March 25, 2026 • 11 mins
In 1876 it rained meat out of the clear blue sky on a homestead in Bath County, Kentucky. While the mystery of what happened will never be solved, the best explanation makes the story even weirder than it seems.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jeers here too for Dave. So this
is short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
That's right, A rare episode where the title itself is
a band name. Not a good one though, No.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I guess maybe horror Bluegrass like a Bluegrass Misfits cover band.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Maybe Yeah, Kentucky meat Shower, I could see that.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I want to shout out Ben Fisher, who is a
listener who wrote in a while back to suggest this one.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
So thanks Ben, Oh Ben, has that band registered? Is
a trademark?
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Also hat tip to mental floss ifl Science, Scientific American,
The Lexington, Kentucky Herald Leader, and Atlas Obscura Atlas Obscure
great sights. But yes, the had you heard of the
Kentucky Meatchower before this, Chuck? Because I did. I didn't.
I hadn't. I'm just going to come out and say
(01:02):
it as badly as I want to say, like, of
course i'd heard this, I had not heard of it.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
No, I think this is fairly ourcane.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Okay, kid, you just made me feel a lot better. Yeah,
what we're talking about we should probably get around to saying,
is the Kentucky meat shower took place just over one
hundred and fifty years ago. We just missed the anniversary
by two days. On March third, eighteen seventy six, a
Hope Stutter named Rebecca Crouch was outside her Well homestead
(01:33):
making soap with her grandson Alan when it began to
rain meat down on them.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
That's right, we should point out because this will come
up later. That was a clear sky, so it wasn't
like it was rainy. And also meat came down right,
good point. This was just meat that came down, and
they were landing all over the yard, and over the
course of a few minutes it rained down over the
size of about a football field on her farm, these
(02:00):
smallish chunks of meat everywhere, even though she said one
of them was about the size of her palm, but
most of them were smaller than that.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Yeah. Yeah, you could compare them to snowflakes. I think
it was the general idea I got. And so obviously,
as you would do if meat was raining on you,
missus Crouch and grandson Alan went indoors. The livestock and
the cat came to the yard instead, because they were like,
there's a bunch of meat. All of a sudden everywhere
(02:29):
in the yard. So we're gonna start eating it. And
as much as they tried, they couldn't eat at all,
because before I think, like the next day, a man
named Harrison gil He was the first sighted witness to
verify that, yes, there was meat all over their yard.
It was stuck to the fence. Mental floss put it
that the fences were flecked with tissue and stained with
(02:51):
what looked like blood. Thorny briars bore gobs of flesh
like Christmas trees from hell.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
You know. A second again, when I thought very seriously
that you were going to say, they did what you
would do, and they went inside, and I thought you
were going to say, and got some hot dog buns. Gross, gross,
But thank god you didn't, because that's gross. And all
this stuff is gross because this was not just regular meat.
It's not like there were little pieces of tinderlin falling
(03:19):
from the sky. There was a local butcher named Frizz Frisbee,
believe it or not. Who of course he's the butcher.
So he's like, sure, I'll try it. So he put
it in his mouth, he spit it out. And this
was the butcher, and he said he spit it out
after chewing it a little, and he said it had
kind of a milky, watery fluid oozing out of it.
(03:40):
And other people also verified that it was oozy and
also described it as like a brown mucus, similar in
appearance to veal or mutton. But it was awful smelling
and tasting.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Yeah, they weren't like it tastes like veal or mutton.
They just said it kind of looks like cooked veel
er mutton. There was a guy who apparently found all
this quite enticing. He was a neighbor named Eli Willis.
He scooped up like a handful of stuff and took
it home to cook for dinner, and his family, of
being more sensible than he realized that he was going
to do this, tried to talk him out of it,
(04:13):
found they couldn't, and so some family members held him
down while other family members scooped up the meet and
ran outside and threw it away in a place he
couldn't find it.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
That all smacks of eighteen seventies news reporting, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
It definitely does, But that also smacks of twenty twenty
six podcast re reporting.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Should we take a break, I think we should sure, all.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Right, we'll be right back right after this, all right,
(05:06):
So people stopped eating this meat. They did think to like,
maybe we should find out what this is. So they
took some samples to Transylvania University which was close by,
as well as some other places, and eventually things kind
of got back to normal. But that wasn't the end
of it, because people, you know, people want to know
what the heck this thing was, So of course people
(05:27):
start surmising and hypothesizing what this meat could have actually been,
what animal this could have been?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah, and this being a gross event, some of the
theories that they came up with were gross too. One
of them was that it was rehydrated frog spawn, which
is frog ejaculate and eggs mixed together. So I described,
and the idea was that this had well, the spawn
had been spread, it dried out, got carried up in
(05:53):
the breeze into the sky, and then when it rained,
it rehydrated and fell down his glob. That was mistaken for.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Meat, that's right, but it wasn't raining, as we pointed out,
it was clear sky, so that doesn't hold much water.
