Rock history doesn’t usually come with teeth marks. But on the night of January 20th, 1982, in Des Moines, IA, Ozzy Osbourne leaned into immortality and came away with a mouthful of bat.
The Night Of The Bat
It happened midway through a show at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium, during the Diary of a Madman tour, when something dark and winged landed at Osbourne‘s feet. In the middle of the chaos, Ozzy did what Ozzy had trained the world to expect: he picked it up and bit its head clean off. By accident. Sorta.
“I thought it was rubber,” Osbourne would say later, repeating the line for decades like a cursed chorus. Then came the realization. “My mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid,” he wrote in his autobiography I Am Ozzy. “Then the head in my mouth twitched.”
Whether the bat was alive or already dead remains one of the great theological disputes of metal lore. A 2004 Rolling Stone article said it was alive. Mark Neal, the 17-year-old who threw it onstage, insisted it was long dead — sealed in a baggie, weeks removed from any semblance of flight. Osbourne himself has told versions of the story that include being bitten back. What everyone agrees on is the aftermath: the show ended, Ozzy went to the hospital, and the rabies shots began.
A Career Made On Spectacle
By 1982, Osbourne was already a walking headline. As the original frontman of Black Sabbath, he’d helped invent heavy metal, wrapping blues riffs in dread and giving Satan a soundcheck. Fired from the band in 1979 for excess even by Sabbath standards, Ozzy rebounded with Blizzard of Ozz, a solo career powered by the virtuosic guitar work of Randy Rhoads and a stage show that leaned hard into horror-movie spectacle.
On the Diary of a Madman tour, Osbourne had taken things further. Raw meat featuring pig intestines and calves’ livers was catapulted into the crowd nightly. Fans returned the favor. Sheep testicles. Live frogs. The bat didn’t seem out of place. Until it was.
The Aftermath Of The Bat-Biting Incident
Osbourne was rushed to Broadlawns Medical Center after the show, where staff quickly realized they were treating more than a patient. “For a week, that was probably 50 percent of my job,” recalled nurse supervisor Pam Culver. Calls poured in from around the world. Did it hurt? How many shots? Where did they inject him?
Even Des Moines felt the aftershocks. By October, the auditorium banned performers from using live animals onstage without management approval — a sentence that exists in history solely because Ozzy Osbourne once mistook a bat for a prop.
Ozzy Osbourne & The Bat: Forever Intertwined
If the bat incident was accidental, its afterlife was anything but. Osbourne leaned into it, monetized it, and eventually embalmed it in pop culture. Plush bats with detachable heads sold out on his website. In 2022, he launched Cryptobatz, turning the moment into NFTs for a generation raised on digital mythmaking.
Still, the bat became an albatross. It followed him through millions of album sales, through the rise of Ozzfest, through reality-TV superstardom on The Osbournes, through two Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductions — first with Black Sabbath in 2006, then as a solo artist in 2024. No matter how much ground Ozzy covered, Des Moines stayed embossed in his skull.
“I’ve had some mileage from Des Moines,” he told The Des Moines Register in 2001, before returning to the same auditorium for the first time since the incident.
Rolling Stone would later rank the bat-biting No. 2 on its list of “Rock’s Wildest Myths,” which feels about right. Who the hell can forget such an incident? Ozzy himself never did. He complained about the questions, but he also understood the deal.
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