A man who was asleep in it was killed. His wife by his side and his little girl felt nothing, but a pillow on which one of them had her head was thrown to a distance. Finally, the meteor went through the floor, broke a large clock on the ground floor, setting fire to everything on its way.
On June 1, 1903, a fulminant ray fell on the church of Cussy-la-Colonne (Côte d'Or). To start, it turned the clock tower upside down, broke a clock, then opened a cupboard in the sacristy in which there were various articles, and broke them all.
In April, 1886, lightning did great damage in the church at Montredon (Tarn). It demolished the steeple to an extent of three metres, several bells, and carried the enormous iron bar which supported them a long way off. The roof of the church was burst in and the tiles were pulverized in several places by the falling masonry. In the interior a bench was broken, an image of Christ reduced to powder, and a metal image of St. Peter twisted.
We may remark, by the way, that churches are very often struck by lightning, doubtless owing to the height of the steeple above the edifice.
We have innumerable notes about ruined steeples, turrets knocked off, the plundering of priestly objects. Sculptures and pictures adorning the sanctuary are often destroyed, and the altar itself shattered. Cases of priests struck while officiating are not uncommon. As for the faithful killed while at church, they may be counted by the hundred.
Without wishing to call lightning a miscreant or an infidel, one is obliged to confess it fails in respect for holy places.
However, the quips and cranks of lightning observed in dwellings are no less varied and curious.
Here are some remarkable accounts:—
One night during a terrible thunderstorm, lightning came down the chimney of a room where two people were asleep. The husband awoke with a start and, believing the house to be on fire, groped his way to the mantelpiece to get a candle, but was stopped by a heap of rubbish. Everything, in fact, of which the chimney had once consisted was heaped up in the middle of the room. The mantelshelf, violently torn off, had been partly melted, the clock had had the door of the case pulled off, and all the window-panes were broken. On the lower storey, another clock was similarly demolished, the floor was torn up and the tiles thrown with such force against the ceiling that there were splinters sticking all over it.
In the month of April, 1866, at Bure (Luxembourg), the thunder, which had been rumbling for some time, suddenly crashed down all at once about midnight with the most appalling violence, so that the ground seemed to tremble and the houses rock on their foundations.