There was a water sanitation expert named Leopold Brandi's who
analyzed the samples and said, I don't think this is
animal at all. He said, I think it's a cyanobacteria.
(06:22):
And he said, like a low form of vegetable existence.
And I you know, he called it a gnostic And
I've seen this stuff in lakes before, and I've also
seen it on like in forests. I've heard it called
star jelly. You know, it kind of looks like like
a a apple butter apple jelly. So you know, that
(06:43):
could have been a thing that came down in the rain.
But again it wasn't raining, no.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
So just like the frog spawn theory, this one had
a hole in it and that it would require precipitation
to come back down. Also, that was kind of the
prevailing thought at the time that this stuff somehow it
up on the breeze and then rained back down because
you couldn't see it until it rehydrated on the ground
(07:06):
and it wasn't really in the sky anyway, So not
a good theory. Finally, I think in eighteen seventy six,
the same year chemistry professor named doctor ld. Cast and
Bind proposed what is now widely considered the correct explanation
for what exactly happened and what exactly happened Chuck.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Well, it doesn't make it any less gross to sort
of find out what it was. In fact, it probably
makes it more gross than mystery meat. In eighteen seventy six,
he wrote in the Louisville Medical News that he thought
it was a mass vulture vomiting incident. Not a bad
band name in and of itself, now that I think
about it, but yeah, vultures are known to vomit. Sometimes
(07:50):
it's to lighten their weight while flying, which would have
made sense in this case, or as a defense mechanism.
But yeah, he was like, you guys were eating vulture
vomit is what you were doing in God knows what
kind of meat it was to begin with, because they
were eating, you know, all manner of dead animals exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, so they ate what had been decomposing animal flesh
initially eaten by vultures and then thrown back up, and
then those guys tasted it. I just want to make
sure that that is fully clear, because that is what
happened in Kentucky when those locals put that in their
mouth and tried to see what it was.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, but people didn't stop there as far as poopooing
these hypotheses, because this guy named Kurt Goda, who's an
art professor, and he was like, hey, man, I've been
studying this thing for two decades. I guess I haven't
had a lot to do. And there's no way that
she would have missed this large group of vultures overhead
(08:48):
like raining down meat on her, because that was a
lot of meat. So it would have been a lot
of vultures. And for years and years, every time somebody
offered up this vulture vomit thing, it seemed like this
Kurt I was right behind him saying there's no way
she would have missed.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
That, right, And then at some point someone told Kurt
that vultures actually can fly up to twenty thousand feet
in the air. It's crazy, and that yes, it would
have been quite possible for a flock. Actually, I think
they're called a volt a venue or a committee of vultures.
(09:23):
That a committee of vultures flying at twenty thousand feet
vomiting down kind of simultaneously onto poor missus Crouch in
her yard. She definitely would not be able to see
that with the naked eye. So it is entirely possible.
It was a mass vulture vomiting event.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, and you know they're never going to solve this thing, obviously.
I think they did have tissue samples, but not the
kind of thing that's still around today to like test genetically.
So the weirdest part of this story maybe is that
later on that art professor said, Hey, maybe I can
a loize these flavor compounds and get it made into
(10:03):
a jelly bean. So he did that. He took it
to a jelly bean maker and they made Kentucky meat
shower jelly beans, and he gave him out as samples
at a state fair at the Court Days Festival and said,
just tell me what it tastes like, and you can
have one of these Kentucky meat shower jelly beans. And
people said, well, maybe bacon before it's cooked, maybe lamb
(10:26):
that's going rotten, or strawberry pork chops, which sounds like
the best thing out of all of.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Them for sure, But Gody told Atlas Obscure that he
just frankly finds them vile. Yeah, Kurt Gody, sounds like
a stuff you should know, listener, if you ask me. So,
if you are listening, Professor Gody bright In and let
us know how we did on this. Say it, Chuck?
