Short Stuff: Kentucky Meat Shower

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“I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jared Gears here too.”

For Dave's, so this is short stuff. That'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, meet shower, I can see that. I want to shout out Ben Fisher, who is a listener

who wrote in a while back to suggest this one.

So, thanks, Ben. I hope Ben has that band registered. It's a trademark. Also, head tip to mental floss, IFL science, scientific American, the Lexington Kentucky Harrow leader,

and Atlas Obscura, Atlas Obscura. Great sites. But yes, the head you heard of the Kentucky Meet shower before this chuck is I didn't, I hadn't. I'm just going to come out and say it.

As bad as bad as I wanted to say, like of course I heard this, I had not heard of it. No, I think this is fairly arcane. Okay, get, you just made me feel a lot better. Yeah.

The what we're talking about, we should probably get around to saying is the Kentucky Meet shower took place just over 150 years ago. We just missed the anniversary by two days. March 3rd, 1876, a hope stetter 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 was 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, the smallest 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, yeah, they, 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, Mrs. Crouch and grandson Alan, what indoors,

the livestock in 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 gonna start eating it. And as much as they tried, they couldn't eat it 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 flicked with tissue in 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 gonna say, they did what you would do and they went inside, and I thought you were gonna say, I got some hot dog buns.

- Gross. - Gross. - But thank God you didn't, 'cause that's gross. And all this stuff is gross, 'cause 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 Fris Frisby, believe it or not, who of course he's the butcher, so he's like jerk, 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, I 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 mucous, 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,

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 his stuff and took it home to cook for 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 him down, while other family members scooped up the meat and ran outside and threw it away, and the 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. - All right, we'll be right back

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(upbeat music) - All right, so people stopped eating this meat. They did think 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 I described. And the idea was that 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 sky, so that doesn't hold much water. There was a water sanitation expert named Leopold Brandeez who analyzed 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 nostic. 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. - Mm-hmm. - You know, it kind of looks like a apple, 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. - No, 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

on the breeze and then rain 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,”

chemistry professor named Dr. L. D. Castenbine 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 meeting in 1876. He wrote in the Louisville Medical News that he thought it was a mass-voltage vomiting incident,

not a bad band name in it and it was self,

not that I think about it. But yeah, voltars 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're 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 voltars 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 poopoing 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 voltars overhead

like raining down meat on her 'cause that was a lot of meat. So it would have been a lot of voltars and for years and years, every time somebody offered up this

boulder 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 voltars actually can fly up

to 20,000 feet in the air, 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 voltars, that a committee of voltars flying at 20,000 feet of vomiting down kind of simultaneously on two poor Mrs. Crouch and her yard, she definitely would not be able to see that

with the naked eye. So it isn't entirely possible. It was a mass-volture vomiting event.

- Yeah, and they're never gonna 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 this 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 as samples at a state fair

at the court day 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, that 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.

“- Kirk Cody sounds like a step you should not listen or if you ask me.”

So if you are listening, Professor Cody, right in and let us know how we did on this. Say it, Chuck. Does that mean sure stuff is out? - Stuff you should know is a production of "I Heart Radio."

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