Professional Weirdo Podcast

Where I research strange stories and tell them to you. Because, let’s face it, I’m gonna research this anyway and blurt it to someone, might as well be a willing audience. Some of these stories might get dark, morbid, murdery…. so listener discretion is advised.

All Episodes

Professional Weirdo Podcast

Episode 5 - Seeking Shelter

May 05, 2025 • Anonymous Narrator • Season 1 • Episode 5

Weather is weird, and we're going to be talking about some of the weirdest. And learning fun weather terms. Give it a listen - you'll be BLOWN away.

Songs I recommend with today’s episode - there’s 5! F5!

Sun is a Hole, Sun is Vapors by Godspeed, You Black Emperor
Whirlwind by the Gits
Lightning Bolt by Jake Bugg
Raining Blood by Slayer
Land of Sunshine by Faith No More

Sources:

Sound mixing performed by Brother Jay from The Rule of Scary podcast - check that out if you’re a horror movie fan! And hey! Thank you for listening to my stories. Keep it weird out there.

To find song recommendations for this podcast, check out the Spotify Professional Weird playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5jIkaamOZlCwtd2peUk9lF?si=0238d524a374492d

Email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com

Welcome back! I think I have a wild one for you all with this one. I was traveling last weekend and had to drive through some rough weather. I’d been watching the radar, planning the best route to take, the best window of time to aim for, but as I walked to my car I was noting the heavy humidity, strange stillness, and flat gray skies in the distance - did I mention I live in tornado alley? I still can’t get used to the ideas of tornados. Warm weather and cold weather come together - it’s all air, right? And that atmospheric condition creates a rotating column of air. Pretend you don’t know about tornadoes - A rotating column of air sounds like no big deal. But then it extends to the ground, creating a funnel that can suck up a Buick. Twist the tops off trees. Peel houses off their foundations. Many times Mother Nature is depicted as a serene figure, covered in flowers and, well, she’s motherly. But sometimes…. she’s in a mood. Sometimes… she’s a mean motherfu— Nature. A mean Mother Nature.

This is episode 5 - Seeking Shelter

Welcome weirdos, to the Professional Weirdo podcast, where I research strange stories and tell them to you. Because, let’s face it, I’m gonna research this anyway and blurt it to someone, might as well be a willing audience. Some of these stories might get dark, morbid, murdery…. so listener discretion is advised.

There are a couple of terms used to describe when a sudden blast of cold, dense wind comes down from coastal mountains. It’s destructive and can cause large waves, capsizing boats. It happens in the Strait of Magellan, the Aleutian Islands, and in the Alaskan Panhandle. One term is a “Squamish wind.” Go ahead and say it. It’s fun to say. Squamish wind. The other term is a williwaw. I had a hard time picking which one would be used for this episode’s rating system, but then I read that there was an episode of Scooby Doo called “Watch out! The Williwaw!” And if it’s good enough for Scooby Doo, it’s good enough for me. I’ll be rating the stories in this episode on a 1 to 5 williwaw scale.

There are some other funny words and phrases in weather, so just quickly running through several of those-

Like a Megacryometeor. It’s like hail, only huge. Okay, but no one asked for hail to be bigger. They vary in mass between .5 kilograms (1.1 lb) to several tens of kilograms (for us in the US who might need help with that conversion, 10 kilograms is 22ish pounds. So a megacryometeor can vary up to 22 pounds, several times over. One in Brazil weighed more than 50 kilograms (or 110 lb). Chunks about 2 m (6 ft 7 in) in size fell in Scotland in 1849. Megacryometeor - fun to say, but no thank you.

And there’s thunder snow, or the very descriptive but boring alternate name for it - loud snow. It’s pretty much a thunderstorm, but when temperatures are cold enough to produce snow instead of rain fall. Thundersnow! Fun to say, for what’s pretty much a chilled thunderstorm.

But this next one is rare and fleeting. It’s hair ice. Rare, because it appears usually in northern forests where there are fungus-covered bark. The fungus releases chemicals that turn into small strands of thin ice when in very cold conditions. It actually looks like white fur - I’ll throw some photos on the instagram channel. And because the strands are so thin, it doesn’t last long.

