The Kentucky Meat Shower

I teach folklore at a college here in Kentucky, and I've been researching strange historical events in Appalachia for about twelve years now. Most of what I find has a rational explanation. Weather phenomena, misidentified animals, mass hysteria. But there's one case from 1876 that I keep coming back to because the more I dig into it, the stranger it gets. They called it the Kentucky Meat Shower. And here's the thing. It really happened. We have newspaper accounts, scientific analysis, physical specimens that still exist today. This isn't legend. This is documented history. March 3rd, 1876. A farm near Olympia Springs in Bath County. A woman named Rebecca Crenshaw was outside making soap in her yard. Her grandson, a boy of about ten, was playing nearby. The sky was perfectly clear. Not a cloud anywhere. And then, sometime between eleven in the morning and noon, the boy looked up and said something like, 'Hey grandma, it's starting to snow.' Except it wasn't snow. It was meat. Raw, red, bloody chunks of flesh falling out of a clear blue sky.

The meat fell for several minutes. Covered an area about a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide. Rebecca said later that she was about forty steps from the house when it started hitting the ground around her. Her husband, Alan, described it as falling like large snowflakes. Most of the pieces were about two inches square, but some were bigger. One chunk measured four inches across. And it wasn't dried out or old. When it hit the ground, it was fresh. Wet. Like something had just been butchered. County locals passed this story down through generations - Aiden' The Crenshaws believed it was a sign from God. They were religious people, and what other explanation could there be? Meat doesn't just fall from the sky. The next day, a man named Harrison Garrett came out to the farm to see for himself. He was known locally as a man of unquestionable honesty, and he confirmed everything. Said he saw particles of meat sticking to the fences, scattered all over the ground. By then it had dried out some, gone a bit stale overnight, but you could still tell what it was.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Two gentlemen, and the newspapers didn't record their names, decided to taste the meat. I know, I know. But this was 1876. People were different. And these two men declared that it tasted like either mutton or venison. Maybe deer, maybe lamb. They weren't sure. The story made the New York Times. Scientific American picked it up. This was national news. Scientists started examining samples that had been preserved in glycerin. A man named Leonard Baker claimed it was something called nostoc, a type of cyanobacteria that swells up when it gets wet. Said it must have fallen with the rain. But there was no rain that day. The sky was clear. Rebecca said so herself. So Baker was wrong. Other scientists got involved. Dr. Allan Hamilton, a histologist, examined the samples under a microscope and identified structures consistent with mammalian lung tissue. He said it could be from a horse or, and this is a direct quote, a human infant. The structure of the organ being almost identical in those two cases.