This weekend, my friends and I attended a rather unusual festival about 45 minutes from campus: the first-ever Kentucky Meat Shower festival in Bath County. If you’re unfamiliar with the story of the Kentucky Meat Rain, you are in for quite a rotten treat.

On March 3rd, 1876, in the Olympia Springs region of Bath County, mystery meat began to rain from the sky. Yes, you heard that right; chunks of unidentified meat fell onto unsuspecting Kentuckian farmers, supposedly “enough to fill a wagon” according to the witnesses. To this day, we don’t know much about the incident, and there are many theories ranging from reasonable to completely fictional. One of the most common theories for the meat shower relates to vultures. It’s common for the scavenger birds to eat too much, not knowing when their next meal will be, and they sometimes have to throw it up in order to make themselves lighter for flight. It is entirely possible that a large flock of these creatures could have been flying and multiple of them began vomiting their dinner below. This would explain the different sizes and theorized meats; different people there (for some reason) decided to eat the meat and argued over which animal it was: mutton, deer, bear, horse, etc. If it came from vultures, it could easily be many animals depending on what the birds had eaten. The main witness to the shower, Mrs. Crouch – the wife of the farmer whose land the meat fell on – did mention, however, that the sky was clear while the meat was falling from the sky. So either she had poor eyesight, the vultures were flying very high, or there’s another explanation. 

Kurt Gohde’s Strange Fascination: The Origin

 One man, some of you may know well, considers himself an expert: Professor of the Arts at Transylvania University, Kurt Gohde. Years ago in a time known as 1998, Kurt Gohde was looking through a newspaper that advertised used books while packing up to move to Kentucky for his new job at Transylvania. He would often scour the arts section (of course) and also a section labeled “odd things”. Within this odd section was a book on unusual weather phenomena, which Kurt took interest in and purchased, hoping to find something about his new home in Kentucky. Within this book was the meat rain, and Kurt was hooked for eternity it seems. As Gohde has told me, “the best way to become an expert at something is to become interested in something nobody else is”.

Later on in his time at Transy, he was assisting librarian Susan Brown with digitizing portraits in special collections. While searching for portraits to photograph in closets full of old stuff, a small jar that would mean nothing to most people presented itself to him. With Olympia Springs on the label, Kurt knew exactly what this old jar of meat had to be: a remnant of the meat shower. It was truly fate that he would come across that, as he is now traveling around with this jar to answer questions for articles and festivals like this one.

When asked what his favorite theory is, not based on realism or plausibility, Kurt had quite an interesting response, saying he recently decided on a new favorite. “My favorite theory right now is something that was publicized potentially as a joke.” Gohde tells me that this silly theory consists of two Kentuckians and a knife fight. “These two knife fighters are so skilled that they slice each other into bacon strips, and then a whirlwind comes along and picks up the bacon strip slices of knife fighters and puts them back down.” With this rather unusual and unlikely theory, the sky meat would be human and these two hypothetical knife fighters would have had to chop each other up like a butcher. “My assumption is that there’s no one who’s ever been in a knife fight whose goal is to slice off little slabs of the other person and just keep going.” Kurt usually enjoys the odd theories, but until very recently this one wasn’t one he really enjoyed. “I’ve never really loved it because it seems so ridiculous, but now that’s why I love it.”

The First Annual Kentucky Meat Shower festival

The festival had a few key stops for visitors. The doors to enter the courthouse-turned-museum still include the bullet holes where a shootout happened sometime in the 1800s. Walking around you can find newspapers, pictures, and relics from Bath County past. At the tail end of the room was where Kurt’s informational table sat, partnered with his jar of meat. Outside were vendors featuring crafts, shirts, and homemade items, which my friends and I gladly passed the time spending money on. A few food trucks were available with a wide variety of snacks and meals to choose from, drawing you in with their alluring smell of fried goods. Even outside of the festival itself, the place has the charm of a very small town, overlooking hillsides and farms that roll on forever. 

There was one thing, though, that stood out from the activities list we knew we had to do: the meat contests. At 2 o’clock sharp, the event organizer Ian Corbin stood in the middle of the street with his megaphone and announced the three meat-related contests that would take place: the Bologna Throw, the Hotdog Eating Contest, and the Meatball Toss. 

I went first in the Bologna Throw, a line of people waiting their turn behind me. I stood in the center of the street and reared back the slimy slice of meat as if it were a frisbee. I made it a little over halfway down the stretch, the bologna slapping against the side of a food truck. I only held my lead for about two more contestants before I was dethroned, as a much stronger, older man beat us and the kids who participated for a twenty-dollar cash prize. His bologna went all the way to the intersection, past the food trucks and vendor tables. There was only one “injury” of the event aside from my pride: Kurt Gohde’s own mother being slapped in the face by a wild bologna throw. 

Next up was the Hotdog Eating Contest, in which our friend Casey Casey and Kurt Gohde himself participated. The goal was to be the first of the total seven contestants to finish eating two hotdogs. Neither of the two we knew won the contest (with a forty-dollar cash prize might I add), but at least they got two free hotdogs for lunch. I requested they both continue eating their ‘dogs to see who could beat who between the two of them, and Gohde beat Casey by one bite – in case you were wondering who’s the better hotdog eater.

To end our evening at the Meat Festival, my friends and I participated in the Meatball Toss, which was basically like your usual egg toss, where the objective is to not drop it when tossing to your partner. As sad as it is to say as a previous softball player, my throwing partner and I were out on the second toss. The competition was quick, two locals winning the twenty-dollar prize.

