Tall Tales and Cornstalks: Whoppers Told in the Hawkeye State

Tall Tales and Cornstalks is Iowa like you’ve never seen it. A place where ghost steamboats drift silently upriver, bulls bend rivers with their horns, and something with wings once clawed its way out of a coal mine near Van Meter.This isn’t your eighth-grade state history. Here, you’ll meet cryptids that lurk in cornfields, angels that turn black as night, and a hermit in the cliffs who may or may not have been talking to God. Some of these stories are straight out of newspaper clippings. Some come from the dusty corners of folklore. And a few? Well, they just felt too good not to tell.Whether you believe every word, laugh at the obvious whoppers, or fall somewhere in between, Tall Tales and Cornstalks is a love letter to Iowa’s weirdest whispers—written for anyone who’s ever stared down a gravel road and thought, something strange happened here.So go ahead. Step into the mist, the myth, and the maybe. Just watch where you walk. The ground has a way of remembering what we forget.