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| 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.
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| Villisca murder house in 1917 |
No
haunted house gift shops. No fog machines. No one sells ghost tours out of a
van.
It’s
just… normal.
Which
is exactly why these places stick with people.
Nobody
goes looking for something weird out here.
They
just run into it.
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| Jerry Boyd and his wife were offered a good paying job in Iowa City |
Jerry Boyd learned that lesson the hard way back in 1860. Boyd, a free man of color, and his wife, Mary, lived in Galena, Illinois. From all accounts, Jerry was a hardworking man. Twenty years before that, he saved his money and purchased Mary from her previous owner, a man named Vandeventer in St. Louis.
Two men, George
Goodwin (also known as Wilder) and Peter Boulton offered them good paying jobs
if they would move to Iowa City.
A few days later,
Jerry and Mary Boyd, a fourteen-year-old mulatto girl who lived with them, a
younger white girl whom Mrs. Boyd was nursing, and Goodwin and Boulton were
headed west in a covered wagon.
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| Party Taxi Thad Mitchell's body was found in |
If you wanted to take a walk on the wild
side in 1920s Des Moines, Thad (T. W.) Mitchell was your guy. Mitchell ran a
prosperous party-taxi business, a smaller version of today’s party buses.
He carried a book containing the names and
phone numbers of over three hundred clients to whom he acted as a pimp,
chauffeur, and guide, so whether you needed a bottle of moonshine, a woman, or
a safe spot to meet—Mitchell could hook you up.
He ran the Consolidated Taxi Company with
his partner, “Bullets” Richart. The partners had a fleet of six Cadillacs that
ran from 6 p.m. into the wee hours of the morning, transporting passengers to
roadhouses and other rendezvous points. Or just giving them a refuge where they
could make out, drink, and take advantage of the extended backseat as they rode
along.
Off-duty policeman William Winburn found
Mitchell dead in his Cadillac sedan early on December 8, 1922. Mitchell was
seated behind the wheel, with the ignition on and the gear thrown in
reverse.
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.
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| Lieutenant E. Earle Burgess |
E. Earle Burgess, a First Lieutenant in the aviation service at Ellington Field in Texas, thrilled Southerners with a display of aerial gymnastics.
he put on a show for 6,000 Houston residents in early July 1919. A few days later, he parachuted from 6,000 feet, thrilling a crowd of onlookers. Two days later, he leaped from one plane to another at 2,5000 feet over Galveston.
Later that week, he dropped from the landing gear of a Curtis D plane to the rounded top of a Pullman sleeping car pulled by a Southern pacific special.
Burgess was born in Allerton, Iowa, and lived in Des Moines before going into the iar service. Sources said he was leaving the service to become a barnstormer.