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Does that mean sure? Stuff is out? Stuff You Should
Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to
my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jeers here too for Dave. So this
is short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
That's right, A rare episode where the title itself is
a band name. Not a good one though, No.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
I guess maybe horror Bluegrass like a Bluegrass Misfits cover band.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Maybe Yeah, Kentucky meat Shower, I could see that.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I want to shout out Ben Fisher, who is a
listener who wrote in a while back to suggest this one.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
So thanks Ben, Oh Ben, has that band registered? Is
a trademark?
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Also hat tip to mental floss ifl Science, Scientific American,
The Lexington, Kentucky Herald Leader, and Atlas Obscura Atlas Obscure
great sights. But yes, the had you heard of the
Kentucky Meatchower before this, Chuck? Because I did. I didn't.
I hadn't. I'm just going to come out and say
(01:02):
it as badly as I want to say, like, of
course i'd heard this, I had not heard of it.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
No, I think this is fairly ourcane.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Okay, kid, you just made me feel a lot better. Yeah,
what we're talking about we should probably get around to saying,
is the Kentucky meat shower took place just over one
hundred and fifty years ago. We just missed the anniversary
by two days. On March third, eighteen seventy six, a
Hope Stutter named Rebecca Crouch was outside her Well homestead
(01:33):
making soap with her grandson Alan when it began to
rain meat down on them.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
That's right, we should point out because this will come
up later. That was a clear sky, so it wasn't
like it was rainy. And also meat came down right,
good point. This was just meat that came down, and
they were landing all over the yard, and over the
course of a few minutes it rained down over the
size of about a football field on her farm, these
(02:00):
smallish chunks of meat everywhere, even though she said one
of them was about the size of her palm, but
most of them were smaller than that.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Yeah. Yeah, you could compare them to snowflakes. I think
it was the general idea I got. And so obviously,
as you would do if meat was raining on you,
missus Crouch and grandson Alan went indoors. The livestock and
the cat came to the yard instead, because they were like,
there's a bunch of meat. All of a sudden everywhere
(02:29):
in the yard. So we're gonna start eating it. And
as much as they tried, they couldn't eat at all,
because before I think, like the next day, a man
named Harrison gil He was the first sighted witness to
verify that, yes, there was meat all over their yard.
It was stuck to the fence. Mental floss put it
that the fences were flecked with tissue and stained with
(02:51):
what looked like blood. Thorny briars bore gobs of flesh
like Christmas trees from hell.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
You know. A second again, when I thought very seriously
that you were going to say, they did what you
would do, and they went inside, and I thought you
were going to say, and got some hot dog buns. Gross, gross,
But thank god you didn't, because that's gross. And all
this stuff is gross because this was not just regular meat.
It's not like there were little pieces of tinderlin falling
(03:19):
from the sky. There was a local butcher named Frizz Frisbee,
believe it or not. Who of course he's the butcher.
So he's like, sure, I'll try it. So he put
it in his mouth, he spit it out. And this
was the butcher, and he said he spit it out
after chewing it a little, and he said it had
kind of a milky, watery fluid oozing out of it.
(03:40):
And other people also verified that it was oozy and
also described it as like a brown mucus, similar in
appearance to veal or mutton. But it was awful smelling
and tasting.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Yeah, they weren't like it tastes like veal or mutton.
They just said it kind of looks like cooked veel
er mutton. There was a guy who apparently found all
this quite enticing. He was a neighbor named Eli Willis.
He scooped up like a handful of stuff and took
it home to cook for dinner, and his family, of
being more sensible than he realized that he was going
to do this, tried to talk him out of it,
(04:13):
found they couldn't, and so some family members held him
down while other family members scooped up the meet and
ran outside and threw it away in a place he
couldn't find it.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
That all smacks of eighteen seventies news reporting, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
It definitely does, But that also smacks of twenty twenty
six podcast re reporting.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Should we take a break, I think we should sure, all.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Right, we'll be right back right after this, all right,
(05:06):
So people stopped eating this meat. They did think to like,
maybe we should find out what this is. So they
took some samples to Transylvania University which was close by,
as well as some other places, and eventually things kind
of got back to normal. But that wasn't the end
of it, because people, you know, people want to know
what the heck this thing was, So of course people
(05:27):
start surmising and hypothesizing what this meat could have actually been,
what animal this could have been?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah, and this being a gross event, some of the
theories that they came up with were gross too. One
of them was that it was rehydrated frog spawn, which
is frog ejaculate and eggs mixed together. So I described,
and the idea was that this had well, the spawn
had been spread, it dried out, got carried up in
(05:53):
the breeze into the sky, and then when it rained,
it rehydrated and fell down his glob. That was mistaken for.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Meat, that's right, but it wasn't raining, as we pointed out,
it was clear sky, so that doesn't hold much water.
