Short Stuff: Kentucky Meat Shower

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0:59Chuck Bryant:Hey, everybody, we're hitting the road again, starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026. And eventually, Canada, we'll tell you your dates, too.

1:09Josh Clark:That's right. We're going to do at least three legs. And the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. We're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th. And then finally, back at Sketch Fest on the 29th at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.

1:25Chuck Bryant:Yep. And then April 16th, 17th, and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry. You can get all the info you need and buy tickets at stuffyoushouldknow.com. Click on the tour button and thank us later.

1:43Josh Clark:That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

1:52Chuck Bryant:hey and welcome to the short stuff i'm josh and there's chuck and jerry jerry'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?

2:14Josh Clark:Yeah, Kentucky Meat Shower. I could see that.

2:17Chuck Bryant:I want to shout out Ben Fisher, who is a listener who wrote in a while back to suggest this one. So thanks, Ben.

2:25Josh Clark:I hope Ben has that band registered as a trademark.

2:30Chuck Bryant:Also, hat tip to Mental Floss, IFL Science, Scientific American, the Lexington, Kentucky Herald Leader, and Atlas Obscura. Atlas Obscura. Great sites. 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.

2:55Josh Clark:No, I think this is fairly arcane.

2:58Chuck Bryant:Okay, good. You just made me feel a lot better.

3:00Josh Clark:Yeah.

3:02Chuck Bryant: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 hopesteader named Rebecca Crouch was outside her, well, homestead, making soap with her grandson, Alan, when it began to rain meat down on them.

3:28Josh Clark:That's right. We should point out, because this will come up later, that it was a clear sky, so it wasn't like it was rainy and also meat came down. Right, good point. And 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.

3:57Chuck Bryant: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.

4:36Chuck Bryant: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.

4:47Josh Clark: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 i got some

4:56Chuck Bryant:hot dog buns gross but thank god you didn't because that's gross and all this stuff is gross

5:02Josh Clark:uh because this was not just a regular meat it's not like there were little pieces of of tenderloin falling from the sky uh 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 um 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.

5:41Chuck Bryant:Yeah, they weren't like, it tastes like veal or mutton. They just said it kind of looks like cooked veal or mutton. And 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 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 in a place he couldn't find it.

6:12Josh Clark:That all smacks of 1870s news reporting, doesn't it?

6:15Chuck Bryant:It definitely does. But that also smacks of 2026 podcast re-reporting.

6:20Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. Should we take a break?

6:23Chuck Bryant:I think we should. Sure.

6:25Josh Clark:All right. We'll be right back right after this.

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7:35Chuck Bryant:Hey everybody, we're hitting the road again. starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026, and eventually, Canada, we'll tell you your dates, too.

7:45Josh Clark:That's right. We're going to do at least three legs, and the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado, at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. We're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th, and then finally back at Sketchfest on the 29th at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.

8:01Chuck Bryant:Yep, and then April 16th, 17th, and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, in Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry. You can get all the info you need and buy tickets at stuffyoushouldknow.com. Click on the tour button and thank us later.

8:19Josh Clark:That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

8:37All right.

8:38Josh Clark: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 start surmising and hypothesizing what what this meat could have actually been, what animal this could have been.

9:04Chuck Bryant: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 the breeze into the sky, and then when it rained, it rehydrated and fell down as globs that was mistaken for meat.

9:34Josh Clark: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 Brandes 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 agnostic. 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 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.

10:17Chuck Bryant: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 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. Kastenbein proposed what is now widely considered the correct explanation for what exactly happened. And what exactly happened, Chuck?

10:59Josh Clark: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.

11:37Chuck Bryant: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.