Everyone who knows about the Van Meter Visitor knows about the five nights of terror in October 1903 when a winged creature with a light-emitting horn terrorized the small Iowa town. Credible witnesses. Contemporary documentation. Physical evidence. The whole town saw it, shot at it, and eventually sealed it in an abandoned coal mine. The story became legend.But what almost nobody knows is that the Van Meter Visitor came back.

Eighty years later, in October 1983, a fifteen year old boy and his father went coon hunting in the woods near Van Meter and had an encounter that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. An encounter they never reported. An encounter they swore to keep secret. An encounter that proved the creature was never really trapped at all. This is the story of that night, told in the words of the man who lived through it. 

Now fifty-five years old and finally breaking his silence after his father's death, he recounts in terrifying detail what happened when they encountered something in those dark Iowa woods that shouldn't exist. Something that matched every description from 1903. Something that took their dog Buck and nearly killed their other dog Belle.

Something that couldn't be stopped with bullets or courage or anything else they had. This isn't a vague sighting or a distant glimpse. This is a close encounter with one of America's most documented cryptids, told by someone who was there, who saw it clearly, who watched it fly away with his dog clutched in its talons. It's a story about the things that hunt in the darkness. About the creatures that exist outside our understanding of the natural world.

About the price of seeing something impossible and having to carry that knowledge for forty years.The Van Meter Visitor is real. It never left. And this is the encounter that proves it.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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