Lore - Episode 74: All Fall Down

Episode Date: November 27, 2017

The sky is a source of life for everything on this planet. Rain to quench our thirst and sunlight for our food. We don’t look up too often these days, but that hasn’t changed our dependance on it. But occasionally, the sky can be a source of something else. Something much less typical than rain or snow or sunshine. History, it seems, paints a very frightening picture of the world above us. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our world is a beautiful place. For those of us who are lucky enough to escape the urban jungle of modern city life every now and then, it's amazing just how gorgeous the natural world around us really is. The national parks of the American West, the green, rolling English countryside, the glaciers and mountains of Canada, it's all breathtaking. But that beauty sometimes steps aside to reveal something else, something more frightening. The weather. From tornadoes and floods, to wildfires and drought, there's always a new challenge facing

humans somewhere in the world. Walk no further than the tragic, seemingly endless barrage of hurricanes we've endured in the last few years, and it's clear that the world around us is more like a lion than a lamb. Beautiful, yes, but also deadly. All of that variety and unpredictability has left humans struggling to understand it all. Sure, modern science has answered most of the questions for us, but for thousands of years, it was folklore that filled in the gaps.

There are dozens of old phrases in the languages of many cultures that attempt to manage the unmanageable. One common example is, red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky in morning, sailors take warning. Another is rain before seven, fine before eleven. Some folklore focuses on the behavior of animals and insects, while others look to the natural world around us. But as refined by centuries of trial and error as they might be, they're all just shots in the dark.

Weather is a mysterious force that humans have feared for most of our existence. On one hand, it has the power to bring life and beauty into a barren land, to nourish our crops and feed our livestock. But on the other, it can be unpredictable and chaotic, even destructive. And when the delicate balance between life and death hinges on something so mysterious, so out of our control, it has a way of breeding panic and doubt and fear, and rightly so. Because sometimes our weather can be downright unexplainable. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Life is unpredictable. We experience this every day. How bad will my commute be today? How long will the line at the restaurant be when I arrive? Will my paycheck cover my bills this month? There is a lot we can control, for sure, but the vast majority of life is just going where the current takes us. And while it's always been this way, every era has its own flavor.

Before our information age and the industrial revolution before that, the vast majority of the world was built around agriculture, and they had their own pressing questions. How will my crops do this season? Will I get enough rain? Will enough of the livestock survive the winter? But the difference between our modern questions and those of humanity's early farmers is fear. Our commute might stress us out, but it's never a matter of life and death.

But when humans first grew crops for survival, they were literally placing their lives in the hands of an unpredictable world. And that's the moment, according to most anthropologists, when religion winked into existence. Early religious icons reflected the world around us, animals that we feared and respected, fertility goddesses. And at the center of all of that was the weather, usually in the form of the sun. In fact, most early religious practices involved our attempts to make those higher powers happy,

like pushing buttons on a cosmic vending machine and hoping for the best. And like it or not, most of our ancestors killed things, cattle, birds, sometimes even each other, all in the pursuit of that goal. As abhorrent as it is to us today, human sacrifice was viewed by many cultures as the ultimate test of their faith. If they could go all the way and spill the blood of someone important or someone they loved, then perhaps that might convince the gods to bless their crops. And all of this happened because of the weather.

That complex system of sunlight and precipitation, a feast and famine. It sat uncomfortably outside the realm of their control, faced with their own impotence. Early humans created a worldview that provided the illusion of power. To its credit, weather has usually played a long. Most of the time, for most of history, crops grew in the growing seasons. We sowed, we reaped, we ate, we survived. It's just what happens. Which helped convince early humans that all their ritual and sacrifice made a difference.

The gods were happy. They could literally point to the sky as proof. With me so far? Good. You see, we have to understand one side of the coin before we can flip it over. Because if the gods can be happy, they can also get angry. Sure, they have the power to bless, but they also have the power to destroy. Which is why most religions feature tales of horrible meteorological mayhem.

In the ancient Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, weather was used as a weapon against Enki as he descended into the netherworld. In the tale, Enki is faced with a shower of deadly hailstones, some as large as those used in ancient siege machines. One Chinese myth tells the story of how, thousands of years ago, the gods sent drought and famine to destroy the people of the land. In response, the legendary ruler, named Tung the Conqueror, sacrificed himself to end their suffering.

