The Kentucky Meat Shower Of 1876: It Came Down Like "Snowflakes"

It was March 3, 1876, when the meat-eorological event occurred. Mrs Crouch was apparently outside “making soup” on their farm, which was located a few miles from Olympian Springs in Bath County, Kentucky, when she saw what looked like “beef” falling all around her. The sky was clear, and yet the meat fell to the earth like “like large snowflakes”. Although some pieces reached up to around “three to four inches square”, most of the eerie precipitation was much smaller and finer.

News of the strange, fleshy event spread quickly. According to The New York Times, reporting a week later, the Crouch farm was visited by a Mr Harrison Gill a day later. Gill, whose “veracity” was “unquestionable”, so the newspaper claimed, described seeing “particles of meat sticking to the fences and scattered over the ground”.

The correspondent of the Louisville Commercial also visited the site to corroborate the reports. They verified the flesh-bit’s sizes and explained that “two gentlemen” went so far as to taste the samples. They believed the meat was either mutton or venison.

You may well be asking yourself what exactly was going on at this quiet Kentucky farm 150 years ago? I am sure the contemporary readers of the New York Times were doing similar. Aside from two people making the brave/foolish decision to taste the stuff, what was it that was falling from the sky?

It seems that few people had any immediate answers. Three months after the flesh fell, a man named Leopold Brandeis analyzed some of the pulpy meat that had been preserved for examination. He declared that the “the Kentucky Phenomenon” was not meat at all but rather a type of cyanobacteria that forms jelly-like colonies. This nostoc – otherwise known as “star jelly or, my personal favorite, “Troll’s jelly” – may have looked like beef, but was in fact just this “flesh-colored” organism that isn’t conspicuous when dry, but balloons when wet.

Other scientists had also examined the substance and come to the conclusion that it was either lung tissue from a horse or meat from a human infant, which must have upset the gentlemen taste testers. Others who examined the samples also concluded that the material was possibly lung tissue, or maybe cartilage and muscle tissue.

It seems the mystery concerning the falling meat-stuff had some very mundane answers after all, but they still left questions. Let’s go with the nostoc explanation first. This substance has appeared across the world for centuries and has caused plenty of mystery, but its appearance is contingent on damp conditions to make it all plump and, in this case, fleshy. But if the Crouches are to be believed, there were no clouds in the sky that day in March 1876. Then there’s the lung, cartilage, or baby meat explanation – this may tell us what it was, but it does not help us understand why it fell from the sky.

Then, later that year, Dr L.D. Kastenbine provided a more plausible explanation that covered all the bases. If the explanation that accounts for all the phenomena with the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct, then Kastenbine achieved it. Writing in the Louisville Medical News, he explained that:

“The only plausible theory explanatory of this anomalous shower appears to me to be that suggested by the old Ohio farmer – the disgorgement of some vultures that were sailing over the spot, and from their immense height the particles were scatted by the then prevailing wind over the ground.”

This, he believed, accounted for the variety of tissues discovered and was a known phenomenon. So while the raining meat was likely to belong to some dead animal, we can still conclude that the two gentlemen who tasted the samples would be unhappy with the result.