The Charleston pebble showers

The earthquake struck on Tuesday, 31 August 1886, at about 9:50 p.m. Modern estimates put it at around magnitude 7.3. Charleston was left broken. The shocks did not stop. In the days that followed, many residents camped in the streets and squares, still afraid to return to their homes.

The News and Courier kept publishing. Its offices stood at 19 Broad Street, in the lower part of the city. The building's granite entablature had been destroyed in the quake.

Saturday, 4 September. 7:30 in the morning. Pebbles began to fall out of the sky behind the newspaper's buildings. They did not drop straight down. A dispatch sent from Charleston that day put it plainly: "They appeared to fall in a slanting direction, from South to North."

Hours later, it happened again. The wire dispatch placed the second fall at about 11 o'clock. The News and Courier's own account gave 1:30 p.m. One later retelling adds a third fall at 2:30 a.m., but that time has never been confirmed.

Those who gathered them found polished flint pebbles, ranging from the size of a grape to that of an egg. They were warm. Every one was worn by the action of water. Some few had sharp fractures, as if they had only just been broken. In all, about a quart was collected.

"The fact of the fall is vouched for by several trustworthy persons," the dispatch insisted. None of them is named. The story travelled fast. On 5 September the Cleveland Leader ran it on its front page under "Stricken Charleston," with a subhead that read: "showers of pebbles in different parts of the city add terror to the scene." Two days later the Winnsboro News and Herald reprinted the Charleston dispatch.

Some took the stones for a meteor shower tied to the earthquake. That idea did not last. In a letter dated 2 October 1932, Warrington Dawson, a member of the Astronomical Society of France, recalled that Camille Flammarion had examined some of them. The French astronomer "definitely disposed of this theory, declaring after a careful examination that the stones were entirely of earthly composition." No police or official inquiry into the pebbles is known.

31 August 1936. The fiftieth anniversary of the quake. The News and Courier quoted Robert C. Richardson, a pressman at the paper in 1886. The showers of hot pebbles, Richardson said, had been no natural event. They were "a cruel practical joke."

Questions remain. The account came half a century later, from one person. Who threw the stones, how, and why they were warm is not recorded in the sources that survive. It stands beside the 1886 assurance that several trustworthy persons saw them fall.

The pebbles belong to a strange season in Charleston. Charles Fort, in Lo!, later gathered other oddities from the weeks after the quake: meteors over the city in October 1886 and falls of ash around Summerville. Prank or puzzle, the case sits among the old stories of lithobolia, stones that fall warm or on odd paths around a single building.