Future Events: 150th Anniversary

This year was the first year of Bath County’s Kentucky Meat Shower festival, put together by local Radio Host Ian Corbin. This year served as a test run for Ian, hoping for it to be bigger and bolder next year for the 150th anniversary. Gohde became involved when he was in town with his jar of meat a few months prior. Ian reached out to him with hopes that the meat itself could attend the festival and Kurt would be able to answer questions for visitors. Little did Ian know Gohde has been planning his own Meat Rain event for the 150th year for decades now. After the smaller success of this event, Ian and Kurt are now able to work together to put on a bigger and crazier festival in 2026. 

Kurt Gohde has already been working on his big idea: creating a rain of 1,876 pieces of meat on March 3rd, in the same field where the meat initially rained down. You may think him to be a madman, and you would probably be right. However, it is going to happen, crazy or not. Ian Corbin will have his festival the weekend before the anniversary date, similar to this year, while Kurt will host his shower the following Tuesday on the exact 150th anniversary. These events will be separate, but the two are working to help each other in different ways, such as Corbin helping work out how to transport people to the farm property. 

Gohde hopes that his meat rain recreation can be a big public event and wants to encourage people to attend by having certain pieces of meat come with prizes. “Maybe somebody wants to sponsor it by saying: I would like to attach to a piece of meat that somebody finds that they can win a day with my dog, or whatever crazy thing so that the people have all sorts of incentive to go out and get the meat,” said Gohde. Like a golden ticket with meat rather than chocolate, Professor Kurt Gohde is sort of like Meat Willy Wonka. 

I can tell you now I will definitely be attending the next festival in 2026, and will be gaining as many meat-prizes as I can collect. I hope to see some of you there as well, so mark your calendars and count down the days until the Olympia Springs’ sky rains meat once again for the first time in 150 years.

If you would be interested in sponsoring a meat-rain prize, whether it be cash, a coupon to your business, or the old VCR you’ve been trying to get rid of, or if you just want to learn more about this strange phenomenon, contact Kurt Gohde at kgohde@transy.edu.

On Thursday, February 20th, Transylvania University hosted Greg Woolf, a renowned ancient historian and archeologist who was recently appointed the director of the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. On Thursday night, Dr. Woolf gave the 2025 Collis lecture to a crowd in Carrick Theater, titled “The Environmental Sustainability of Ancient Cities.”

Woolf received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Oxford in 1985 and graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Doctor of Philosophy in classical studies in 1990. Woolf taught ancient history at many institutions, such as Oxford, the University of St. Andrews, the University of London, and UCLA before assuming his current position at NYU in January 2025. In his scholarship, Woolf has examined material culture, urbanization, and religion, as well as looking at how all three interact with imperial systems, especially the Romans. When introducing Dr. Woolf prior to the lecture, Transylvania professor Dr. Frank Russell emphasized how Woolf’s 1997 article “Beyond Romans and Natives” was an inflection point in the classics discipline, helping shift discussion of Roman imperialism from the shadow of modern debates on colonialism to a more nuanced discussion of cultural exchange. Both Russell and Woolf added that the content of the lecture was related to topics explored in Woolf’s recent book, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History.

Woolf opened by explaining his main goal behind the research that led up to the lecture. His goal was to contextualize Roman cities in historic debates over naturalness versus unnaturalness in environmental sustainability. The works of ancient writers like Juvenal and Galen have cast Roman cities in a negative light, with Woolf comparing them to the works of more modern writers like William Blake who criticized urban life during the Industrial Revolution. And while the pollution and industrialism of the nineteenth century that angered authors like Blake existed in the Roman period – evidence of high lead emissions during the imperial period can be found in Greenland’s ice caps – this resulted from the industrial-scale mining that largely occurred in rural areas of the empire. As for urban areas of the empire, Woolf argued that Roman cities were far closer to sustainable ‘green cities’ than the polluted dystopias that they are often portrayed as in literature.

This is an argument that makes quite a bit of sense when considering the limitations of the ancient world. Roman urbanism reached its height around 200 CE, with hundreds of small cities forming around the empire, along with a handful of megacities. The limitations of transportation meant the materials for building Roman cities were usually locally sourced, both from nearby forests and quarries. Roman cities were also circular economies, with archeology showing that older structures were consistently harvested for materials in newer structures. As for supporting the needs of the citizens of megacities, Woolf turned to their surrounding rural areas, or what he refers to as their hinterlands. Woolf argues that rather than Roman megacities creating the ancient equivalent of suburbs, megacities only formed in areas with rural hinterlands that could serve as breadbasets for their citizens such as the Italian peninsula and the Nile and Orontes river valleys. 

Woolf brought up many other points to support his argument for Roman sustainable urbanism, such as the trend of more green spaces appearing in Roman cities over time, the distinction between the biological waster of cities and the chemical waste of mining activity, the Mediterranean brushwood that served as a quick growing source of fuel for cities, and the – albeit traditionally undesirable – biodiversity that came with urban growth in the form of fungi and rats. In a Q&A session after the lecture, Woolf conceded that this Roman urbanism relied on the imperial system surrounding it, the same one that undertook the extreme pollution-causing mining and based much of its economy on human slavery. Overall, Dr. Greg Woolf gave a fascinating lecture that brought to light the initially surprising, but in hindsight clear environmental advantages of urbanism in the ancient world.