Ten Times It Rained Animals (Yes, Animals)

When the Weather Girls first released “It’s Raining Men” in 1982, they had no idea how right they would be. That song is obviously fun, memorable, and catchy. But as it turns out, it’s also true! Okay, it’s not technically true. Men don’t rain down from the sky—except perhaps in some single woman’s dreams. It’s just a goofy song! But the idea of things raining down upon us other than, uh, rain is not as crazy as you might think!

Throughout history, there have been many occurrences of things raining down from the sky that weren’t rain. And we’re not talking about acid rain or something, either. We mean things like animals! And weird other stuff, too! In this list, we’ll take a look at ten times when it rained animals from up above. If you can believe it, there are way more than ten of these incidents throughout history. So we had to pick the best ten to deliver to you today! Who knew?! (The Weather Girls, that’s who!)

Related: 10 Times Animals Interrupted Sports

10 Kentucky, USA (1876)

On the morning of March 3, 1876, a farmer’s wife, identified only as Mrs. Crouch, was standing on her porch in rural Bath County, Kentucky, when she noticed meat starting to fall from the sky. All around her, for several sudden and abrupt moments, meat slapped the ground in a bizarre and unforeseen shower. She took it as a sign from God, which, honestly, we probably would have in that context, too.

Experts came out to look at the meat pieces and confirmed that they were about two inches by two inches ((5cm by 5cm) and chopped up. Most experts regarded the meat as either lamb or deer. Others claimed it was human flesh, though with no proof to confirm that allegation. A couple of men even reportedly tasted the meat and also judged it to be lamb or deer. Honestly, that was pretty brave. We would not taste falling sky meat!

Further analysis at the time by the Scientific American later identified the meat as lung tissue, but here’s where it gets creepy: One doctor claimed that it was either from a horse or… a human infant. Further analysis confirmed that the meat was most likely lung tissue, with the possibility that some was also muscle.

As for what caused the shower, locals believed that the meat had been vomited up by buzzards en masse while they were flying overhead. Vultures and buzzards tend to vomit food when they see one of the other birds in their flock do so to avoid mass food poisoning and sickness issues. It’s possible they were flying overhead, got spooked somehow, and ejected all the meat in their stomachs.^[1]

9 Shropshire, UK (2004)

On Wednesday, August 18, 2004, a man named Kevin Kell was walking in the tiny village of Knighton within the Shropshire region in the West Midlands of the United Kingdom near the border with Wales. At about 2:45 p.m. local time, he looked up and noticed that stuff was falling from the sky. It wasn’t rain, though—it was fish!

A few hours earlier in the afternoon, there had been a thunderstorm in the area, but at the time, the sky was clear. Well, it was clear except for all the fish falling around him! Confused, Kell looked down to the pavement and saw dozens of small fish—most likely minnows, in his estimation—lying dead on the cold cement. Naturally, he was confused. Almost everybody else in Shropshire was, too. The incident was so strange that it even made the BBC News and was blasted all over the world.

But there was actually a very simple explanation for it! The rainstorm earlier in the day, combined with strong winds and weird weather patterns, had likely picked up the fish as part of its pull from the ocean into a waterspout. The fish were then carried high above in the clouds for a while before they were dropped unceremoniously onto the pavement in Knighton around Kell’s feet.

So, while it certainly wasn’t natural or normal to see fish falling from the sky, it also wasn’t biblical. We hope. No word on whether Kell prayed extra hard that night to keep away any possible plagues, but according to media reports, he did continue onto the pub just as he’d intended to laugh about the fish shower with his mates. Of course!^[2]

8 Nagaram, India (2015)

The residents of a tiny village called Vuyyurivaripalem near the city of Nagaram in India woke up one morning in August of 2015 to find that fish were strewn about all over their farm fields. The so-called “fish rain” happened in the very wee hours of the morning on a Sunday, so practically nobody in the village knew it was going on until they woke up with the sun a few hours later.

Spread over more than two acres (0.8 hectares), there were hundreds and hundreds of dead fish littering the fields. And since nobody copped to going out there to leave them strewn around like that, they must have come from… above! The villagers were so thrown by the fact fish had apparently fallen out of the sky that they called experts and scientists from nearby universities for advice.

One of those experts, a biology professor named Srinivasa Rao, spoke to the Times of India about the phenomenon. “Fish do not fall out from the sky,” Rao cautioned. “Actually, what happens is that a gale or tornado sometimes accompanies rain. Due to gusty winds, the water from nearby rivers, canals, and fish tanks gets displaced. Along with the water, fish and other marine species thus end up in other places.” That’s exactly what happened in Vuyyurivaripalem, he believed.