Now we’re moving out of the arctic temperatures where hair ice might be found, and into the opposite. Fire. And usually a lot of it. Spotted in bush and wild fires are a phenomenon called Fire devils, or fire whirls. It’s when heat is rising quickly enough to create its own wind, which creates a vortex of flame. They can be up to 50 meters, or 160 ft tall. Think fire tornado. Sure, because each of those things on its own isn’t bad enough?

Another weather phenomenon with fire in the name, although in this case it’s actually luminous plasma. St. Elmo’s Fire - it’s a blue glow around objects. This form of plasma is released when air molecules around an object are ionized, usually by an electrical field, so more noticeable in thunderstorms or volcanic eruptions. It’s been spotted by pilots around the wings of planes, or by sailors around the mast of ships.

This next one, ball lightning, has been written about all through history. The descriptions vary slightly in color and motion, but typically it’s a floating orb of light or flame that appears during a thunderstorm. And it’s been witnessed in modern years. 1994 coming through a closed window in Sweden, 2005 in Guernsey after lightning hit a plane and ball lightning appeared on the ground, 2011 ball lighting came through a window in the Czech Republic and bounced around and disappeared, 2014 in Scotland in a aircraft while it was in flight, and 2022 in Lower Austria when a woman described a yellowish “burning object with licking flames” that followed a wavy trajectory along a road. Despite the many sightings, scientists can’t replicate it in laboratory studies and don’t have a solid explanation for it. Many theories, but none proven so far.

And the last in this section. Halos. These are rings that circle the moon or sun and are made when clouds of ice crystals are at high altitudes. As light passes through, the crystals act as prisms, separating light. They usually show up before rain and snow. And when the ice crystals are hexagon-shaped it can create a sundog, or parhelion, causing the sunlight to bend in a way that mirrors light so it appears as if there are two secondary suns on either side of the actual sun.

4/5 williwaws for this batch of new weather terms.

You can spot where a waterspout will form by the dark spot on the water. That’s where the spinning column of air is already spinning the water below. As everything speeds up, the water will start to spray around the edges and then the funnel will reach down from the sky and meet it. Waterspouts form like tornadoes, but often don’t get up to the same wind speeds. They are strong enough to pull up marine life from the water and as the storm crosses to land and starts to lose the energy that’s driving the vortex, what went up must come down. And that’s how you get a Sharknado. No no no. The winds aren’t THAT strong. But waterspouts are the explanation for how we get…

It’s also called amphibious rain. It’s recorded that frogs fell from the sky in Kansas City in 1873, with the thought that a tornado must have pulled the frogs from a body of water in the area and dropped them later. Sometimes the frogs fall frozen, but on June 16, 1882 in Dubuque, Iowa, people noticed that the large hail that fell actual encased small frogs. But during a frog storm in Serbia in 2005 it’s said the frogs were stunned for a minute after falling, but then began to hop around.

In an episode of the X-files when it rains toads, an amazed Agent Scully says, "Mulder... toads just fell from the sky," and he replies, "I guess their parachutes didn't open."

What might make these events seem extra strange is that it’s not a mix of marine life. You’d expect frogs and fish and other small marine life to fall together. But the vortex actually acts as a filter - as it loses power, the heavier objects are dropped first. So objects of similar shape and size fall together. You might be getting frog rain in one area, but a neighbor down the road is going to get fish rain. But not sharks. Because Sharknado is not real. But I do have some nightmare fuel for you… there are recorded events in Australia of something else raining down from storms - spiders. That idea gives me a major case of the williwaws. 5 out of 5.

Let’s talk about something cheerier. Like raining blood - that’s right kids, it’s not just a Slayer song. In Middle Ages it was truly believed to be blood, and a bad omen. Noted in 582 in Paris “there rained real blood from the clouds, falling upon the garments of many men, who were so stained and spotted that they stripped themselves of their own clothing in horror.” It was noted that blood rain fell in Germany before the coming of the Black Death which hit from 1348-1349. But jump forward to 1803, when blood rain fell on Apulia, and scientists suggested it was rain mixed with matter from the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius or Etna which caused it to look like blood. While some occurrences of blood rain can be from red dirt and dust being pulled up in storms and mixed with rain before falling, a 2015 study showed that an episode of blood rain was caused by a microalgae that caused the coloring. And what happens when similar algae exists in snow? You get Watermelon snow - because of the pink color, not the taste. This snow is most common in alpine and coastal polar regions when it’s cold enough for snow to remain during the summer. As the snow is stepped on or compressed, the pink or red colored snow is revealed. 4 out of 5 williwaws

Okay - if you’re listening to this while eating, maybe pause now. Just pause and come back later after you have happily digested your snack or meal. I’ll try and be as delicate as I can, but this one takes some intestinal fortitude. Here we go.

