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Lightning can occur in strange ways. French astronomer Camille Flammarion collected
interesting stories of lightning’s bizarre effects. In one occurrence, a girl was jerked
through the air and left unharmed on top of her sewing machine when her room was hit by
lightning. Another story tells of a building hit twice during one storm. The first bolt
started a fire, while the second set off the alarm bell that summoned help to extinguish
it. The intense heat lightning generates can make the air in fabric expand so explosively
that clothes are actually blown off a person’s back, an event that happened to a workman
in Ashford, England, in 1878. He was stripped naked and badly burned. The opposite
happened in 1943, when the National Safety Council reported a soldier who was sealed in
his sleeping bag when lightning struck and welded the zipper shut. A lightning bolt that
hit a home in County Mayo, Ireland, broke the shells of a basket of eggs, but left the
inner membranes unharmed. Lightning that struck a windowpane created an almost perfectly
circular two-inch hole. Every other one of a stack of twelve dinner plates was broken
when an Iowa residence was hit by lightning.
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