Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck and Jeers here too for Dave. So this
Speaker 1: is short stuff.
Speaker 2: That's right, A rare episode where the title itself is
Speaker 2: a band name. Not a good one though, No.
Speaker 1: I guess maybe horror Bluegrass like a Bluegrass Misfits cover band.
Speaker 2: Maybe Yeah, Kentucky meat Shower, I could see that.
Speaker 1: I want to shout out Ben Fisher, who is a
Speaker 1: listener who wrote in a while back to suggest this one.
Speaker 2: So thanks Ben, Oh Ben, has that band registered? Is
Speaker 2: a trademark?
Speaker 1: Also hat tip to mental floss ifl Science, Scientific American,
Speaker 1: The Lexington, Kentucky Herald Leader, and Atlas Obscura Atlas Obscure
Speaker 1: great sights. But yes, the had you heard of the
Speaker 1: Kentucky Meatchower before this, Chuck? Because I did. I didn't.
Speaker 1: I hadn't. I'm just going to come out and say
Speaker 1: it as badly as I want to say, like, of
Speaker 1: course i'd heard this, I had not heard of it.
Speaker 2: No, I think this is fairly ourcane.
Speaker 1: Okay, kid, you just made me feel a lot better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what we're talking about we should probably get around to saying,
Speaker 1: is the Kentucky meat shower took place just over one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years ago. We just missed the anniversary
Speaker 1: by two days. On March third, eighteen seventy six, a
Speaker 1: Hope Stutter named Rebecca Crouch was outside her Well homestead
Speaker 1: making soap with her grandson Alan when it began to
Speaker 1: rain meat down on them.
Speaker 2: That's right, we should point out because this will come
Speaker 2: up later. That was a clear sky, so it wasn't
Speaker 2: like it was rainy. And also meat came down right,
Speaker 2: good point. This was just meat that came down, and
Speaker 2: they were landing all over the yard, and over the
Speaker 2: course of a few minutes it rained down over the
Speaker 2: size of about a football field on her farm, these
Speaker 2: smallish chunks of meat everywhere, even though she said one
Speaker 2: of them was about the size of her palm, but
Speaker 2: most of them were smaller than that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, you could compare them to snowflakes. I think
Speaker 1: it was the general idea I got. And so obviously,
Speaker 1: as you would do if meat was raining on you,
Speaker 1: missus Crouch and grandson Alan went indoors. The livestock and
Speaker 1: the cat came to the yard instead, because they were like,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of meat. All of a sudden everywhere
Speaker 1: in the yard. So we're gonna start eating it. And
Speaker 1: as much as they tried, they couldn't eat at all,
Speaker 1: because before I think, like the next day, a man
Speaker 1: named Harrison gil He was the first sighted witness to
Speaker 1: verify that, yes, there was meat all over their yard.
Speaker 1: It was stuck to the fence. Mental floss put it
Speaker 1: that the fences were flecked with tissue and stained with
Speaker 1: what looked like blood. Thorny briars bore gobs of flesh
Speaker 1: like Christmas trees from hell.
Speaker 2: You know. A second again, when I thought very seriously
Speaker 2: that you were going to say, they did what you
Speaker 2: would do, and they went inside, and I thought you
Speaker 2: were going to say, and got some hot dog buns. Gross, gross,
Speaker 2: But thank god you didn't, because that's gross. And all
Speaker 2: this stuff is gross because this was not just regular meat.
Speaker 2: It's not like there were little pieces of tinderlin falling
Speaker 2: from the sky. There was a local butcher named Frizz Frisbee,
Speaker 2: believe it or not. Who of course he's the butcher.
Speaker 2: So he's like, sure, I'll try it. So he put
Speaker 2: it in his mouth, he spit it out. And this
Speaker 2: was the butcher, and he said he spit it out
Speaker 2: after chewing it a little, and he said it had
Speaker 2: kind of a milky, watery fluid oozing out of it.
Speaker 2: And other people also verified that it was oozy and
Speaker 2: also described it as like a brown mucus, similar in
Speaker 2: appearance to veal or mutton. But it was awful smelling
Speaker 2: and tasting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they weren't like it tastes like veal or mutton.
Speaker 1: They just said it kind of looks like cooked veel
Speaker 1: er mutton. There was a guy who apparently found all
Speaker 1: this quite enticing. He was a neighbor named Eli Willis.
Speaker 1: He scooped up like a handful of stuff and took
Speaker 1: it home to cook for dinner, and his family, of
Speaker 1: being more sensible than he realized that he was going
Speaker 1: to do this, tried to talk him out of it,
Speaker 1: found they couldn't, and so some family members held him
Speaker 1: down while other family members scooped up the meet and
Speaker 1: ran outside and threw it away in a place he
Speaker 1: couldn't find it.
Speaker 2: That all smacks of eighteen seventies news reporting, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: It definitely does, But that also smacks of twenty twenty
Speaker 1: six podcast re reporting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: Should we take a break, I think we should sure, all.
Speaker 2: Right, we'll be right back right after this, all right,
Speaker 2: So people stopped eating this meat. They did think to like,
Speaker 2: maybe we should find out what this is. So they
Speaker 2: took some samples to Transylvania University which was close by,
Speaker 2: as well as some other places, and eventually things kind
Speaker 2: of got back to normal. But that wasn't the end
Speaker 2: of it, because people, you know, people want to know
Speaker 2: what the heck this thing was, So of course people
Speaker 2: start surmising and hypothesizing what this meat could have actually been,
Speaker 2: what animal this could have been?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this being a gross event, some of the
Speaker 1: theories that they came up with were gross too. One
Speaker 1: of them was that it was rehydrated frog spawn, which
Speaker 1: is frog ejaculate and eggs mixed together. So I described,
Speaker 1: and the idea was that this had well, the spawn
Speaker 1: had been spread, it dried out, got carried up in
Speaker 1: the breeze into the sky, and then when it rained,
Speaker 1: it rehydrated and fell down his glob. That was mistaken for.