There was a water sanitation expert named Leopold Brandi's who
analyzed the samples and said, I don't think this is
animal at all. He said, I think it's a cyanobacteria.
(06:22):
And he said, like a low form of vegetable existence.
And I you know, he called it a gnostic And
I've seen this stuff in lakes before, and I've also
seen it on like in forests. I've heard it called
star jelly. You know, it kind of looks like like
a a apple butter apple jelly. So you know, that
(06:43):
could have been a thing that came down in the rain.
But again it wasn't raining, no.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
So just like the frog spawn theory, this one had
a hole in it and that it would require precipitation
to come back down. Also, that was kind of the
prevailing thought at the time that this stuff somehow it
up on the breeze and then rained back down because
you couldn't see it until it rehydrated on the ground
(07:06):
and it wasn't really in the sky anyway, So not
a good theory. Finally, I think in eighteen seventy six,
the same year chemistry professor named doctor ld. Cast and
Bind proposed what is now widely considered the correct explanation
for what exactly happened and what exactly happened Chuck.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Well, it doesn't make it any less gross to sort
of find out what it was. In fact, it probably
makes it more gross than mystery meat. In eighteen seventy six,
he wrote in the Louisville Medical News that he thought
it was a mass vulture vomiting incident. Not a bad
band name in and of itself, now that I think
about it, but yeah, vultures are known to vomit. Sometimes
(07:50):
it's to lighten their weight while flying, which would have
made sense in this case, or as a defense mechanism.
But yeah, he was like, you guys were eating vulture
vomit is what you were doing in God knows what
kind of meat it was to begin with, because they
were eating, you know, all manner of dead animals exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, so they ate what had been decomposing animal flesh
initially eaten by vultures and then thrown back up, and
then those guys tasted it. I just want to make
sure that that is fully clear, because that is what
happened in Kentucky when those locals put that in their
mouth and tried to see what it was.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, but people didn't stop there as far as poopooing
these hypotheses, because this guy named Kurt Goda, who's an
art professor, and he was like, hey, man, I've been
studying this thing for two decades. I guess I haven't
had a lot to do. And there's no way that
she would have missed this large group of vultures overhead
(08:48):
like raining down meat on her, because that was a
lot of meat. So it would have been a lot
of vultures. And for years and years, every time somebody
offered up this vulture vomit thing, it seemed like this
Kurt I was right behind him saying there's no way
she would have missed.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
That, right, And then at some point someone told Kurt
that vultures actually can fly up to twenty thousand feet
in the air. It's crazy, and that yes, it would
have been quite possible for a flock. Actually, I think
they're called a volt a venue or a committee of vultures.
(09:23):
That a committee of vultures flying at twenty thousand feet
vomiting down kind of simultaneously onto poor missus Crouch in
her yard. She definitely would not be able to see
that with the naked eye. So it is entirely possible.
It was a mass vulture vomiting event.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, and you know they're never going to solve this thing, obviously.
I think they did have tissue samples, but not the
kind of thing that's still around today to like test genetically.
So the weirdest part of this story maybe is that
later on that art professor said, Hey, maybe I can
a loize these flavor compounds and get it made into
(10:03):
a jelly bean. So he did that. He took it
to a jelly bean maker and they made Kentucky meat
shower jelly beans, and he gave him out as samples
at a state fair at the Court Days Festival and said,
just tell me what it tastes like, and you can
have one of these Kentucky meat shower jelly beans. And
people said, well, maybe bacon before it's cooked, maybe lamb
(10:26):
that's going rotten, or strawberry pork chops, which sounds like
the best thing out of all of.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Them for sure, But Gody told Atlas Obscure that he
just frankly finds them vile. Yeah, Kurt Gody, sounds like
a stuff you should know, listener, if you ask me. So,
if you are listening, Professor Gody bright In and let
us know how we did on this. Say it, Chuck?
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Does that mean sure? Stuff is out? Stuff You Should
Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to
my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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