It was March 3, 1876 in Olympia Springs, Kentucky and Mrs. Allen Crouch was outside of her house making soap. And that’s when something fell from the sky. It was a piece of meat. Large chunks of flesh - about 2 x 2 inches or 5 x 5 cm - continued to fall for over the next hour. It was recorded in a New York Times article that quote “the meat, which looked like beef, fell all around her. The sky was perfectly clear at the time and she said it fell like large snowflakes.” End quote. Mmm… okay, having trouble visualizing meat falling like snowflakes, but let’s keep going. The fall was witnessed by Allen Crouch as well, and the next day they were visited by Harrison Gill who described pieces of meat scattered on the ground and hanging on fences. Two other men visited and these two absolute WHIZ KIDS applied their demented form of investigation by TASTING the meat, reporting that they thought it was deer or lamb. Thanks, guys. Thanks for that. Someone call the police. But the horror of this is only going to get worse when I tell you that samples were sent to ACTUAL scientists and under their analysis one determined it was lung tissue from a horse. Other samples were identified as muscle and cartilage. Another scientist said he thought it must be a type of cyanobacteria that forms in colonies and has a gelatinous casing around it. When it’s dry, it can float on the breeze and his theory was that rain soaked into it and caused it to drop. While I feel somehow better about the idea that Dumb and Dumber had been standing in the Crouch’s yard eating blobs of rehydrated bacteria, this theory didn’t hold up. There was no rain. The meat fell from a clear sky. And that leads to the last and worst theory. There’s a bird native to this region. Sometimes called a vulture, sometimes a buzzard. Either way, it’s a large bird that eats dead animals. In fact they flock to the location of a dead animal, flying in large circles high above their meal. And when they sense they are in danger, or having some difficulty flying due to weight, they vomit. And THAT is the story of the Great Kentucky Meat Shower. If I could set that story on fire, I would. 1 out of 5 williwaws.

In 1994 in Oakville, Washington in the US, rain started to fall. But people noticed something strange as the rain - question mark? - accumulated they realized it was not rain after all, but some type of goo. Smaller than a grain of rice, and piling up on the ground. Five reports came in over the next 3 weeks describing the clear, gelatinous blobs. And people who had handled the blobs reported they felt nauseous (let’s hope they weren’t eating it). Also dizzy, and they started to have flu-like symptoms. Others claimed animals that had been in the rain were getting sick and dying. Some suggested that due to the Air Force running bombing practice in the Pacific Ocean nearby, jelly fish might have been blow up and were getting pulled into the sky by waterspouts. But after analyzing samples, that was ruled out because whatever this was, it was a living material, but lacked a nuclei, which would have been present in jelly fish. So this indicated it was a type of bacteria or algae, but that’s where things get difficult. Microbiologist Mike McDowell appeared on Unsolved Mysteries in 1997 and described what he found in testing the blobs. He said the material was very uniform, with no structure that was visible with a microscope. Despite a lot of testing, he couldn’t isolate the bacteria. Revealed by his sons years later, McDowell felt the blobs had been a carrier. A carrier for what? That’s unknown, because his samples went missing before he could complete his investigation. The Oakville Blob mystery remains unsolved. 4 out of 5 williwaws!

