Modern Mysteries

Legends revisited - the day it rained blood

By T.K. Randall
October 11, 2013 ·  14 comments

Did blood really rain from the sky over Chatham County ? Image Credit: CC BY 2.0 OliBac / Flickr In 1884 on a day with clear skies over rural Chatham County, sharecropper Bass Lasater witnessed a deluge unlike anything she'd ever seen. Drops of liquid started to fall from the sky that, far from being the usual cool raindrops that typically water her crops, took the form of large spots of blood that doused an area of approximately one tenth of an acre in a strange red sheen.

Word of the event very quickly spread across the county and gained widespread attention after being published in local newspapers. Upon hearing about the incident, chemist Professor Francis P. Venable decided to conduct his own investigation and headed out to take a closer look.Venable took samples of the red substance from areas where it had dried in to the sand and took it away for analysis. Examining the samples with a microscope and spectroscope he concluded that the substance was indeed blood, but that he could not explain how it had come to be there.

"As to theories accounting for so singular a material falling from a cloudless sky, I have no plausible ones to offer," he wrote. "I have deemed this strange matter worthy of being placed on record."

Source: Charlotte Observer | Comments (14)

Tags: Fortean, Blood rain