In Sumerian mythology, the constant cycle between rain and drought was thought to be due to the struggle between the storm gods, Baal and Degal. And of course, there's the story of Noah, found in the teachings of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. It's a tale of how an angry god destroys a sinful world with abnormal weather, and how a small group was chosen to survive as a way of redeeming humanity. And while it varies in a number of secondary details, this flood story is found in most ancient cultures around the world.

Something that's because a global flood actually happened. But another approach might be to see these stories as echoes of our own insecurity. Life comes to us from the sky, but so does death. Early humans were helpless for an answer. These ancient tales proposed reasons in the form of folktales. It's easy to dismiss stories like these as just that. Stories. They stretch the imagination a bit too far.

They ask us to accept as fact a whole slew of beliefs that fly in the face of science. If the suspension of disbelief is a bridge, these tales of horrific weather might be asking us to go a bit too far. But history has taught us that there are always exceptions to the rule. Unusual weather might be rare for sure, but meteorological events that we would view as extreme, bizarre, or even supernatural are more than just tales of fantasy. According to the historical record, they've actually happened. For five days in May of 1780, the sun over New England was red, which admittedly was

weird enough. But then, around 9am on the 19th, a dark cloud crept south. When you read the reports of its movement, being observed in town after town as the day went by, it sounds a bit like the nothing from the never-ending story. Night had returned early. Livestock acted confused and agitated. Chickens put themselves back to roost. Even the people, rational and modern as they were, began to give up hope.

Some people assumed it was the arrival of Judgment Day and fell on their knees in prayer. The real cause, it turns out, was less cosmic, a smoke from a massive forest fire, possibly in Algonquin Province Park in Southern Ontario. In May of 1816, a group of riders settled into their accommodations on the northern shore of Lake Geneva. Among them were the poets Lord Byron and Percy Bish Shelley, along with Shelley's mistress Mary and their four-month-old son. Forced to remain inside by unusually cold and dreary weather, they began to write their

own entertainment. Mary began work on a novel that the world would eventually know as Frankenstein, while Lord Byron began a poem called Darkness. The first words paint a powerful picture of what they were experiencing. I had a dream, he wrote, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished. And in fact, it had been. All around the world, the sky was darker.

The sun had turned red, never a good sign, it seems, and the temperature had dropped significantly around the globe. In fact, summer never arrived that year. Instead, it snowed in New England, killing off crops and livestock. The northern half of the planet experienced the worst famine in decades. They called it the year without a summer. And it wasn't the fault of a forest fire. No, this time the cause was a volcano in Indonesia called Mount Tambora.

It had erupted in April of 1815 in a massive explosion which sent ash into the air for nearly a thousand miles. For two days, there was a 300-mile zone of complete darkness around the island, and as it dissipated, it spread for a full year. The result was beyond dramatic. But those stories have explanations. There's a source, a cause, something to point to and say, yeah, that's the trigger, even if it took scientists decades or centuries to figure it out.

Sometimes though, things just get, well, odd. It snowed in the northern parts of New York State back in April of 1889. April snow isn't as unusual as you might think, but this snow was different. It was black. At least 49 separate communities in the region reported it. It was only about half an inch deep, but that was enough to frighten more than a few people. When the snow melted, it left behind tiny grains of black dust, but just how it came into existence is still a mystery.

In May of 1849, a 400-mile area of Ireland experienced showers of black rain. It was described as the color of ink, with a pungent odor and an unpleasant taste. It happened again in April of 1887, and yet again in October of 1907. And while I find the notion of a thick, fetid black liquid falling from the sky pretty bizarre, the fact that someone had the initiative to actually taste it, well, that might be the most bizarre piece of the story. In March of 1888, another mysterious rain fell, this time in the Mediterranean, but it wasn't black.

No, this rain was thick and red, with an acrid copper-like smell. Some of the more scientific-minded of the locals actually tried burning a small sample and found that it smelled very much like rotting flesh. Don't worry, it gets much more weird. In August of 1804, near the French city of Toulouse, rain fell on a cloudless day, but no ordinary rain. No, it was a shower of frogs, hundreds of them, roughly a month or so old, and they were alive.

