Fragments | The Kentucky Meat Shower: When Flesh Fell from a Clear Sky — Ep. 05

Welcome To Fragments

I'm Robert Barber. Welcome to Fragments. Just me, a microphone, and an interesting story that I couldn't stop thinking about. Some of these are forgotten newspaper accounts. Some are old legends. Some are just bits of folklore that have survived for generations. They're not full documentaries, but rather they're just stories that deserve another telling.

Meat Falls On A Kentucky Yard

On March 3, 1876, a woman named Mrs. Crouch was outside making soap near Olympia Springs, Kentucky, when pieces of what looked like raw meat started falling around her. The sky was perfectly clear, and this wasn't one or two pieces. The material ended up scattered across an area that was later described as roughly a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide. Some of the pieces were small. Other pieces were several inches across. And by the next day, people were coming out to see it for themselves. A man named Harrison Gill visited the property and reported finding pieces scattered across the ground and even stuck to the fences. So

The Unhinged Taste Test

people had a pretty obvious question. What in the world had just fallen out of the sky? And apparently, at least a couple of people decided the best way to answer that was to taste it. I wish I was making that part up. Two men reportedly sampled the stuff and decided it tasted like either mutton or venison, which honestly is not where my mind would have gone if unidentified meat had just fallen into the yard. I don't know what kind of confidence you have to have in your own digestive system to look at something that just dropped out of the sky and think, well, somebody ought to taste it. But apparently that was one of the first attempts to figure out what this stuff actually was. Samples were also collected and sent out for examination. I guess the taste test wasn't quite as conclusive as one had hoped.

Not Meat Or Something Alive

And one early explanation was that maybe it wasn't made at all. A man named Leopold Brandis examined a sample and identified it as Nostalk. Nostalk is this strange gelatinous growth that can suddenly swell up after wet weather. If you've never seen it before, I can understand how you might look down and think something unusual had just appeared there. And historically, people sometimes did think it had fallen from the sky. So that would have been a pretty simple answer. Nothing had rained down over Kentucky. Something on the ground had just swollen up and looked like it had. Except other people examined samples under a microscope, and that explanation started to fall apart. Arthur Meade Edwards examined a specimen that had actually come from Brandis, and he said it looked like animal tissue. Other samples were examined too. Some of the pieces were described as lung tissue. Others looked like cartilage. Others

Microscopes Confirm Animal Tissue

looked like muscle. So now we're right back to the original problem. If it really was animal tissue, how did it get there? This was 1876, so obviously we're not talking about something falling out of an airplane. Mrs. Crouch hadn't seen anything overhead that explained it, and she said the sky was perfectly clear when it happened, which didn't fit especially well with the idea that some kind of storm had carried the material in.

Wind And Whirlwind Theories

People still came up with different possibilities, though. One suggestion that circulated was that a whirlwind or some other strong current of air had picked up pieces of animal remains somewhere else, carried them through the air, and then dropped them over Kentucky. And that idea wasn't completely ridiculous. There were already stories of things like fish and frogs apparently falling from the sky after being swept up by strong winds. So if you were trying to explain pieces of flesh dropping from above, I can understand why your mind might go there. Something gets picked up somewhere else, travels through the air, and eventually comes back down. The problem was that Mrs. Crouch said the sky was clear and the sun was shining when the meat started falling. There wasn't an obvious storm. There wasn't a tornado moving through. There wasn't anything she saw that explained why pieces of animal tissue were suddenly coming down around her.

The Vomiting Vultures Explanation

Then a Kentucky doctor named L. D. Castenbein suggested something else. Vultures. More specifically, vomiting vultures. And I know how that sounds. The first time I came across that explanation, I thought it sounded almost as strange as the meat falling from the sky in the first place. But the more you think about it, the more it starts to make a certain amount of sense. Vultures can regurgitate what they've eaten. They'll do it when they're frightened, and they can also do it to lighten themselves enough to get airborne quickly. And vultures tend to feed in groups. So Castenbein's idea was that a flock of vultures had fed on some animal carcass somewhere nearby. They'd eaten pieces of flesh from it. Then they'd flown over the crouch property and disgorged what they'd eaten. Which is disgusting, but it would explain quite a bit. It would explain why the pieces were irregular. It would explain why there were different kinds of tissue mixed together, muscle, cartilage, lung. And it would explain how pieces of meat could apparently fall from a perfectly clear sky without needing to be picked up by a storm first. It was already up there, inside the birds. And I'm not sure whether that's a more comforting explanation or not. If I had chunks of meat falling on me, I'd definitely want somebody to explain it. I'd want to know where it came from. I'd want to know why it was happening. I'm just not sure I'd feel much better after somebody came back and said, Don't worry, it was probably a flock of vultures throwing up. At some point, I think there are explanations that technically solve the mystery without making the situation feel any less disturbing. And this might be one of them.

Why The Mystery Couldn’t Be Proved

The problem was nobody could really prove Kastenbein's explanation afterward. There's no surviving account placing a flock of vultures directly over the crouch property at the moment the meat fell. Nobody followed a flock back to a carcass. Nobody could point to the animal the material had supposedly come from. By the time people were examining the samples, all they had were the pieces that had landed. The event itself, it was over. And everyone was trying to work backward from there.

What Makes The Vulture Theory Fit

What I like about this story is that there really wasn't much argument over whether something strange had happened. Pieces of flesh had apparently ended up scattered across the crouch property. People came out and saw them. They found pieces on the ground. They found pieces stuck to fences. Samples were collected. People examined them. Scientists put them under microscopes. And for reasons I still can't quite understand, people tasted them. The real argument was over how the meat got there. And that question stuck around long enough for newspapers and scientific publications to keep discussing it. People proposed different explanations. Maybe it wasn't meat. Maybe it'd been carried in by some kind of wind. Maybe birds were responsible. And more than a century later, the vulture explanation is still probably the one that makes the most sense. Not because anybody proved it, but because it fits a surprising amount of what people reported. Different kinds of tissue, irregular chunks, clear weather, no obvious source on the ground. A flock of scavengers overhead could account for all of that, which means the Kentucky meat shower may have a perfectly ordinary explanation. It's just one of the most disgusting ordinary explanations I can think of.

The Story’s Last Unsettling Detail

And I keep coming back to those two men who decided to taste it. Because think about that for a second. Something that looks like raw meat has just fallen out of the sky. Nobody knows where it came from. Nobody knows what animal it came from. Nobody knows how long it's been sitting there. And your first thought is apparently, well, let's find out if it's mutton. I don't know what actually happened over Bath County that day. But if Dr. Kastenbein, then the answer to one of the strangest things ever reported falling from the sky is remarkably simple. A flock of vultures ate something. They flew over Kentucky, and somewhere above Mrs. Crouch's yard, they gave it back.