photo #8767649

The Day the Sky Rained Spiders in Tennessee (1936) October 21, 1936, 7:12 a.m. Over Chattanooga, a silver web drifted down—thousands of baby orb-weaver spiders ballooning on silk threads. Farmer Ida Mae Potts ran outside as the sky shimmered like torn lace; spiders landed in her hair, on the mule, across 40 acres of corn. The Chattanooga Times reported: “A living parachute invasion; chickens gorged till they burst.” Entomologist Dr. Willis Gertsch traced the hatch to a Lookout Mountain nursery warmed by early frost. Winds lofted the hatchlings 3,000 feet; they rode 60 miles before descending in a 10-minute blizzard of silk. Children scooped them into Mason jars for fishing bait; a preacher called it “manna with legs.” The silk tangled power lines, shorting streetcars; TVA crews swept it into barrels—later woven into a scarf for Eleanor Roosevelt. Spiders vanished by noon, leaving cornstalks draped like Christmas trees. Gertsch’s preserved vial of 200 specimens, still glistening, sits in the Smithsonian—labeled: “The Morning Tennessee Wore a Wedding Veil.”