It happened again near Kansas City, Missouri, in 1873, a scientific American published a report in July of that year describing it as a shower of frogs which darkened the air and covered the ground for a long distance. The sky, that unpredictable source of life and death, of the power to quench our thirst or starve us out of existence, it's uncontrollable and mysterious. Sure, most of us will never experience anything more than rain or snow or the blazing heat of the sun on a summer day, but odd things do happen. Places of blood and hay and frogs, some places have even had fish fall from the sky or gelatinous

fungus or pieces of coal. They are as unpredictable as the sky they fall from. But in 1876, something happened that was so unusual, so bizarre, and so unsettling that it makes every other story seem like amateur hour. The views from the farm were amazing, with a small mountain just half a mile to the west and a lush forest nearby as well. Both are still there today, part of the Olympian State Forest in Kentucky. But what happened in March of 1876 has remained firmly in the past, and honestly, I'm pretty

glad for that. It happened on Friday, March 3rd. Alan Crouch and his adult son had gone to work in the field earlier that morning and aside from a house guest named Sadie Robinson and a sick granddaughter, both of whom were indoors, Mrs. Crouch and her 11-year-old grandson were the only people in the yard outside near the house. According to their testimony later, sometime between 11am and noon, it began to rain. Not unusual, I know, but there were two details that make the rain a bit more out of the ordinary

than you might expect. But first, there were no clouds in the sky over the farm. In fact, Mrs. Crouch herself described how the sky was clear and the sun was shining. She did say that she predicted rain earlier, but it was just an educated guess after watching whirlwinds in the mountains around sunrise. Weather folklore, as it were. But that's where the second feature of this unusual rain comes in. Mrs. Crouch and her grandson, also named Alan, were about 40 feet from the house when it

started and they could both hear it. They could see it too, all white on the ground around them. Mrs. Crouch turned to young Alan and asked him what it was and the boy replied with a smile. Why, grandma, it's snowing. It wasn't, though. The things that were landing on the grass around them were pale, but they weren't as white as snow and, honestly, they were much too large to be snowflakes.

They both walked toward each other, staring at the ground as they moved, studying the mysterious substance with wide eyes. Which is when a large piece landed right behind Mrs. Crouch, making a snapping sound as it did. They both turned to look at it, and that's when it all clicked in their minds. It wasn't snow or even ash from a nearby forest fire. It was meat, raw, torn flesh, raining down from the sky. Mrs. Crouch gathered young Alan and quickly led him back inside.

There, they waited in fear for her husband and son to return. For a brief moment, she claimed to entertain the idea that the flesh raining from the sky was theirs, having been torn to pieces by something wild. That fear vanished when they both returned shortly before dusk. The elder Alan Crouch examined the unusual objects all over his yard, which covered an area of roughly 40,000 square feet. Most of the pieces were small, maybe twice the size of a postage stamp. Some were larger, closer to the size of an adult hand.

And in the places where the meat had landed on wooden objects, it left a dark stain that witnesses compared to blood. The best guess from witnesses said that if the pieces had all been gathered together, they probably wouldn't have amounted to much. Some estimates place the total volume at around half a bushel, roughly 30 pounds, which sounds like a lot until you spread it out over two acres of land. But again, this was meat from the sky. The community around the Alan farm, known then as Olympian Springs, was small, but close-knit.

So word of the unusual weather traveled fast. Soon others were riding up to the farm for a closer look. One of those people, Harrison Gill, actually owned most of the county, which he had bought from Henry Clay, the well-known US politician and statesman. Gill arrived two days after the meat had showered down on the farm. Alan Crouch gave him a tour of the scene and allowed him to take a few samples, which he later placed in jars of alcohol. Some of those samples were sent away to places like the Newark Scientific Association in

New Jersey, which was good because animals on the Crouch farm were already eating it and getting sick. Knowing what it might be was a question everyone wanted answered. Farm animals weren't the only things putting the mysterious meat in their mouths, though. Local man Benjamin Franklin Ellington actually tasted it for himself. To give his actions a bit of context, Ellington was a trapper and hunter and claimed to have eaten almost anything he could kill in the forest. Deer, squirrels, rats, and all sorts of other varmint, as he put it.

