Short Stuff: Kentucky Meat Shower

Summary

Stuff You Should Know – Short Stuff: Kentucky Meat Shower

Episode Date: March 25, 2026
Hosts: Josh & Chuck
Special Context: Celebrating 150th anniversary (March 3, 1876) of the Kentucky Meat Shower, suggested by listener Ben Fisher.

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Overview

In this episode, Josh and Chuck delve into the bizarre historical mystery of the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876—an event where chunks of meat inexplicably rained down over a Kentucky farm. The hosts explore eyewitness accounts, outlandish theories, and the most widely accepted explanation, all with their signature mix of curiosity and irreverence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Actually Happened?

[02:19–04:04]

• The Kentucky Meat Shower occurred on March 3, 1876, in Bath County, Kentucky.
• Rebecca Crouch and her grandson witnessed pieces of meat falling from a clear sky onto their homestead while making soap outside.
• The shower covered an area about the size of a football field; chunks ranged from palm-sized to much smaller, like “snowflakes.”
• Livestock and a cat eagerly sampled the meat, but it was not to their taste—or anyone else's.
• First external witness: Harrison Gill confirmed the meat was real and noted it stuck to fences “with tissue and stained with what looked like blood,” and briars “bore gobs of flesh like Christmas trees from hell.”
  • Quote (Josh, 03:56): “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.”

2. Local Reaction & Sampling

[04:04–05:29]

• Local butcher Frizz Frisbee tasted the meat: “had kind of a milky, watery fluid oozing out of it.”
• It looked like veal or mutton but smelled and tasted awful.
• Neighbor Eli Willis wanted to eat the meat for dinner; his family had to forcibly stop him, “holding him down while other family members scooped up the meat and ran outside and threw it away.”

3. Early Theories: Frog Spawn & Star Jelly

[08:36–09:49]

• Some theorized it was rehydrated frog spawn—i.e., frog eggs and ejaculate swept into the sky and rained down, but it hadn’t rained.
  • Chuck (09:06): “But it wasn’t raining. As we pointed out, it was clear sky. So that doesn’t hold much water.”
• Water sanitation expert Leopold Brandes thought it might be “a cyanobacteria,” also called star jelly, but again it would require rainfall to appear.
  • The theory fell apart due to the lack of precipitation.

4. Most Accepted Explanation: Vulture Vomit

[09:49–12:43]

• Chemist Dr. L.D. Kastenbine suggested in 1876 it was “a mass vulture vomiting incident.”
  • Vultures vomit mid-flight to lighten themselves or as a defense, sometimes dropping recently consumed, partially digested meat.
  • “So they ate what had been decomposing animal flesh, initially eaten by vultures and then thrown back up and then those guys tasted it.” (Josh, 11:09)
• Objections from art professor Kurt Goede: if so many vultures vomited simultaneously, wouldn’t Mrs. Crouch have seen them? Later, someone pointed out vultures can fly at 20,000 feet—well out of sight.
  • Josh: “A committee of vultures flying at 20,000ft, vomiting down kind of simultaneously onto poor Mrs. Crouch in her yard. She definitely would not be able to see that with the naked eye.” (12:26)

5. Lasting Mystique and Modern Weirdness

[12:43–13:34]

• Scientific proof remains elusive; no samples survive for modern analysis.
• Kurt Goede, the skeptical art professor, eventually had artificial Kentucky Meat Shower–flavored jelly beans made and handed out at the Court Dates Festival, asking for flavor feedback.
  • Responses ranged from “bacon before it’s cooked” to “lamb that’s going rotten,” and “strawberry pork chops.”
  • Josh (13:34): “But Cody told Atlas Obscura that he just frankly finds them vile.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Thorny briars bore gobs of flesh like Christmas trees from hell.” – Josh, 03:56
• “He put it in his mouth, 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…” – Chuck, 04:23
• “A mass vulture vomiting incident. Not a bad band name in and of itself, now that I think about it.” – Chuck, 10:36
• “So they ate what had been decomposing animal flesh, initially eaten by vultures and then thrown back up and then those guys tasted it.” – Josh, 11:09
• “A committee of vultures flying at 20,000ft, vomiting down… She definitely would not be able to see that with the naked eye.” – Josh, 12:26
• “Strawberry pork chops, which sounds like the best thing out of all of them for sure.” – Chuck, 13:30
• “But Cody told Atlas Obscura that he just frankly finds them vile.” – Josh, 13:34

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Episode Timeline

| Timestamp | Segment | Summary | |-----------|----------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------| | 01:09 | Opening remarks | Shoutouts, title jokes, origins | | 02:19 | Introduction to event | Mrs. Crouch, clear sky meat shower | | 03:14 | Description of meat & witness accounts | Meat size, “snowflakes,” livestock reaction | | 04:16 | Local reactions & sampling | Butcher tries meat, neighbor Eli Willis incident | | 08:09 | Aftermath & seeking explanations | Samples sent to universities | | 08:36 | Early theories (frog spawn, star jelly) | Dismissed due to lack of rain | | 09:49 | Vulture vomit theory (widely accepted) | Dr. Kastenbine’s explanation | | 11:30 | Modern objections & clarification | Vultures at high altitude, visual invisibility | | 12:43 | Ongoing curiosity & jellybean tastings | Kurt Goede’s jelly beans, flavor feedback |

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Conclusion

This episode offers an engrossing look at one of America’s strangest unsolved mysteries, the Kentucky Meat Shower, through vivid detail, a survey of scientific and fantastical theories, and the hosts’ trademark humorous banter. The horror-tinged absurdity of the event is matched only by the equally bizarre efforts to explain—and taste—it, giving listeners a satisfying, weirdly appetizing slice of historical curiosity.