Let’s talk about those monstrous storm systems that form over warm ocean water. The names can change depending on where they are. If it’s in the Atlantic or northeastern Pacific Ocean, they’re usually called hurricanes. If it’s in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, it’s called a typhoon. And “tropical cyclone” is the term used when the storm is in the Indian Ocean or South Pacific. These storms are enormous, being visible from the International Space Station. They can be between 100 and 2000 km in diameter, or between 62 and 1,200 miles in diameter. And for a very patient fan of this podcast, let’s talk a little more about the second-deadliest hurricane to occur in the Atlantic Ocean. That would be Hurricane Mitch. (Thanks for listening, Mitch. Sorry this episode took a bit longer to release!) Hurricane Mitch occurred in 1998, with the most damage happening in Honduras and Nicaragua. It was a Category 5. The area hadn’t seen a hurricane like this one since 1780. In advance of the hurricane, Honduras evacuated 100,000 people along the coastline. Most of the destruction from this storm was due to the torrential rain that fell once it made landfall. The flooding was massive. Bridges and roads were wiped out, mudslides and landslides buried whole villages. Hurricane Mitch didn’t officially enter Nicaragua, but they still experienced 50 inches of rain in some areas (or 1,300 mm). And a unique issue came up as Hurricane Mitch flooded Nicaragua - the floodwaters relocated the estimated total of 75,000 live land mines left over from an insurgency in the 1980s. Because this hurricane had had such impact, the World Meteorological Organization retired the use of Mitch for any future North Atlantic hurricanes. Okay, so anything visible from space is getting 5 out of 5 williwaws.

I remember playing Sim City back in the late 90’s and when I felt I’d built my city up enough and wanted a reset, I’d unleash all the disasters available in the menu. If I still played that game today, I don’t think that would appeal to me in the same way. A little too close to the news. But something like my Sim City disaster frenzy happened across multiple states in the United States between April 3rd and 4th, 1974. It’s been called the Super Outbreak.

The weather started to shift on April 1st when a low pressure system developed across the plains, getting a boost from a surge of moist air. This combination, including the extreme difference in temperature as the systems came together, got the attention of the National Weather Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. They forecasted severe weather was coming, and it started with F2 and F3 tornadoes on April 1st and 2nd. This F-Scale rating system for tornadoes was introduced in 1971 in a research paper and its full name is the Fujita Scale. I know you are used to my highly precise, meticulously measured, rating scale, but let’s run through the category ratings of the F-Scale for tornadoes.

F0’s are in the gale category

F1’s are in the weak category

F2’s are in the strong category

F3’s are in the Severe category

F4’s are in the Devastating category

And F5s are in a category called Incredible

The early tornadoes that happened on April 1st and 2nd were deadly - tearing through Kentucky, Alabama, and Tennessee. Another tornado hit Indiana. And this was all before the actual Super Outbreak had even officially started. By midday April 3 a large-scale trough was spread across most of the width of the U.S. All the elements continued to strengthen within this huge band over the coming hours, conducive to something called a “tornado genesis” which is an interesting word for saying there’s all the ingredients for a tornado. That happens all the time, it’s just a tornado watch. Except this wasn’t a targeted area, but across multiple states. The coverage of these conditions grew, along with the severity. The first F5 happened in Indiana. Another 2 F5s hit in Ohio and Kentucky. One woman who was a small child in Jeff, Kentucky, hit by an F4 tornado, recalled that as her and her family fled their trailer and laid on the ground near a small elm tree, she witnessed their Saint Bernard dog, still chained to the dog house, fly through the air. The dog survived, but was found 4 miles away. The family’s trailer was picked up by the tornado and dropped on them, with only the little elm tree giving enough support to keep them from being crushed. Storms continued, producing baseball-sized hail in Illinois and Missouri. More F3 tornadoes hit in Illinois. In Decatur the tornado sirens sounded at 2:48 pm, but that was 3 minutes after the tornado had already hit. Conditions in Indiana created one long-lasting tornado that traveled for 121 miles. In one small Indiana town, 38 out of 48 homes were destroyed. Another F4 traveled for 110 miles in Alabama. Before the day of April 3rd ended, two F5 tornadoes hit Tanner, Alabama. April 4th started with more deadly tornadoes and flash floods. But while 130 tornadoes happened on April 3, only 19 were recorded on April 4. In the end, 13 states were hit by a total of 149 confirmed tornadoes. 100 of those happening within 24 hours, 30 of the tornadoes rating as F4s or F5s, and at one point 15 tornadoes were happening at the same time.

