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Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 69: May-Jun 1990 |
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Lightning In The Family
What follows is hardly a scientific report, but we have no reason to doubt its accuracy.
On last Saint Patrick's Day. G. Patterson, of Phoenix, Maryland, north of Baltimore, was in bed sick during a hard rainstorm, when the bulb in her bedside lamp exploded. Lightning had struck her house.
She got out of bed and rushed over to her daughter's house nearby to find a red ball of fire on the house's baseboard outlet. Her daughter's house had also been struck by lightning! Worse yet, the TV and VCR had been destroyed.
Later on the same day, Patterson's daughter in Bel Air, northeast of Baltimore, called to say that the chimney of her house had been struck by lightning, scattering fireplace bricks all over the floor!
(Simon, Roger; "After Lightning Strikes a Family Thrice, Call Priest," Baltimore Sun, April 9, 1997.)
Reference. Lightning's "pranks" are cataloged in GLL11 in the catalog: Lightning, Auroras. Information on this book can be found here.