Here’s the craziest part of the story, though: that was actually the second “fish rain” that occurred in that part of India in just the last month! On June 19, 2015, in the nearby Krishna district, residents in the Gollamudi village reported that fish had fallen from the sky into their farm fields as well.^[3]

7 Pennsylvania, USA (2016)

It was a typical day in September 2016 in Philadelphia, and a woman named Lisa Lobree was walking through Fairmount Park with her friends. Then, suddenly and without warning, a catfish fell from the sky above her and landed with a smack right on top of her head! Lisa was stunned, of course. There had been nothing around her at the time, and no one else—besides one of her friends named Annie—in the area to account for anything that would have hit her.

Dazed and confused, she kept walking for another few steps. But that’s when Annie looked down at the ground behind them and found the smelly fish that hit Lisa! “It bounced off Annie, too,” Lisa told CBS Philadelphia after the incident. “Annie sees me go down, turns around, looks, and goes, ‘Oh my God! It was a fish.’ I think it might have hit me in the head, face, and neck because I smelled so bad afterward. I smelled disgusting.”

Thankfully, Lisa didn’t suffer any serious injuries from the falling fish. She got a small cut on her face and ended up with a very small welt on the top of her head that swelled up from the collision with the catfish. The fish wasn’t small, either—reports suggest it was about a foot (30.5cm) long. As for what caused it? Well, it wasn’t a thunderstorm or a rain spout this time.

While experts were befuddled by the incident, Lisa’s friends noted that they saw a bird flying high overhead after the incident occurred. That bird, they think, had the catfish in its beak and was taking it home for a meal when it accidentally dropped the thing down from above. Unfortunately for Lisa Lobree, she got smacked in the head with it. And unfortunately for that bird, it lost its lunch!^[4]

6 California, USA (2017)

Did God decide to send a rainstorm of carp and blue gill down on a northern California school one day in the spring of 2017? Or was this a massive and expertly done prank successfully pulled off without the culprit being caught? That’s the question authorities at Stanford Avenue Elementary School in the city of Oroville, California, were asking after more than 100 dead fish were discovered on the school’s playground and roof one morning.

The rainstorm came down sometime between 10:00 a.m. and noon on a Friday morning. But here’s the crazy thing: Nobody knows where they came from. And experts don’t even believe they were picked up by an area storm and carried in the clouds over to the school! While news outlets and school officials alike assumed that the fish had been dropped onto the playground from a water spout that was kicked up somewhere close by—perhaps even from the nearby Oroville Dam—the National Weather Service very specifically refuted those theories.

Speaking to KTVU News about the weird carp rain, an NWS spokesman said, “There was no meteorological evidence that would explain this.” Weird! So if it’s not a water spout or a mini-tornado that picked up fish from a hatchery, what could it have been? A prank? A sign from God? Let’s hope that school isn’t targeted for any future plagues of locusts or other biblical events in the near future…^[5]

5 Paraná, Brazil (2013)

We’ll see you fish-raining phenomena and raise you… spiders. Yes, spiders! In 2013, in the small town of Santo Antônio da Platina in the Paraná state of far southern Brazil, hundreds and hundreds of spiders rained down through the air. They fell from trees, telephone poles, and wires high above the streets.

For nearly an hour, these little eight-legged fellas flew through the air and allowed gravity to help them land just as if they were falling down in a rainstorm. Now, if we were in Santo Antônio da Platina on that day, we would have absolutely freaked out. But animal behavioral experts weren’t worried at all! In fact, spider rain is actually a totally normal and expected phenomenon. Who knew?!

A biologist named Marta Fischer spoke to the media about Brazil’s 2013 spider rain and called it “totally normal.” The spiders in question here were arachnids named Anelosimus eximius. They are known by experts as “social spiders” because they are very active with each other and in moving around for food.

They dangle off high branches, telephone poles, and wires up in the air and then launch themselves down below to feast. “They are usually in trees during the day and in the later afternoon and early evening construct a sort of sheet web,” Fischer explained. “Each makes his, and then they come together. The goal is to capture insects.” Not gonna lie—that’s incredibly creepy!^[6]

4 New South Wales, Australia (2015)

Two years later, in 2015, the town of Goulburn in the Southern Tablelands area of New South Wales, Australia, suffered a WEEK-LONG spider rain. A week long?! We guess we can wrap our heads around a few minutes of spiders falling from the sky, like what happened in Brazil in 2013. But a full week of it? No, thank you! Townsfolk in Goulburn noted that their houses quickly started looking like abandoned buildings and maybe haunted mansions after spiders surged across the region and fell from the sky.