Speaker 2: Meat, that's right, but it wasn't raining, as we pointed out,
Speaker 2: it was clear sky, so that doesn't hold much water.
Speaker 2: There was a water sanitation expert named Leopold Brandi's who
Speaker 2: analyzed the samples and said, I don't think this is
Speaker 2: animal at all. He said, I think it's a cyanobacteria.
Speaker 2: And he said, like a low form of vegetable existence.
Speaker 2: And I you know, he called it a gnostic And
Speaker 2: I've seen this stuff in lakes before, and I've also
Speaker 2: seen it on like in forests. I've heard it called
Speaker 2: star jelly. You know, it kind of looks like like
Speaker 2: a a apple butter apple jelly. So you know, that
Speaker 2: could have been a thing that came down in the rain.
Speaker 2: But again it wasn't raining, no.
Speaker 1: So just like the frog spawn theory, this one had
Speaker 1: a hole in it and that it would require precipitation
Speaker 1: to come back down. Also, that was kind of the
Speaker 1: prevailing thought at the time that this stuff somehow it
Speaker 1: up on the breeze and then rained back down because
Speaker 1: you couldn't see it until it rehydrated on the ground
Speaker 1: and it wasn't really in the sky anyway, So not
Speaker 1: a good theory. Finally, I think in eighteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: the same year chemistry professor named doctor ld. Cast and
Speaker 1: Bind proposed what is now widely considered the correct explanation
Speaker 1: for what exactly happened and what exactly happened Chuck.
Speaker 2: Well, it doesn't make it any less gross to sort
Speaker 2: of find out what it was. In fact, it probably
Speaker 2: makes it more gross than mystery meat. In eighteen seventy six,
Speaker 2: he wrote in the Louisville Medical News that he thought
Speaker 2: it was a mass vulture vomiting incident. Not a bad
Speaker 2: band name in and of itself, now that I think
Speaker 2: about it, but yeah, vultures are known to vomit. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it's to lighten their weight while flying, which would have
Speaker 2: made sense in this case, or as a defense mechanism.
Speaker 2: But yeah, he was like, you guys were eating vulture
Speaker 2: vomit is what you were doing in God knows what
Speaker 2: kind of meat it was to begin with, because they
Speaker 2: were eating, you know, all manner of dead animals exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they ate what had been decomposing animal flesh
Speaker 1: initially eaten by vultures and then thrown back up, and
Speaker 1: then those guys tasted it. I just want to make
Speaker 1: sure that that is fully clear, because that is what
Speaker 1: happened in Kentucky when those locals put that in their
Speaker 1: mouth and tried to see what it was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but people didn't stop there as far as poopooing
Speaker 2: these hypotheses, because this guy named Kurt Goda, who's an
Speaker 2: art professor, and he was like, hey, man, I've been
Speaker 2: studying this thing for two decades. I guess I haven't
Speaker 2: had a lot to do. And there's no way that
Speaker 2: she would have missed this large group of vultures overhead
Speaker 2: like raining down meat on her, because that was a
Speaker 2: lot of meat. So it would have been a lot
Speaker 2: of vultures. And for years and years, every time somebody
Speaker 2: offered up this vulture vomit thing, it seemed like this
Speaker 2: Kurt I was right behind him saying there's no way
Speaker 2: she would have missed.
Speaker 1: That, right, And then at some point someone told Kurt
Speaker 1: that vultures actually can fly up to twenty thousand feet
Speaker 1: in the air. It's crazy, and that yes, it would
Speaker 1: have been quite possible for a flock. Actually, I think
Speaker 1: they're called a volt a venue or a committee of vultures.
Speaker 1: That a committee of vultures flying at twenty thousand feet
Speaker 1: vomiting down kind of simultaneously onto poor missus Crouch in
Speaker 1: her yard. She definitely would not be able to see
Speaker 1: that with the naked eye. So it is entirely possible.
Speaker 1: It was a mass vulture vomiting event.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know they're never going to solve this thing, obviously.
Speaker 2: I think they did have tissue samples, but not the
Speaker 2: kind of thing that's still around today to like test genetically.
Speaker 2: So the weirdest part of this story maybe is that
Speaker 2: later on that art professor said, Hey, maybe I can
Speaker 2: a loize these flavor compounds and get it made into
Speaker 2: a jelly bean. So he did that. He took it
Speaker 2: to a jelly bean maker and they made Kentucky meat
Speaker 2: shower jelly beans, and he gave him out as samples
Speaker 2: at a state fair at the Court Days Festival and said,
Speaker 2: just tell me what it tastes like, and you can
Speaker 2: have one of these Kentucky meat shower jelly beans. And
Speaker 2: people said, well, maybe bacon before it's cooked, maybe lamb
Speaker 2: that's going rotten, or strawberry pork chops, which sounds like
Speaker 2: the best thing out of all of.
Speaker 1: Them for sure, But Gody told Atlas Obscure that he
Speaker 1: just frankly finds them vile. Yeah, Kurt Gody, sounds like
Speaker 1: a stuff you should know, listener, if you ask me. So,
Speaker 1: if you are listening, Professor Gody bright In and let
Speaker 1: us know how we did on this. Say it, Chuck?
Speaker 2: Does that mean sure? Stuff is out? Stuff You Should
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