A strange precipitate fell July 12, 1873 across the streets and brick alleyways of Kansas City, over her stockyards and rail depots. would report that there rained a “shower of frogs which darkened the air and covered the ground for a long distance.” A summer deluge of blanketing the Missouri city, coming down as if snow onto the Kaw River and the tony homes of Quality Hill, on Main Street and the City Market.
Not that this was a singular amphibious meteorological event—biblical rains of frogs were recorded in Toulouse, France in 1804, London in 1838, and in Birmingham, England in 1892, to choose just three examples. And, not just downpours of frogs, but spiders (Pakroff, Russia—1827), ants (Cambridge, England—1874), snakes (Memphis—1877), mussels (Paderborn, Germany—1892), turtles (Vicksburg, Mississippi—1894) and fish (Futtepoor, India—1918) as well. So copious are these animal rains that the London of 1859 quotes one confused vicar who was a witness to a blizzard of fish carcasses that the “roofs of some houses were covered with them.
” That’s not to mention the storms of lead and diamonds, rains of water that were both black and red, and in one memorable instance the so-called 1876 “Kentucky Meat Shower,” which saw a downpour of bloody fleck-sized carrion that observers reported (but of course) tasted as if venison. By the time a portly, mustachioed, failed novelist and hack journalist from the Bronx named Charles Fort recorded several instances.