According to his experienced pellet, the meat was most definitely from a bear. This meat that fell from the heavens on Alan Crouch's farm, he later told a reporter from the New York Herald, has got that uncommon greasy feel that I am so well acquainted with. I know bear grease when I see it, and that's the kind of fluid what come out of that meat at old Alan's and got all over my hands when I was zamming in it. I smelt it too, he added, and I know that smell as well as I know the smell of liquor. Gentlemen, it's bear meat certain, or else my name's not Benjamin Franklin Ellington. It's a colorful testimony, for sure, but science might have proven Mr. Ellington wrong

in the end. Are those samples that were sent out? Well, the American Journal of Microscopy and Popular Science declared it to be lung tissue, but they didn't say more. Dr. Edwards from the Newark Scientific Association I mentioned earlier did say more, though. According to him, the tissue sample was indeed from a lung, but he narrowed down the source to two possible animals. A horse, or an infant.

An infant human, that is. The sky above us is full of possibility. More often than not, that possibility is life-giving and wonderful, a sunshine for our crops and rain to quench our thirst. We might take it for granted today, but for thousands of years, the sky was our source of life. But we always take a risk when we place our well-being into the care of something so unpredictable and chaotic.

Sure, we might get what we need, but we might also get something else. Something darker. Hopefully, no matter how dark things get, we'll never experience another shower of raw meat. Although if you're ever in Lexington, Kentucky, and more than a little curious, you can go see a piece of it. One of those original samples is still around and on display as part of the Arthur Bird Cabinet at Transylvania University.

And not only that, but we're a lot closer to understanding what exactly caused such an odd shower to begin with. It turns out, that region of Kentucky, now known as Olympian State Forest, is home to a number of species of vultures. Vultures have a very unusual defense mechanism, hardwired into their reflexes. Vultures are, of course, birds of prey that tend to feed on dead animals. They feast quickly, fill their stomachs, and then fly away to go digest the food and safety. But if they're startled in the middle of that process, they respond by lightening their

load so they can fly faster. In other words, if you spook a freshly stuffed vulture, it will vomit everything up. So the working theory as to how the Kentucky meat shower actually happened is surprisingly simple. However disgusting it might sound. More likely than not, a vulture high up over the Crouch Farm had been startled that day in 1876, and in response, it literally tossed its lunch. That lunch, in turn, rained down over Mrs. Crouch and her grandson, far below.

History can be a bit messy, but can also be much worse as one tale from the northern edges of India makes clear. You see, when a team of British soldiers stepped into a Himalayan Valley in 1942, it wasn't the beautiful view that stopped them in their tracks. It was the horror they discovered in the midst of it all. Right there, at 16,000 feet above sea level, was a small frozen lake filled with human remains. At least 300 human skeletons were visible right beneath the ice, and while those British soldiers

at first assumed the bodies were a Japanese scouting party who died making a secret wartime Himalayan crossing, it soon became clear that they were much older than that. In fact, it's now believed those remains had been there for over a thousand years. Local folklore offers us a theory, though. Every 12 years, a Hindu pilgrimage takes place in the region, where people travel into the mountains to visit a shrine devoted to the goddess Nanda Devi. A journey, by the way, it takes every pilgrim right through this particular valley. According to the legend, a king and his entourage made that journey to the shrine many centuries

ago, but they never returned. Vocals said that the goddess was displeased with them, and as a punishment, she reigned death upon them all, a story that since been passed along through legend and song. In 2004, scientists returned to the lake to further study the skeletons, and in the process, discovered what appeared to be solid proof that the legends were actually real. All of the people who died in that valley a thousand years ago did so from the exact same source, a blow from a heavy object roughly 9 inches in diameter that shattered their skulls. But it hadn't been a weapon or even a landslide of rocks.

No, every single person in the lake had been killed by something else, something that was both absurd in its likelihood and terrifying in its power, a sudden rain of massive, deadly hail. It's true that we should be grateful for the weather that provides our world with everything it needs to thrive, but don't forget to keep an eye on the sky above, because every now and then something falls from it that isn't meant to nourish life on Earth. Sometimes it seems, the sky really can deliver death. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from

Marseille Crockett and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than a podcast, there's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.