This is an IHeart podcast.

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

What color is rain supposed to be?

Now, I know this is a pretty silly question.

Rain is the color of water, and water sometimes has a tint based on the particles that it picks up along the way.

Or if you step back and look at it atmospherically, you might argue that rain looks gray or cumulatively a sort of muted white.

But when rain has an actual color, something very strange is happening between the clouds

and the earth. The Indian states of Kerala has been a frequent sight of strange rainstorms.

On the southwest coast of the country, it's home to over 33 million people.

And in the summer of 2001, a number of villages located among the mountains there

experienced a rainstorm that puzzled scientists all around the world.

Between July and September of that year,

dark red water poured from the sky, staining clothing pink and turning the streets into red rivers.

In other parts of Kerala, the rain was yellow or green or black, but the most prominent

color was that red. This alarming meteorological event puzzled the locals,

but it didn't shock as much as you might assume, because it wasn't the first time that it had

happened. On and off for decades, red rain had fallen in this region. Some say as early as the

1950s, with other sources pointing even further back than that, as early as 1896.

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