Eerie Iowa: The Hawkeye State's Darker Side

[Publisher's note: The local authors Bruce Walters (Professor Emeritus) and Michael McCarty (Five-time Bram Stoker Finalist) are hosting a book signing and discussion October 25^th from 2-5pm at Barnes and Noble inside Northpark Mall in Davenport, Iowa and again on November 20^th from 1:30 to 2:30pm at the Bettendorf Public Library.]

Overhead, Iowa's landscape is a quilt of green patches of cornfields stitched together by highways that connect its 934 cities. It’s a picturesque Grant Wood painting of rural America.

But from the ground, these fields feel very different. If you’ve ever walked through endless rows of corn, you’ll know viscerally how eerie and disorienting they can be. The towering stalks create narrow corridors of vegetation, limiting what can be seen or heard. When the wind stirs the stalks, it feels as if something is moving in the field just out of sight. In the famous movie Field of Dreams, the ghosts of long-dead baseball players emerge not from a graveyard, but from the corn itself.

The word eerie shares certain qualities with mystery – both involve an awareness of the unknown. But eeriness is unsettling. A drive along a lonely rural road at dusk, with fields stretching endlessly to the horizon, is a liminal experience. These spaces in Iowa capture a haunting quiet – a sense of being suspended between past and present, civilization and wilderness, the seen and the unseen.

Sigmund Freud explored eeriness in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche).” He described eeriness as something both familiar and unfamiliar – an experience where what was hidden or repressed suddenly comes to light.

These moments provoke unease precisely because they disturb our sense of the ordinary. Carl Jung’s work on myths and symbols often intersects with the eerie. He believed that symbols emerge from the unconscious, expressing deep fears, desires or unresolved tensions. Archetypes such as the trickster or shadow figure in myths embody this unsettling, mysterious quality. Jung and Freud offer a rich framework for understanding why certain places, images or feelings evoke a deep sense of unease.

Don’t simply follow the path to the places Michael McCarty and I have written about in the new book Eerie Iowa. Open the door you haven’t dared to open and witness the darker side of the Hawkeye State.

The farmlands and rural areas of Iowa are no stranger to the weird, dark and mysterious. Learn about a terrestrial sighting from 1903, a creepy cryptid that terrorized the town of Van Meter.

Illustration above by Bruce Walters depicts one of the stories regarding UFO encounters in Iowa which has its own chapter in the new book “Eerie Iowa”.

Find out about Bigfoot sightings in Calhoun County. Peer under the waters of Lake Okoboji to find a huge lake monster. Read the history of a frightening sculpture based on a story by Franz Kafka and hear a premonition that predicted a devastating fire. Eerie Iowa recounts in words, photos, and original illustrations a twisted path through Gothic Iowa's shadowy history. Do you dare follow?

Illustration above by Bruce Walters depticts the “Earling Exorcism” was a 28-day battle with a demon that inspired both the book and film The Exorcist. Emma Schmidt (a.k.a. Anna Ecklund), illustrated here by Bruce Walters, was a woman living in Iowa whose alleged demonic possession and exorcism occurred over several decades, culminating in an extensive exorcism that lasted from August 18 to December 23, 1928, in Earling, Iowa. Ecklund's case is considered by theologians and scholars of the paranormal to be one of the most abundantly documented cases of demonic possession in the 20th century, its coverage including a profile in a 1936 issue of Time magazine.