I’ve been saying for years that we should try to sell them- most of them go right in the trash (our product is used for printing and ink doesn’t stick to the lightning bolts). Never actually tried to sell any, however. I have given some to friends and family.
A large red oak in our front yard was struck by lightning. The current traveled through the tree and out through the roots, which blew huge chunks of sod into the street about 20 feet away. Other than that, you wouldn’t have known the tree had been hit, but it died a slow and painful death over the course of the summer from the internal damage.
That’s a shame. They’re really beautiful.
When I was in 5th grade or so, I was playing football on the playground at recess. Someone shanked a punt and it hit some power lines running overhead. Two of the lines touched and a Jacob’s ladder arced between them for 10-15 seconds.
We have an invisible dog fence in our yard now and apparently they are lightning magnets. One night during a thunderstorm at about 3am our yard got hit. The lightning blew the cover off our irrigation control box into the neighbor’s yard, exploded 4-5 holes in the yard about 3 feet wide and 1 foot deep, including one that destroyed a section of the irrigation pipes leading to flooding before it tracked into the house and shorted out several receptacles in the basement. Every sensitive piece of electronics in the house was f’ed up too.
When I was about 12 years old my family and I were with a group that went on a day trip to do some sightseeing at Canyon De Chelly in Arizona. We visited a few different places in the area. At our last stop, we were walking around at the top of the canyon walls, enjoying the majestic views stretching out before us. Then some dark clouds started to build up. It wasn’t raining and there wasn’t any lightning or thunder yet, but a strange thing happened. Everyone’s hair started to stand up. You’ve seen someone with their hand on a Van de Graaff generator? We all looked like that. All of us kids thought it was hilarious. The adults rushed to get everyone back on the bus RIGHT NOW, because this is a warning sign that lightning is about to strike. Fortunately, we got on the bus and left without incident.
Not unusual, but I’ve had some close experiences in the tropics. I once spent a tense hour in a minibus driving through a lightening storm, with lightening hitting the trees lining the road around us as we passed. The tense part was that I had just been shopping in the big city, and atop that minibus was my brand new tank of propane. Phew!
I also witnessed a lighting strike to a pole just outside a restaurant I was eating at. It was the loudest sound I’ve ever heard.
Never seen ball lightning or St. Elmo’s fire, sadly. Here’s the best I can do:
I was hauling mulch for a local (outside Philly) nursery. As I drove down a deserted side road on a delivery, something happened to cause a short between two conductors on the power line paralleling the road, announcing itself with an enormous bang and the emission of a spectacular spark that stretched almost the entire distance (about 100 feet) between two of the supporting poles. This happened just as I was passing that point in my truck. Scared the hell out of me.
I was standing on the platform of a suburban station outside of Paris on an extremely wet day, foggy and drizzly. I had an umbrella up and eventually became of aware of a slight buzzing sound overhead. I looked up and saw a continuous spark about an inch long running from one of the ribs of the umbrella to the shaft. Apparently the air was so moist it was conducting electricity the ten feet or so distance from the overhead wire of the railway (carrying about 25,000 volts AC, IIRC) to my umbrella. I suspect I’m lucky I wasn’t electrocuted.
The closest I’ve ever gotten to lightning was standing in a now-defunct bookstore in suburban Houston and watching through the panoramic front window as multiple strikes landed in the parking lot about fifty feet away. It was remarkably similar in appearance to a scene near the beginning of the Spielberg version of War of the Worlds.
I have been hit with lightning twice in my life. Only thing unusual is the fact that I am alive.
As a pilot, I have seen many things that most folks would consider strange but for pilots, not so much.
In the late 1930’s my Dad & Mom were driving down a road at night during a T storm and a ball of lightning came from behind & above them, landing and rolling along in front of them. It ran over a car that was in front of them & the car disappeared or at least was not there when it out.
In 1959, a big strong lightning strike hit a lone tree in a field & killed 13 race horses of Raymond Drake which had all gathered under it. He was part of the startup of Blue Ribbon Down in Sallisaw, OK.
We had a similar experience at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado. My stepdaughter and her two cousins all had their hair suddenly stand on end, my sister-in-law yelled “Lightning!” and we all hauled ass back to the visitor center.
My mother-in-law claims a bolt of ball lightning shot through her living room one night - basically came in through one wall and out the opposite.
Two from my dad from his days as a geologist;
Camped on the edge of a smallish salt pan when a lightning storm came through the area. Some rain earlier had left a thin layer of water across the surface of the pan and lightning was coming down and then being conducted across the surface in random directions.
They had been working on top of a small rise that had a lot of iron ore content. When a storm came through they all headed down to the bottom but my dad had left his geol-pick at the top and ran back to get it. There was enough of a charge builong up in the area for all his hair to stand up. He says he broke land-speed records getting out of there 
One of mine; sitting in a bus on a ridge-line acting as a radio relay for some hike groups, if you can picture the layout of the area:
small hill—saddle—low hill (bus)—saddle----small hill
there was about 60 yards between each of the hills and the small hills on each side were about 20 yards higher than where I was in the bus.
Within a few minutes of each other there were strikes on both of the smaller hills, I didn’t stay around to see if the next shot would be a bullseye. :eek: