A violent storm was raging near Marseilles, when seven persons, seated together in the ground-floor drawing-room of a country house, saw a fireball as big as a plate appear in their midst.
It directed its course towards a young girl of eighteen, who, frightened out of her life, had fallen on her knees. Touching her shoes, it rebounded to the ceiling, then came down to her feet again, and so on two or three times, with mysterious regularity, the girl experiencing, it seems, no other sensation than that of a slight cramp in her legs. Eventually the fireball made its exit from the room through a keyhole!
The girl could not get up at once after it had gone. For a fortnight or so she could not walk without assistance, and it was two years before she got over a liability to sudden weakness in her legs, causing her suddenly to fall.
It is strange to reflect that these diminutive fireballs, produced by the actual atmosphere we breathe, are less understood by us than that enormous globe which we call the sun, and to which is due the flowering of the entire life of our planet. If we are still in doubt as to the nature of the sun's spots, at least we have been able to analyse its own elements. And we know its dimensions, its weight, its distance from us, its rate of rotation, etc., etc.
Yet these electric spheres that make their escape from the clouds in times of storm, baffle our investigations altogether.
According to records which seem authentic, fireballs have been seen actually to come into existence upon the surface of a ceiling, at the mouth of a well, and upon the flagstones of a church.
In 1713, at the château of Fosdinaro, in the neighbourhood of Massa Carrara, in the course of a storm and heavy downpour of rain, there was seen to appear suddenly upon the ground a very vivid flame, white and blue in colour. It seemed to flare fiercely, but did not move apparently from the one spot, and after growing quickly in volume it suddenly disappeared. Simultaneously with its going, one of the observers felt a curious sort of tickling behind his shoulder, moving upwards; several bits of plaster from the ceiling under which he stood fell upon his head, and there was a sudden crash quite unlike an ordinary thunderclap.
In 1750, on the 2nd of July, at about three in the afternoon, the Abbé Richard happened to be in the church of St. Michel at Dijon during a storm. "Suddenly," he tells us, "I saw between two pillars of the nave a bright red flame floating in the air about three feet above the floor. Presently it rose to a height of twelve or fifteen feet, increasing in volume. Then, after having moved some yards to one side, while still rising diagonally to the height almost of the woodwork of the organ, it disappeared at last with an explosion like the report of a cannon."
On July 21, 1745, a violent storm broke out in Boulogne, and the tower of a convent was struck by a fireball. It was of great size, and was seen to emerge from one of the sewers of the town and to move along the surface of the road until it hit against this tower, of which a part subsided. No one was hurt. A nun affirmed that some years before she had seen just such another fireball emerge from the same spot and precipitate itself with a crash against the summit of the tower without doing any damage.
In the middle of a violent storm, Dr. Gardons saw several fireballs flying in different directions, not far from the ground, making a crackling sort of noise. One of them was seen by witnesses to come out of an excavation full of stagnant water. They killed one man, several animals, and did much damage to the trees and houses in the vicinity.