Holy Mackerel: The Mystery of the Miracle Fish

Did a mysterious piscine houseguest arrive via a marvel of science, or divine intervention, or both? Plus a new Inconspicuous News Roundup!

Thea Giovannini-Torelli was in bed, writing in her journal, when she heard the sound.

It was about four weeks ago — the morning of Monday, September 29th — and Thea, a 37-year-old arts organizer, was in her home in Montauk, at the eastern tip of Long Island. She had awakened early, as usual, and had already watched the sunrise, meditated, and had some coffee. Now, as she was journaling, she heard something that sounded like the rustling of papers.

“I got really scared,” Thea told me during a recent interview. “I live alone in this big house, and Montauk sort of empties out after the summer.” So she quickly dashed around the house, checking all the rooms for any sign of an intruder — nothing.

“So I went back to journaling in my bedroom, and three sentences later I heard the same sound,” said Thea (pronounced TAY-uh). “This time I sort of followed the sound a little bit more, which led me to my living room, and there it was.”

“It” was a fish — a live fish. It was on Thea’s living room floor, a few feet away from her fireplace. The sounds she had heard were the fish flipping and flopping against the hardwood.

A surreal scene. (Photo by Thea Giovannini-Torelli)

“When I first saw it, I was just dumbfounded,” said Thea. “I’d never been in a situation where it felt like every single thing I knew had been flipped upside-down. I was breathless, I was in awe, I was just totally emptied. It was like a miracle.”

Holy mackerel! After staring at the odd scene for what she estimates was about a minute (“Which is a long amount of time when a fish is flopping around in your living room!”), Thea realized she needed to document it, so she ran to get her phone and took a few photos of her unexpected houseguest.

If you look closely, you can see the trail that the fish left as it flopped its way across the floor. (Photo by Thea Giovannini-Torelli)

By now you’ve probably figured out what must have happened. Montauk is an oceanside town, so some sort of seabird — probably an osprey — must have plucked the fish out of the Atlantic and flown off with it. The bird’s flight path took it over Thea’s house, at which point it lost its grip on the fish, which then fell earthward, somehow went down Thea’s chimney, either bounced or flopped off her fireplace’s hearth, and ended up on her living room floor. The gash on the fish’s side, which you can see in the photos, could have been caused by the bird’s talons or the fish’s impact upon landing.

I know, I know — it all seems like a stretch. I mean, imagine yourself standing on a really tall ladder and trying to drop a live fish down the chimney of a house located directly below you. That would be hard enough, but now imagine doing it while flying above the house instead of standing on a stationary ladder. When you factor in all the variables involved — flight speed and direction, fish mass, fish drop trajectory, fish aerodynamics as it flips and flops, wind speed and direction, humidity, chimney aperture, and more — it seems like you could try it a million times without success. And yet the osprey somehow managed to do it accidentally?

I agree that it seems more than a little unlikely, but it’s the only plausible explanation. And here’s something you might find surprising (as I did): It’s happened before. Reports indicate that birds have previously dropped live fish down chimneys in 1999 and 2005, and fish falling from the skies have also hit power lines, resulting in a New Jersey power outage in 2023 and a Canadian wildfire earlier this year.

But Thea didn’t know about any of that as she contemplated the bizarre tableau in her living room. And she also wasn’t thinking about the wind speed or the fish’s drop trajectory or any of those other variables, because she wasn’t viewing the fish as a mystery to be solved, but as a marvel to be appreciated. “I love symbols, and I’m not scared of talking about spirituality,” she told me. “So to me, this was very much like a miracle. Not a scientific miracle — like, oh, a bird flew above my house, and then the fish fell and it went exactly into the chimney. It was more like, oh, a fish is in my living room, in my home! I have all of these creative projects that I want to do, and I can’t get into the river to let them flow, and then suddenly there’s this fish. It’s a miracle fish!”

You might say that Thea was viewing the situation more through the lens of metaphysics, not physics. And on some level, that makes perfect sense: The fish was, after all, literally a gift from the heavens, bestowed from on high. Why not view it as a miracle?

Thea has continued to use that perspective as a litmus test when she tells friends about the fish. “If they react scientifically — like, ‘Oh, it must have been dropped by a bird’ — then it’s like I don’t want to be friends with them anymore,” she said. “But if they react in a more spiritual way or poetic way, like, ‘Oh my god, this is a miracle,’ I love them. I like feeding off of other people’s enthusiasm, and I want to be around people who believe in miracles like this.”

I’m not particularly into symbols, miracles, or spirituality. But as you may recall from a few previous posts, I’m a big fan of wonder, which I don’t think is that far removed from what Thea was getting at. Sometimes the world presents you with something so incredible, so mind-blowing, that you may as well just immerse yourself in its singularity and let the reverence wash over you.

All of that said, I had a bunch of additional questions for Thea, many of them about fairly basic practicalities, so let’s switch to interview transcript mode (some exchanges have been edited for length and clarity):

Inconspicuous Consumption: I’m assuming you don’t have a cat, right? Because if you did, it might have tried to eat the fish.

Thea: Right, or I would’ve woken up to find the fish on my pillow! But I don’t have any pets.

Thea Giovannini-Torelli and I during our recent Zoom interview.

IC: Do you know what kind of fish it was?

Thea: Some people who’ve seen the photos have told me it was a bluefish, but then I asked a fisherman who said it was a shad.

IC: Did you check your fireplace hearth to see if there was any sign of impact from when the fish landed?

