.

 

Then it’s gone.

 

Most people don’t report it. They tell a friend. Maybe a neighbor. Then they stop talking about it.

 

But the story doesn’t go away.

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.

Eerie Iowa Booke Review

 

Iowa looks calm. Cornfields. Church bells. Pie contests. Then Eerie Iowa comes along and says, “Sure, but have you met the monsters?”

Michael McCarty and Bruce Walters take you down the gravel roads of the Hawkeye State and into the dark. They find a winged thing glowing over Van Meter in 1903. A lake monster curling under Okoboji. Bigfoot, naturally, tromping around Calhoun County like he owns the place.

 

It’s not just stories—they dig up history, too. Facts. Names. Newspaper clippings. All the little details that make you wonder if maybe it really did happen.

 

There’s a Kafka inspired sculpture that looks like it might start whispering to you if you stare too long. And Black Angels straight out of Hell that portend death if you look at them wrong.

 

The writing? Sharp. Weird. A little wicked. The kind that makes you smile right before the hair on your neck stands up. And the pictures. Bruce Walter’s drawings are haunting. Somewhat scary.