A woman was crossing a road in Jennings, Louisiana, last week when something very strange fell from the sky. Eleanor Beal was on her way to work when large clumps of tangled worms dropped down from above.
“When I saw that they were crawling, I said, ‘It’s worms! Get out of the way’,” she said.
All sorts of wildlife have fallen from the sky in the past. In 1918, hundreds of dead sand eels, eel-like fish, showered down over allotments in Hendon, Sunderland, during a thunderstorm. On August 8, 2000, sprats rained down on a street in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, after a thunderstorm. Perhaps one of the strangest of all showers fell on Bath in 1871, when small creatures encased in a jelly-like substance fell during a violent hailstorm. According to a report in Scientific American, specimens were preserved at a local tavern “where scientific men, upon observing the creatures, pronounced them to be marine insects, probably caught up in a cloud by a waterspout in the Bristol Channel”.
In fact, many reports of strange showers of creatures could be explained by waterspouts or tornados. In the recent shower of worms in Louisiana, a waterspout was sighted around the same time over a river less than 8 kilometres (5 miles) away. It is possible that the vortex sucked up the worms into a storm cloud and later dumped them on land.