They say truth is often stranger than fiction, and the bizarre case of the Kentucky meat shower certainly falls into that category. Sometimes called the Olympian Springs meat shower, after the small town in Bath County where the incident took place, this carnivorous curiosity has baffled everyone from local historians to environmental scientists.
Investigators quickly determined the ‘what’. It was, by almost all contemporary accounts, small pieces of what appeared to be meat which fell from the sky that morning. What has been – as yet – impossible to definitively determine, was the ‘how’, and the ‘why’.
Exactly what happened that morning in Kentucky? Meat rain from birds? Was it a type of strange, jelly-like bacteria that has been thought to fall from the sky? Was it, as some thought in Kentucky, blood rain? Or is there another, more out-of-this-world explanation?
It’s worth noting at the outset that nineteenth-century newspaper stories from which this story derives vary considerably in detail and attribution, which leads to discrepancies in facts, names, measurements, and quotes. Many modern retellings repeat these older anecdotal details, further muddying these meaty waters.
Are you ready to sink your teeth into this mystifying mystery? Make no bones about it, this one is weird…
Friday 3 March 1876, Around 11am

Mary Crouch was happily sitting on her porch... (Credit: Ryan McVay via Getty Images)
Picture the scene. As Mary Crouch was happily sitting on her porch making soap on a quiet spring morning, she suddenly saw chunks of what seemed to be red meat falling from a perfectly clear sky onto her farm. The shower of flesh lasted for several minutes, sometime between 11am and midday, and covered an area of approximately 90 by 45 metres. Some of the pieces were tiny – Crouch described them as being like snowflakes – and others were larger, some up to ten centimetres square.
While the Olympia Springs meat shower was fleeting, it lasted long enough for locals to gather and marvel at the meat-draped landscape, or even collect some of the mysterious matter. News of this astonishing phenomenon quickly spread, as word-of-mouth and local newspapers eagerly reported on so-called raining meat from the heavens.
One of the first reports said that two of the first men on the scene even tasted it, and thought it may have been lamb or venison. Another is believed to have said it was bear meat. As is their wont, newspapers named the incident the Kentucky Meat Shower, and the New York Times reported on ‘flesh falling from the clouds.’
The Immediate Aftermath

Particles of meat were all over the Crouch farm (Credit: annick vanderschelden photography via Getty Images)
The Kentucky meat rain incident quickly garnered attention. News spread, making headlines in newspapers from New York to San Francisco and beyond. In the local paper, a journalist reported the story – where the raining meat landed, the size of the area over which it fell, the weather and the other pertinent facts – and went on to say, ’Mr. Harrison Gill, whose veracity is unquestionable and from whom we obtained the above facts, hearing of the occurrence, visited the locality the next day, and says he saw particles of meat sticking to the fences and scattered over the ground.’
Scientists were called to investigate, with samples being sent for analysis to determine the nature and origin of the fallen meat. Sceptics suggested it was a hoax, while others speculated about supernatural causes.
What Fell in Kentucky? Blood Rain?

Blood rain is benign and naturally-occurring (Credit: Jose A. Bernat Bacete via Getty Images)
While it sounds like the title of a low-rent horror movie, one of the more improbable explanations for the Kentucky meat shower was that it was blood rain. This is a benign phenomenon in which raindrops appear red or reddish-brown due to tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere – often dust, sand, or even certain types of spores – that get mixed into the rainfall. Despite the dramatic name, the colour typically comes from natural sources like iron oxide (rust) in dust, or pigments in microorganisms, and not actual blood. This is a rare but documented occurrence that can give rainwater an unusual hue that has historically fuelled myths and supernatural explanations, however it doesn’t explain the fact that lumps of flesh fell from the sky, and it wasn’t raining.
What Caused the Kentucky Meat Shower?

Nostoc in Yellowstone Lake, Wyoming (Credit: Jennifer Idol/Stocktrek Images via Getty Images)
In the days and weeks that followed, various theories emerged to explain the phenomenon. While early speculation ranged from spiritual causes to meteorological anomalies, the most widely accepted explanation, while grotesque to imagine, is the most plausible.
Nostoc
One of the first explanations of the raining meat came from a scientist named Leopold Brandeis. Writing in the Sanitarian, he identified the substance as Nostoc, a genus of cyanobacteria (often referred to as witch’s butter, star jelly, or spit of moon) that lives in a jelly-like colony. It typically appears on moist soil, rocks, or other damp surfaces, forming translucent, gelatinous masses. After heavy rain, it can swell quickly with water, leading to the sudden appearance of these squishy patches. Yet there was no rain that day, or in the days leading up to the Olympia Springs meat shower.
He wrote, ‘The flesh that was supposed to have fallen from the clouds in Kentucky is the flesh-colored Nostoc (N. carneum of the botanist); the flavor of it approaches frog or spring chicken legs, and it is greedily devoured by almost all domestic animals.’
However, not everyone was so sure…
Organic Matter
Brandeis sent a sample of the flesh to the Newark Scientific Association, and they replied with a letter – published in the long-defunct Medical Record – stating they’d identified the meat as lung tissue from a horse or, rather frighteningly, a human infant. Further analyses identified two samples as lung tissue, two as cartilage, and three as muscle.
But it was Dr. Lewis Kastenbine later in 1876 who published a hypothesis in the Louisville Medical News that still stands up to scrutiny today.
The Vulture Theory

Turkey vultures (Credit: Donna Feledichuk via Getty Images)
This Kentucky meat rain theory isn’t for the squeamish. It essentially says that a flock of turkey vultures, common to the area, may have disgorged their partially digested meals while flying over the Crouch farm, possibly due to being startled or needing to shed weight for flight.
He wrote ‘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, from their immense height, the particles were scattered by the prevailing wind over the ground. The variety of tissue discovered – muscular, connective, fatty, structureless etc – can be explained only by this theory.”
Despite this plausible explanation, the Olympia Springs meat shower remains a subject of fascination and continues to captivate the imagination of those who hear its strange tale.
The Kentucky Meat Shower: A Rare Mystery

The events in rural Kentucky remain a mystery (Credit: alexeys via Getty Images)
When asked, most modern scholars will regurgitate the vulture theory as the most plausible cause. Still, whether one attributes the flying flesh to vomiting vultures or some other bizarre natural occurrence, the Kentucky meat rain story remains one of the oddest recorded events in American history.