During a thunderstorm in Winter Park, Florida, in 1893, a barrage of 2- to 4-inch-long sunfish fell with the rain over the town. The fish likely came from nearby Lake Virginia, swept up by a waterspout and deposited miles away. This event is one of many documented cases of animal rain in the United States and remains a local legend.

The Winter Park fish rain captured the Southern Gothic imagination, appearing in local folklore and later in the poetry and fiction of Florida writers. The motif of raining fish became a symbol of the uncanny in American literature, used by poets like James Dickey and others to evoke the surreal and the inexplicable in the natural world.