Exploring the Astonishing Mystery of the 1876 Kentucky Meat Shower

The morning of Friday, March 3, 1876, broke bright and clear over Olympian Springs, located in northeastern Kentucky. A gentle breeze brushed across the Crouch family farm, where Mrs. Crouch was busy making soap in the yard. Then, just before noon, something utterly unexpected began to fall from the sky.

“Why, grandma, it’s snowing!” exclaimed Mrs. Crouch’s young grandson, Allen. But what rained down upon the land for the next several minutes wasn’t snow—it was grotesque, slippery pieces of flesh, some as long as Mrs. Crouch’s hand.

For a dreadful moment, as she later recounted to a reporter, Mrs. Crouch feared that her “husband and son, who were away, had been torn to pieces and their remains were being carried home... by the wind.”

Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. But what, then, had really happened?

Am-ooze Bouche

It wasn’t long before word of the mysterious meat shower spread across the country. The New York Times printed the headline: “Flesh Descending in a Shower” the following week. The New York Herald took it further by dispatching a reporter from Louisville to investigate the strange event.

The unnamed reporter from the Herald scurried around town collecting information from a variety of residents. At the heart of his investigation were the Crouches. Mrs. Crouch had hurried indoors soon after the strange shower began, but she estimated that at least half a bushel (about 4 gallons) of fleshy chunks had fallen. When Mr. Crouch came home that afternoon, he took stock of the aftermath, which covered an area of about an acre. The fences were dotted with tissue and stained with what appeared to be blood; thorny bushes were draped with clumps of meat, resembling nightmarish Christmas trees.

The horrific scene appeared to go unnoticed by the Crouches’ hogs, chickens, cat, and dog—all of whom “had been eating [the meat] freely, and seemed to like it well,” according to Mrs. Crouch. (Although the dog did later fall ill under suspicious circumstances later that month.)

Mr. Crouch gathered several samples and passed some of them to Harrison Gill, the proprietor of Olympian Springs, who preserved them in alcohol. Other pieces were bravely consumed by locals—like 27-year-old butcher L.C. “Friz” Frisbe from the nearby city of Mount Sterling.

“Several people … told me it was a dangerous experiment, but I assured them my constitution could handle as much of it as a rooster’s or a cat’s,” Frisbe told the Herald reporter, with the background noise of a bone saw’s rhythmic snoring and the occasional thwack of a cleaver. But even the steel-stomached Friz had chosen to spit out the meat “after chewing it a little,” possibly because “a kind of milky, watery fluid oozed out of it,” he explained. Though he compared its appearance to mutton and its texture to veal or lamb, he couldn’t quite identify the taste or smell.

A merchant named Joe Jordan also spat out his sample, which smelled like a rotting corpse and released “brown mucous.” Like Friz, Reverend J.R. Nichols thought the meat resembled mutton, while C.J. Craig insisted it looked like “pounded beefsteak.” Benjamin Franklin Ellington, a trapper, was certain it was bear meat.

The Herald correspondent even tried to bribe an Irish railroad worker, Jimmy Welsh, into tasting a piece. Welsh agreed for a dollar but kept delaying the task. First, he asked for side dishes, then requested whiskey, and eventually claimed he just wasn’t hungry. When the correspondent raised the reward to $3, Welsh suddenly remembered he couldn’t eat meat because it was Lent.

If butchers, preachers, and railroad workers couldn’t crack the mystery, perhaps scientists could.

Game of Theories

One theory that circulated was that the entire event had been a hoax, orchestrated by Mrs. Crouch to scare her husband into selling the farm. The Crouches had a good laugh when the Herald reporter shared this idea: Apparently, Mr. Crouch had already wanted to sell the farm. Another amateur theorist suggested, according to the Herald, that “the meat might have fallen from the lunch basket of a passing balloonist.”

