Raining Animals - in Literature and Popular Culture

In Literature and Popular Culture

Rains of animals (as well as rains of blood or blood-like material, and similar anomalies) play a central role in the epistemological writing of Charles Fort, especially in his first book, The Book of the Damned. Fort collected stories of these events and used them both as evidence and as a metaphor in challenging the claims of scientific explanation.

Other examples:

• Raining animals are relatively common in Terry Pratchett's Discworld. The explanation given is magical weather. One small village in the mountainous, landlocked Ramtops operates a successful fish cannery due to regular rains of fish. The Omnian religion includes several accounts of religious figures being saved by miraculous rains of animals, one being an elephant. Other items include bedsteads, coal scuttles, cake and tinned sardines.

• Fish fall from the sky in Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.
• In the Red Dwarf episode Confidence and Paranoia, fish rain in Lister's sleeping quarters.
• Raining frogs are shown in the 1999 New Line Cinema movie, Magnolia. Frogs rain down and cause havoc on drivers.
• In the role-playing game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the player can do an optional quest given by Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness, which involves playing a prank on a small, peaceful-yet-superstitious village. The player is told to perform certain actions that will fulfill a prophecy within the village that is believed to herald the end of the world, thus causing all of the villagers to panic. The final event foretold in the prophecy is flaming dogs raining from the sky, which, unlike the other events of the prophecy, is achieved by the Daedra Lord himself and his powers.
• A sperm whale and a bowl of petunias were called into existence above the alien planet Magrathea in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The whale had only moments to come to terms with its new identity and purpose during the ultimately fatal plummet to Magrathea's surface. The bowl of petunias had been in similarly terminal situations before.
• The character Cris Johnson in the film Next relates as fact that fish eggs were re-hydrated after being evaporated from the ocean near Denmark, resulting in a rain of fish.
• John Hodgman's satirical almanac More Information Than You Require makes references to multiple events involving raining animals.
• The short story 'Rainy Season' by Stephen King from the collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes is about frogs with sharp teeth falling from the sky.
• In the 2010 film, Wonderful World, Ben Singer (played by Matthew Broderick), experiences raining fish at the end of the film, while in Senegal. His close friend Ibu had told him about the phenomenon earlier in the film.
• In "Summer Knight" from The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, the book's first line says: "It rained toads...".
• In the sixth part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, a character with the power to control weather causes a rain of frogs.
• In The X-Files episode "Die Hand Die Verletzt", frogs fall from the sky in the area where a demon was apparently summoned and killed a high-school student the night before.
• In The Sarah Jane Adventures story "The Curse of Clyde Langer", it rained fish from the sky above Ealing in the west of London due to the influence of an alien entity known as Hetocumtek which had been trapped in a Native American totem pole centuries earlier.