In July, 1896, at Epervans (Saône-et-Loire), a young man named Petiot, who was mowing in a meadow, was struck dead by lightning while lighting a cigarette, and left in a state of complete nakedness.
On August 11, 1855, a man was struck by lightning near Vallerois (Haute-Saône), and stripped naked. All that could be found afterwards of his clothes was a shirt-sleeve, a few other shreds, and some pieces of his hobnailed boots. Ten minutes after he was struck he regained consciousness, opened his eyes, complained of the cold, and inquired how he happened to be naked.
There is no telling what lightning will not do.
Sometimes it will snatch things out of your hand and carry them right away.
There is a case of a mug being thus spirited away from a man, who had just been drinking out of it, and deposited undamaged in a courtyard near—the man himself suffering no injury. A youth of eighteen, holding up a missal from which he is singing, has it torn out of his hands and destroyed. A whip is whisked out of a rider's hand. Two ladies, quietly knitting, have their knitting-needles stolen. A girl was sitting at her sewing-machine, a pair of scissors in her hand; a flash of lightning, and her scissors are gone and she is sitting on the sewing-machine. A farmer's labourer is carrying a pitchfork on his shoulder; the lightning seizes it, carries it off fifty yards or so, and twists its two prongs into corkscrews.
On July 22, 1878, at Gien (Nievre), a woman while sprinkling her house with holy water during a storm, saw her holy-water bottle smashed actually in her fingers by the lightning, which at the same time smashed up the tiled pavement of the room.
In a church at Dancé (Loire) during vespers, one day in June, 1866, a flash of lightning killed the priest and all the congregation, knocked over the monstrance on the altar, and buried the Host in a heap of débris.
On June 28, 1885, the cupola of the Javisy Observatory, which was not then provided with a lightning conductor, was struck by lightning. An enormous piece of oak from un angle de construction was torn to shreds, and one splinter was lodged in the hinge of a window behind the pivot, in the part between the pivot and the frame, hardly a twenty-fifth of an inch apart, and this without breaking the glass.
In other cases lightning has been known to split men in two, almost as with a huge axe. On January 20, 1868, this happened to a miller's assistant in a windmill at Groix. The lightning struck him, and split him from his head downwards in two.
In the course of July, 1844, four inhabitants of Heiltz-le-Maurupt, near Vitry-le-Françoise, took refuge under trees during a storm, three of them under a poplar, and the fourth under a willow, against which doubtless he leaned. In a few minutes this one was struck by lightning. A bright flame was observed to be issuing from his clothes, but he remained standing, and seemed unconscious of what had happened. "You're on fire! You're on fire!" exclaimed his friends. Getting no reply, they went up to where he was, and found to their horror that he was a corpse.