As samples made their way to laboratories, more plausible theories began to surface. Chemist J. Lawrence Smith told The New York Times that he believed the shower was actually dried frog spawn “transported from the ponds and swampy grounds by currents of winds.” To some of those who had seen the remains up close, this explanation seemed almost as hard to digest as the meat itself.

In the weekly medical journal The Louisville Medical News, Leopold Brandeis proposed that the substance was Nostoc—a type of cyanobacteria that forms slimy, gelatinous masses when there’s an overabundance of moisture. Because this often happens after rainfall, the legend grew that Nostoc rained down as well. Brandeis, however, believed the wind had simply carried some to rural Kentucky.

The most plausible theory—then and now—is that the meat fell from the beaks of vultures gliding above. Both turkey vultures and black vultures, native to Kentucky, sometimes vomit when threatened. Not only does this acidic vomit serve as a defensive mechanism, but an empty stomach can help the birds make a quicker escape.

“I’ve always thought there were major flaws in that theory because Mrs. Crouch said the meat fell from a clear blue sky, and surely she would have noticed a flock of vultures large enough to blanket a football-sized field with meat by vomiting,” says Kurt Gohde, an art professor at Kentucky’s Transylvania University who has studied the meat shower in-depth, speaking to Mytour.

Gohde has since changed his stance after learning more about black vultures—specifically, that they can soar as high as 20,000 feet in flocks (or kettles) of dozens or even hundreds, and they can devour pounds of meat in just minutes. In other words, it’s entirely possible that the vultures were flying high enough that Mrs. Crouch didn’t spot them, and the kettle was large enough to disgorge half a bushel of bits or more. This theory also explains the varied descriptions of what Gohde refers to as “the meatrain.” Even scientists couldn’t agree on whether the material was muscle, cartilage, fat, or something else.

“Those vultures would have had different meals in their stomachs, and it’s likely that there were several types of meat mixed into the shower of flesh,” he explains. “Meats from various deceased animals, all soaked in the acidic brine of vulture digestive fluids. That sounds like an awful thing to eat!” Bully for Jimmy Welsh.

The Electric Jelly Bean Taste Test

Gohde’s study of the Kentucky Meat Shower wasn’t confined to researching vulture habits. In 2004, as Atlas Obscura reports, he happened to unearth a surviving chunk buried in storage at Transylvania University. So he had it genetically tested.

“The tests didn’t reveal the animal and didn’t reveal much else either,” he says. “The fluid it was suspended in was an alcohol preservation fluid. The cork was estimated to have been only about 40 years old at the time and it was assumed that was when the fluid was probably swapped out (from what may have been formaldehyde) for alcohol.” (These days, the chunk is tucked safely away in an apothecary cabinet at TU’s Monroe Moosnick Medical and Science Museum.)

Without genetic analysis to nail down exactly what one vulture may have upchucked that fateful March day, Gohde enlisted a Cincinnati taste lab to create jelly beans based on the sample’s flavor compounds. He described the flavor of the treat as “strong enough that I would have immediately spit out any meat with that taste,” with a lingering chemical aftertaste. In 2007, he solicited feedback from other taste-testers at Mount Sterling’s annual fall festival Court Days. 

Many people likened the taste to ham, while others compared it to 'lamb that has started to spoil' or 'pre-cooked bacon.' Gohde speculated that the preservatives used in pre-cooked bacon products could impart a flavor that resembled the chemical aftertaste he noticed when sampling the jelly beans.

Gohde's favorite description came from a large man with a beard, who immediately identified the taste as 'strawberry porkchop.' He was so certain that Gohde, who had never heard of such a dish, decided to leave it as an unsolved mystery in his mind, not looking it up to maintain the intrigue.

Gohde is content to leave the Kentucky Meat Shower mystery unresolved, despite how plausible the vulture vomit theory might seem.

“I’m not sure if I’ll ever consider it a settled matter,” Gohde says. “I prefer to think of it as a mystery that remains open, simply because it happened in a time when people didn’t feel the need to explain everything.”