Short Stuff is out!

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

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[Josh]

Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jer. Jer's here too, for Dave. So this is Short Stuff.

[Capital One Advertiser]

That's right.

[Chuck]

A rare episode where the title itself is a band name. Not a good one though.

[Josh]

No. I guess maybe Horror bluegrass. Like a Bluegrass Misfits cover band, maybe. Yeah.

[Chuck]

Kentucky Meat Shower. I could see that.

[Josh]

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

[Chuck]

I hope Ben has that band registered as a trademark.

[Josh]

Also, hat tip to Mental Floss, IFL Science, Scientific American, the Lexington Kentucky Herald Leader, an Atlas Obscura. Atlas Obscura.

[Chuck]

Great sites.

[Josh]

But yes. Had you heard of the Kentucky Meat Shower before this, Chuck? Because I didn't. I hadn't. I'm just gonna come out and say it as badly as I want to say. Like, of course I'd heard of this. I had not heard of it.

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No.

[Chuck]

I think this is fairly arcane.

[Josh]

Okay, good. You just made me feel a lot better.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

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 3, 1876, a hopesteader named Rebecca Crouch was outside her well homestead making soap with her grandson, Allen when it began to rain meat down on them.

[Chuck]

That's right, we should point out, because this will come up later. That was a clear sky, so it wasn't like it was rainy. And also meat came down.

[Josh]

Right, Good point.

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

Yeah, yeah. You could compare them to snowflakes. I think it was the general idea I got. So obviously, as you would do if meat was raining on you, Mrs. Crouch and grandson Allen 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. 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.

[Chuck]

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. And got some hot dog buns.

[Josh]

Gross. Gross.

[Chuck]

But thank God you didn't. Cause that's gross and all this stuff is gross. Because this was not just regular meat. It's not like there were little pieces of tenderloin falling from the sky. 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, 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 Uzi and also described it as like a brown mucus similar in appearance to veal or mutton, but it was awful smelling and tasting.

[Josh]

Yeah, they weren't like, it tastes like veal or mutton. They just said it kind of looks like cooked veal or mutton. 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.

[Chuck]

That all smacks of 1870s news reporting, doesn't it?

[Josh]

It definitely does. But that also smacks of 2026 podcast re reporting.

[Chuck]

Yeah, for sure. Should we take a break?

[Josh]

I think we should. Sure.

[Chuck]

All right. We'll be right back right after this. You know what?

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[Chuck]

All right, 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 this meat could have actually been, what animal this could have been.

[Josh]

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. I saw it 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.

[Chuck]

That's right. But it wasn't raining. As we pointed out, it was clear sky. 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 a gnostic. 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. 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.

[Josh]

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?

[Chuck]

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.

[Josh]

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.

[Chuck]

Yeah, but people didn't stop there as far as poo pooing these hypotheses, because there's a guy named Kurt Goda who's an art professor, and he was like, hey, man, I've been studying this thing for two decades. I guess I haven't had a lot to do. And there's no way that she would have missed this large group of vultures overhead, like, raining down meat on her, because that was a lot of meat. So it would have been a lot of vultures. And for years and years, every time somebody offered up this vulture vomit thing, it seemed like this Kurt guy was right behind him, saying, there's no way she would have missed that.

[Josh]

Right. And then at some point, someone told Kurt that vultures actually can fly up to 20,000ft in the air. That's crazy. And that, yes, it would have been quite possible for a flock, actually. I think they're called a Volt, A venue, or a committee of vultures. That. A committee of vultures flying at 20,000ft, vomiting down kind of simultaneously onto poor Mrs. Crouch in her yard. She definitely would not be able to see that with the naked eye. So it is entirely possible it was a mass vulture vomiting event. Yeah.

[Chuck]

And, you know, they're never going to solve this thing. Obviously. I think they did have tissue samples, but not the kind of thing that's still around today to, like, test genetically. So the weirdest part of this story maybe is that later on, that art professor said, hey, maybe I can analyze these flavor compounds and get it made into a jelly bean. So he did that. He took it to a jelly bean maker, and they made Kentucky meat shower jelly beans. And he gave them out as samples at a state fair at the court Dates festival and said, just tell me what it tastes like and you can have one of these Kentucky Meat shower jelly beans. And people said, well, maybe bacon before it's cooked, maybe lamb that's going rotten. Or strawberry pork chops, which sounds like the best thing out of all of them for sure.

[Josh]

But Cody told Atlas Obscura that he just frankly finds them vile. Yeah, Kurt Goede sounds like a stuff you should know listener if you ask me. So if you are listening, Professor Goede, write in and let us know how we did on this. Say it, Chuck.

[Chuck]

Does that mean short stuff is out?

[Podcast Host]

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