Dad's Stories: Ball Lightning!

When I was young boy, the family was in the living room of our house at 607 Bosque Blvd., listening to a radio program. All of a sudden, the hair on our arms stood up and we experienced a very odd sensation. We all sat where we were, totally bewildered by the phenomena. Suddenly and without any warning...a hazy ball of fire, about the size of a person's head entered through an open window facing the north. While the family sat in stunned silence, with eyes the size of hen eggs, the electrical sphere moved rapidly across the room and exited out a bedroom window on the north side of the house.

After it left the room, we became very animated and excitedly moved around the room all talking at once. "What was that," someone blurted out. My daddy said, "It was ball lightening!" In my confused state of mind, I thought I had just seen the Holy Ghost move through our living room. No one was hurt by the incident, but I guarantee you that we never again had family "radio" time during a severe thunderstorm.

I'm sure my face looked something like this:


From then on, whenever it commenced to lightening and thunder, my mother would immediately say, "Turn off the radio! (later the TV). For years, if there was a forecast of thunderstorm activity, day or night...my mother would go all around the house unplugging anything that was connected to an outside antenna.

I saw one other instance of "ball lightening" in action. As a teenager, one of my hobbies was listening to shortwave radio, I usually had a long wire antenna strung from the top of our house, out to our garage. My mom was convinced that one day it would draw a lightening strike that would burn down our home. One night during a terrible thunderstorm and following a loud "crack" of thunder, I observe a nebulus ball of fire run down the antenna wire and dissipate near the garage. After this particular incident, I purchased a "lightening protector" device for my antenna, that would immediately send to ground any direct lightening strikes which might hit my shortwave antenna.

In my entire life, I've never seen such violent thunderstorm activity as we used to have in Meridian, Texas. It was unbelievable, really.