The Van Meter Visitor

For a few nights in the autumn of 1903, a small farming town in Iowa sat up with its shotguns, waiting for something with wings and a light on its head.

What the town reported

Van Meter is a small town west of Des Moines. As the story is usually retold from the newspapers of the time, it began late one night when a local businessman saw a bright light moving across the rooftops of Main Street — and then the thing carrying it.

Over the next few nights, other respected townspeople said they saw it too: the town doctor, who described being woken by a light through his window and firing at a creature outside; and a bank cashier who sat up in the bank with a shotgun and fired at it when it appeared. The descriptions were strange and consistent: something tall, with great leathery wings, and a single horn on its forehead that threw out a beam of light bright enough to blind.

The cashier is said to have found large three-toed tracks afterwards and taken a plaster cast of one.

The mine

The sightings were eventually traced to an abandoned coal mine at the edge of town. According to the accounts, a crowd gathered there one night, heard a noise from the shaft, and watched not one but two creatures come up out of it — a large one and a smaller one. The men fired. The creatures flew off, the story ends, and were never seen in Van Meter again.

What was it?

Nobody knows, and that is why the story has lasted. Explanations have ranged from a hoax or a newspaper tall tale to a misidentified large bird. For folklorists it is one of the great American creature legends of its era. The town has embraced it: Van Meter holds a festival in the Visitor’s honour each autumn.

Our film: The Light in the Mine

Our story is fiction, set in an invented prairie mining town in October 1903. A winged animal with a beam of light on its brow roosts on the headframe of a failing coal mine. The town wants it dead. The widow who owns the mine finds it nesting in her shaft with its young — and starts to wonder what it has been doing down there all along.

The Light in the Mine is coming soon.