Thea: There’s some wood below my fireplace, and I saw there was a little bit of dampness and maybe a bit of blood on one of those wood corners.

IC: Obviously, the flue must have been open, right?

Thea: An ex-boyfriend of mine mentioned that when I told him the story. He didn’t understand why the flue wasn’t closed in late September. But I mean, I’m a city person living out here in the country — I don’t know what to do with the flue.

IC: Good thing, because then the fish would’ve just landed on the flue and started rotting there. Instead of a bluefish, it would’ve been a flue fish!

Thea: Exactly. Thank god the flue was open.

IC: Roughly how many people would you say you’ve told this story to so far?

Thea: Oh, like an embarrassing number. The first people I told were my mom and my sister. And then I think I emailed my therapist, who’s on vacation, but I was desperate to know what he thought about it. By now, maybe 50 people. And then they’ve all told other people [indeed, that’s how I heard about it — Paul], so now I’m getting messages from other people telling me things like, “You were the talk of the coffee shop.”

IC: Has anyone doubted you, or thought maybe you had staged the photo and were pranking them? I mean, it’s a pretty incredible story.

Thea: I must be pretty convincing, because no one has been too skeptical. Some people have asked if friends might have planted the fish in my living room as a prank, but as soon as I explain how I always keep all the doors locked because I live alone, they turn into jaw-dropping believers.

IC: What did you end up doing with the fish?

Thea: I got a dustpan, and I placed the fish on the dustpan. By then it wasn’t moving too much. But if I’m being totally honest, I probably waited until it wasn’t moving as much — I could have gotten it much sooner.

I live right by the beach, so I started heading down to the beach with the fish on the dustpan, but then I got scared that the birds were going to smell the fish and attack me. So I ended up just throwing the fish down in the sand. I don’t think it was dead yet. And that kind of breaks my heart — I wish I was a better person and had put it back in the ocean. You know those stories about people releasing chimpanzees into the wild and then they come back for years to thank them? I could have been thanked by this fish all my life if I had just made it down to the water instead of worrying about the birds.

IC: Was there ever a moment where you thought about eating the fish?

Thea: No, never. But I’m friends with someone who’s a relative of Freud, and when I told him the story, he gave me this Freudian analysis, and then he said, “But Jung would’ve just cooked it and eaten it.” I liked that.

IC: How serious were you when you said you don’t want to be friends anymore with people who were primarily interested in the science or the physics of the fish’s fall? Like, have you actually stopped being friends with some of them?

Thea: No, I just meant that those people aren’t really my people, they’re not the kind of people I want to be surrounded by. So I’m not keeping them in the loop about all the fish updates.

But most people get it. I went to the UPS store soon after the fish appeared, so I told the UPS lady about it and we kind of bonded, and then the whole line of people bonded behind us, and then all of us at the UPS store were talking about this fish. I was showing people these photos of my home, which is kind of an intimate thing. It’s been a huge source of connection.

IC: Anything else that you want to mention about all of this?

Thea: The New York Times recently started a new newsletter called Believing. When it launched, the woman who writes it said on Instagram that the newsletter would be about “religion, spirituality and our weird, modern hellscape.” So when I saw the fish, I remembered reading that and I was like, wait —I know the world is a very complicated place, but why are you starting off by saying that we live in a hellscape? Like, you’re saying that hellscape is the baseline? Because we actually live in this amazing world where fish are falling through chimneys!

There’s this book about awe that came out a few years ago, and the basic point was that your capacity for awe is like a muscle that you can train and develop. So if you take time out of your day to actually see it and notice it, it can expand. So it’s kind of cool to have something like the fish story that spreads awe to other people. I want to live in that world.

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Paul here. By this point, Thea’s worldview sounds pretty familiar, right? She talks about awe in much the same way I talk about wonder, and her emphasis on building the capacity to notice the interesting things all around us is very much in keeping with Inconspicuous Consumption’s focus on overlooked details (and also fits in with my friend Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing project). So even though she’s coming at all of this from more of a “spiritual” perspective, I think our viewpoints are actually pretty close. If there’s a lesson here, I think it’s that physics and metaphysics can coexist, or even align.

And besides, I’ve had my own experiences with inexplicable phenomena. Remember the granola bar that ended up in my bird feeder?

(Special thanks to Elise Bauer for putting me in touch with Thea, and to Janet Rogers for research assistance.)

Inconspicuous News Roundup

(Photo from liveauctioneers.com)

• I was looking at an auction listing for an old Planters Peanuts advertising display and noticed that the buttons and buttonholes model’s dress appear to alternate back and forth from one side to the other. Never seen anything like that before! (Also, the buttons are peanut-shaped, but I’m more interested the alternating-sides design.)

• If you’re as fascinated by subways and coin-operated gadgets as I am, you may want to check out the New York Transit Museum’s upcoming free Zoom presentation about how New York City subway platforms used to have lots of vending machines. It’s on Tuesday, November 18th, from 2-3pm Eastern.

• Here’s a good timeline on the history of the motel.

• What does “fluff-loomed” mean? I don’t know, but it made me smile when I saw it on this label from a vintage blanket:

• Here’s an amusing account of a reporter’s attempt to track down some of the debris from White House East Wing’s demolition.

• A small town in Kansas is trying to raise funds to transform its water tower into the world’s largest teapot.

• Remember how I acquired a beautiful hornets’ nest that fell out of a tree near my house? It turns out that these types of nests are the latest trendy thing in interior design.

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.