335 lives were lost, and up to 6000 injured. The total combined path of destruction was 2600 miles (4,184 km). And while the 1974 Super Outbreak holds the record for the most violent long-tracking storms, the record it set for the most prolific outbreak in terms of overall tornadoes was broken by the 2011 Super Outbreak. It produced 367 tornadoes from April 25-28 - over double the amount of tornadoes produced by the 1974 Super Outbreak, but thankfully with fewer tornados as severe as 1974. While the yearly number of tornadoes is stable, the frequency of tornado cluster outbreaks is increasing. Before 1980 there were about 3.5 days per year with 16+ tornadoes. Since 2000 the number has doubled to 7 days per year. Other trends are that tornadoes are decreasing in the spring and summer months, but increasing in the fall and winter. And in the U.S., tornado alley has been the typical corridor for tornado activity, hence the name. But the locations of where tornadoes are happening has been shifting eastward, into an area called “Dixie Alley.” This shift is concerning, as it shifts the tornados out of the wide open plains and into more populated areas. 5 out of 5 - or F5 - williwaws. Damn, Mother Nature, do you have to be so scary??

I’m going to wrap up with a personal story. The thing I’ll describe next is stored as a memory, but after you hear it, you may decide this must have been a dream. I have other early memories of dreams - knowing that I switched from asleep to awake. But when this occurred I was 4, so maybe I didn’t have it all figured out yet. Here goes - my parents had built a new house, and their 2nd story bedroom had a door, with a window in the top half of the door. That door was meant to open onto a 2nd story deck, but the deck wasn’t built yet. One night there were loud storms coming through, and being afraid I went into my parents room and my mom scooted over and let me sleep in their bed. When I woke up in the morning, my parents had already gotten up and gone downstairs to the kitchen. The storm continued, dampening the day light. I got up and looked out the window of the door, out into the woods behind our house, and the storming sky above it. Heads up - things get weird here. I’m hoping by sharing this story I don’t become too much of an unreliable narrator. Noting again, it replays like a memory, but I’d just been sleeping moments before, and I pretty much had a baby brain, so anything goes. But there I was, 4 years old, looking out the window into the storm. From the clouds, descending in a quick, serpentining path, a fire ball. Bigger than a basketball - maybe about the size of a beach ball? And it wasn’t flaming, more like a ball of molten lava, black and crusty exterior with a red, burning core showing through the cracks. It paused about 4 feet in front of the window I was looking through, hovering and rotating for a few moments there, then it shot straight back up into the clouds in a split second. My reaction? Did I scream for my parents? Did I cry soundlessly in shock? Did I immediately develop a deep fear of storms? As a new human with only 4 years experience, in a world where I’m learning about why the sky is blue, and that space and the rest of the universe lies beyond it, and that clouds are drops of water suspended in the air, and rainbows are when those droplets are bending white light to make all the colors, and thunder. and lightning. and tornadoes. and hail and blizzards and flash floods and earthquakes and volcanos - well, what’s the big deal about a fire ball? I figured it was just the weather. Then I remembered that it was Saturday morning - cartoon day! And ran downstairs to turn on the TV. It wasn’t until years later, knowing a bit more about our world, that I remembered the fire ball and it finally hit me - what the hell was that?! I was hoping while researching this episode I might come across something that sounded familiar. Maybe ball lightning? But with a burnt and crusty exterior? It’s another mystery.

And that is it. I hope where you are, the weather is fair. But even if it’s not, whatever it is, it’s still spectacular. What a wild and weird world we live in.

As a reminder, I’m on Instagram under professionalweirdopodcast. I post there when I release new episodes, with a few other posts in between for giggles. Follow me there if you’re on the ‘gram. And if you want to hit another follow button, please follow the podcast and tell your friends about it. And you can email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com

Songs I recommend with today’s episode can be found on the Professional Weirdo podcast music Spotify playlist (why are there so many words to describe this???) - anyway - I made a playlist on Spotify. For each episode I’ve released, or plan to do, I’ve pulled together a few songs, so it’s the vibe of this podcast, through songs. This episode I had a hard time narrowing down my selections, so there’s 5! F5! The songs are:

Sun is a hole, sun is vapors by Godspeed you black emperor

Whirlwind by the Gits

Lightning Bolt by Jake Bugg

Raining Blood by Slayer and

Land of Sunshine by Faith No More

I’ll list these, along with the link to the playlist, in the show notes.

That’s a wrap! Sources used for this episode can be found in episode notes. Sound mixing performed by Brother Jay from The Rule of Scary podcast - check that out if you’re a horror movie fan! And hey! - thank you for listening to my stories. Keep it weird out there.