Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Kentucky Meat Shower

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's a summer kickoff thing. Join today at Simonplus.com. Rewards program Terms Apply. See Simonplus.com for details. Hey guys, it's us. The Jonas Brothers. I'm Joe. I'm Kevin.

And I'm Nick. And guess what? We created our own podcast called, Hey Jonas. Nice. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We get to ask other people to do podcasts.

We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it. But, you know, tired and sick. Listen to Hey Jonas on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jared Jare's here too for Dave. 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 Meat 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 as a trademark.

Also, hat tip to mental floss, IFL science, Scientific American, the Lexington, Kentucky Herald Leader, and Atlas Obscura. Atlas obscure. Great sights. But yes, had 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 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, good. 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 3, 1876, a hopesteader 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. 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 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, 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, 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. And 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 were flecked 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 name Fris Frizby, 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 dinner. And his family being more sensible than he realized that he was going to do this, tried to talk them out of it, found they couldn't. And so some family members held them down while other family members scooped up the meeting, ran outside and threw it away in a place he couldn't find it. That all 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 right after this.

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Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers. And guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, new? Huge news. We created our own podcast called, Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it.

We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts. We're starting a trend. But this one's extra special. So how do we actually come up with a name, Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it.

And we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast where people could call in and say, hey, Jonas. And then I wrote down on my little notepad, Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. All right. 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 was in the end of it because people, you know, people want to know what the heck this thing was. So of course people start surmising and hypothesizing what 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. I saw it describe. 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. There was a water sanitation expert named Leopold Brandeis 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 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. 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 at the time that this stuff somehow ended

up 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. Castambine proposed what is now 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 and of itself now that I 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, you know, 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 poop-pooing these hypotheses because there's a 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. Right. 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 Gowdy, write in and let us know how we did on this. Say it, Chuck. Does that mean short 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.