This happened to me when I was in grade school, I turned off the light in my room and for lack of a better term since I haven’t taken any engineering courses or the like, an electrical discharge occured. Literally, a few lines of blue lightning connected the ceiling and floor for less than a second. If that’s still not a good description, I could even draw a picture. I know this happened because my sister saw it too, we were both about 11 feet away at the door. There was defintely no shock, or any sort of burn leftover and I didn’t think much of it. Don’t remember hearing any sound either. That’s the weirdest thing that’s happened to me ever, and the other things if you’re wondering were sneezing when I looked at the sun and sleep paralysis, which were both explained by a few searches on google. The more I think about it the weirder it gets so if any could explain that would be nice.
I would venture to say that it wasn’t lightning since it would take a hell of a lot of voltage to jump across that span in normal living conditions. More voltage than you’ll probably ever have in your house (unless your house get’s struck by lightning). Unless of course you have a really really bad grounding problem, in which case make sure not to touch your shower head while taking a shower.
yeah no way it was lightening…
most likely ghosts.
Were the lines thick and bright or slender?
Did they ‘zap’ or did they dance and swirl a bit?
Other things I forgot to ask; were the curtains drawn, what was the weather like outside, was the window behind you?
The voltage required to arc from floor to ceiling would be in the millions of volts. There’s no way that could have come from household electricity. I suspect it was an illusion, caused by something else.
My thought was that maybe it had been a pinhole camera-type projection of an outdoor lightning flash through a chink in the curtains (of course this would produce a reversed image on the wall, but it’s quite possible for such an image to appear to be in free-floating mid air, particulalry since we are talking about a scenario where the room lights had just been turned off and the eyes are adjusting)
No explanation from me, but I wonder if it was related to the kind of phenomenon a few friends of mine and I witnessed.
Probably about 10 p.m. They were outside on the lawn, I was upstairs talking to them from my window. Mid-conversation, we saw “sheet lightening” between us, also for less than a second. We all paused mid-sentence to ask each other: “Did you see that?” “Wuzzat?!?” “What the hell was that?”
It was kind of like, well… a “sheet”, parallel to the ground, and about ten feet above the lawn (that’s a best guess – it was over my friends heads, but seemed to be lower than my knee level at the second floor window).
It was a warm summer evening, cool enough to wear long pants, but too warm for long sleeves. Kind of humid. There was a street lamp about 30 feet away, but there was no arc or any other kind of electrical weird thing happening at the street light.
Sounds like it could be a smiliar kind of discharge as what you describe.
Poltergeist? Aliens? Swamp gas?
I would imagine that the phenomenon you are describing, Charmian would be something like a thin layer of mist being illuminated by a light source. It’s possible, under conditions similar to what you describe (and almost zero wind velocity) for a very thin plane of mist to form parallel to the ground.
It was dark outside (not sure what time), no lightning, and it was free floating but since it only flashed for less than a second, there was no way you could tell if it swirls or dances but it was 2 dimensional so it can be described sort of like a sheet. It looked like it came from above but it could very well have come from the ground up. From the top to the bottom it’s 230cm or 7’7.
The lines were thick and bright blue sort of like the photoshop lightning effects all over the web. I’m not talking about a simple spark when you unplug your VCR with the power still on, but if you’ve seen electricity jump out of a wall socket it’s like that but bigger.
Can’t remember the curtains so I’ll leave that as a possibility. Best one yet.
The wall the windows were on were in front, at a slant.
I’m sure more people have seen someone stick a metal rod next to a Van de Graaff generator, it was like that, albeit a much larger scale, so it might have something to do with static electricity. Other than that, I’m outta ideas.
That seems very plausible. I’m quite sure there was not even a breeze that day. I have driven on very dark, country backroads and have seen that layer-of-mist effect and it was definitely very similar to what we saw.
Except, aside from the steady light of the street lamp, there was no other really viable source of illumination. (The “street lamp” was on a paved path behind my house and not actually on the “street” so no headlights could have hit it.) And it was a really bright, quick pulse, like a camera flash and nothing else got lit up.
However, unless the mist could have conducted some kind of charge Mangetout’s explanation seems to be the best for my scenario at least.
Simpa, I don’t suppose there would have been weird, vertical bands of mist in your room though… The hypotheses must continue…