Short Stuff: Kentucky Meat Shower

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Hey and welcome to the short stuff, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jared Gears here

too for Dave, so this is short stuff.

It's right, a rare episode where the title itself is a band name.

Not a good one though.

No.

I guess maybe horror, bluegrass, like a bluegrass misfits cover band maybe.

Yeah, Kentucky meat shower.

I could see that.

I want to shout out Ben Fisher, who is a listener who rode in a while back to suggest this

one.

So, thanks Ben.

I hope Ben has that band registered as a trademark.

So, head tip to mental floss, IFL science, scientific American, the Lexington, Kentucky

Harold leader, and Atlas Obscura, Atlas Obscura.

Great sights.

But yes, the head you heard of the Kentucky meat shower before this Chuck, because I didn't

I hadn't.

I'm just going to come out and say it as badly as badly as I wanted to say, like of course

I'd heard of this.

I had not heard of it.

No, I think this is fairly arcane.

Okay, 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 150 years ago.

We just missed the anniversary by two days on March 3rd, 1876, a hope stutter named Rebecca

Crouch was outside her, well, homestead, making soap with her grandson Alan when it began

to rain meat down on them.

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.

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 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.

Yeah, you could compare them to snowflakes, I think it was the general idea I got.

Obviously, as you would do if meat was raining on you, Mrs. 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 in the yard, so we're going to start eating

it.

As much as they tried, they couldn't eat at all because before, I think like the next

day, a man named Harrison Gill, 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 reflect with tissue and stained with what looked like blood, thorny briars bore

gobs of flesh like Christmas trees from hell.

You know, a second ago, 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 a regular meat, it's not like there were little pieces of tenderloin falling

from the sky.

There was a local butcher named Frizz Frizzby, 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 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.

Yeah, they weren't like it tastes like veal or mutton, they just said it kind of looks

like cooked veal or 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 this stuff and took it home to cook for a dinner and

his family being more sensible than he realized that he was going to do this, tried to talk

him out of it, found they couldn't and so some family members held them down while

other family members scooped up the meat and ran outside and threw it away and a place

he couldn't find it.

That all of the smacks of 1870s news reporting doesn't it?

It definitely does, but that also smacks of 2026 podcast re-reporting.

Yeah, for sure.

Should we take a break?

I think we should, sure.

Alright, we'll be right back right after this.

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Alright, so people stopped eating this meat.

They did think, like maybe we should find out what this is, so they took some samples

to a 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 want to know what the heck this thing was.

So of course people start surmising and hypothesizing what this meat could have actually

been.

What animal this could have been?

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 it described.

And the idea was that this had, well, the spawn had been spread, it dried out, got carried

up in the breeze into the sky, and then when it rained, it rehydrated and fell down

as globs that was mistaken for meat.

That's right.

But it wasn't raining, as we pointed out, it was clear skies, so that doesn't hold much

water.

Right.

There was a water sanitation expert named Leopold Brandes, who analysed the samples and said,

I don't think this is animal at all.

He said, I think it's a cyanobacteria, 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.

Yeah.

I've heard it called star jelly.

You know, it kind of looks like, like, apple butter or apple jelly.

So, you know, that could have been a thing that came down in the rain, but again, it

wasn't raining.

Yeah.

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 ended up

on the breeze and then rained back down, because you couldn't see it until it rehydrated

on the ground, and it wasn't really in the sky anyway.

So not a good theory.

Finally, I think in 1876, the same year, a chemistry professor named Dr. L.D. Kastinbine

proposed what is now can widely considered the correct explanation for what exactly happened,

and what exactly happened, Chuck?

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 1876, he wrote in the Louisville medical news that he thought it was a mass, vulture

vomiting incident, not a bad band name in it and it was self-knowing, they think about

it.

But, yeah, vultures are known to vomit, sometimes 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, and God knows

what kind of meat it was to begin with because they were eating all manner of dead animals.

Exactly.

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.

Yeah, but people didn't stop there as far as poo-pooing 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, 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 guy was right behind him saying there's no way she would

have missed that.

Right.

And then at some point someone told Kurt that vultures actually can fly up to 20,000 feet

in the air.

That's crazy.

And that yes, it would have been quite possible for a flock, actually I think they're

called a vault, a venue, or a committee of vultures, that a committee of vultures flying

at 20,000 feet vomiting down kind of simultaneously onto poor Mrs. Krauch 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.

Yeah.

And 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 test genetically.

So the weirdest part of the story maybe is that later on that art professor said, hey,

maybe I can analyze these flavor compounds and get it made into 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 his 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 that's going rotten, or strawberry pork chops,

which sounds like the best thing out of all of them.

For sure, but Cody told Atlas Obscure that he just frankly finds them vile.

Yeah.

Cody sounds like a stuff you should not listen to if you ask me.

So if you are listening, Professor Cody, write in and let us know how we did on this.

Say it, Chuck.

Does that mean your stuff is out?

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