One resident named Ian Watson spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald about the endless spider rain that fell from Goulburn’s skies onto his home. “The whole place was covered in these little black spiderlings,” Watson said. “And when I looked up at the sun, it was like this tunnel of webs going up for a couple of hundred meters into the sky.” He added that the swarm was so thick and relentless that spiders kept getting stuck in his beard. Well, that’s not creepy at all! Nope, not at all…

Amazingly, this isn’t the only spider rain that Australia has suffered through. In 1974, the town of Albury (also in New South Wales) suffered its own spider rain incident that lasted days as well. And biologically speaking, the phenomenon Down Under is just as normal as the one in Brazil. It’s called “ballooning,” according to arachnologists.

One retired biological expert from the University of California named Rick Vetter explained the event to Live Science. “Ballooning is a not-uncommon behavior of many spiders,” Vetter noted. “They climb some high area and stick their butts in the air and release silk. Then they just take off. This is going on all around us all the time. We just don’t notice.” Maybe we don’t usually notice—but we definitely do when thousands of them fall for days on end!^[7]

3 Ishikawa, Japan (2009)

In 2009, Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture suffered a very unique and baffling rainstorm: Tadpoles fell down from the sky. And it didn’t happen just once, either! The media described it as “a series of episodes in a number of cities in the region” that lasted nearly a full month. People all over the prefecture reported being caught in hail storms of tadpoles.

Many people caught outside were pelted by the tiny creatures, while many more found dead tadpoles stuck to their cars and on the roofs of their homes. In one specific case in the city of Nanao, a man found hundreds of tadpoles strewn about on his car and in the parking lot around it after hearing them pelt down and rushing outside to see.

Less than two days later, in the city of Hakusan, there was another downpour of dead tadpoles. Scientists have said that the tadpole storms have been caused by water spouts and other various winds and strong storms that have picked up water from oceans, rivers, and lakes only to move it dozens or hundreds of miles and then dump it onto unsuspecting people. But locals in Ishikawa Prefecture weren’t convinced.

For one, nobody reported any wind in the hours and days before these tadpole rains occurred. And people also waved away the other possible explanation: that birds were dropping their food while flying high in the skies above. Maybe that could happen once or twice, locals reasoned, but certainly not hundreds of times in multiple cities over a full month!^[8]

2 Louisiana, USA (2007)

So, we’ve covered fish, we’ve covered spiders, and we’ve covered tadpoles. All very weird things to rain down upon us, right? Well… how about worms? In 2007, in the small town of Jennings, Louisiana, it started raining worms from the sky one afternoon while locals were out and about going through their days as usual.

Large, tangled clumps of worms began to fall down onto people without warning. One local police department employee named Eleanor Beal was just minding her own business and trying to cross the street when she got hit from above with a bunch of worms! “When I saw that they were crawling, I said, ‘It’s worms! Get out of the way,” Beal reported to the local media. She warned her co-workers to keep away from the clumps of tangled worms that were fast accumulating on the streets.

While people still aren’t quite sure where the worms came from, there appears to be at least one very likely natural explanation: around the same time the worm rain was first noticed, the nearby Lacassine Bayou had a waterspout ripping through it. Officials believe that spout lifted a ton of worms out of the muddy ground nearby, carried them through the air for a few miles, and dumped them on Beal and her neighbors in Jennings.^[9]

1 Chihuahua, Mexico (2022)

In 2022, a massive flock of hundreds of birds flying through the sky in the northern Mexico state of Chihuahua was caught on a security camera suddenly seizing up and dropping to their deaths. The “bird rain,” as it came to be known, was both massive and unexpected. Some of the birds that fell from the sky survived, shook off their drop, and managed to fly away. Others were able to be rescued and nursed back to health.

However, most of the yellow-headed blackbirds that fell from the sky perished upon landing on roofs, streets, and sidewalks below. To make things even more creepy, the entire incident was caught on camera. And we’re talking about hundreds of birds here! It truly was a “rain storm” of sorts!

Local authorities in Chihuahua struggled to come up with a reason for why the birds might have died. They were migrating south from Canada on their yearly trip, so some people questioned whether exhaustion was an issue. That wouldn’t explain how hundreds and hundreds of them fell at the same time, though.

The more likely explanation is probably one of two things: The flock could have either fallen victim to nearby power lines and electrocuted themselves and each other, or the birds may have inhaled toxic fumes at some point right before their fall and were all stricken in a massive group.^[10]