with huge, wooden beams, while pews were wrecked. The fireball split in two, one half smashing through a window to escape back into the sky, while the other disappeared within the church itself, its ruins almost ob- scured under a sulfurous pall of thick, dark smoke. In that unscientific age, the incident was naturally blamed on the Devil. “Later,” according to an early twentieth century source (John S. Amery, Joshua Brooking Rowe [1905], Devon Notes and Queries, J. G. Commin, p. viii), “some blamed the entire in- cident on two people who had been playing cards in the pew during the sermon, thereby incurring God’s wrath.”


On August 29, 1726, the sloop Catherine A nineteenth century engraving depicts a ball lightning event.


climb in and out of bed. In fact, several docu- mented encounters with ball lightning proved fatal for human observers. During what was known as “the Great Thunderstorm” of October 21, 1638, four pa-


rishioners were killed and some 60 other per- sons injured by an eight-foot-wide fireball that crashed through the roof of an English church at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Devon. Large stones crashed to the ground together


and Mary, while passing through the Gulf of Florida in a violent thunderstorm, was struck by a fireball that killed a crew member and severed the hand of another man. Later that same century, “Admiral Cham- bers on board the Montague, November 4, 1749, was taking an observation just before noon ... he observed a large ball of blue fire about three miles distant from them. They immediately lowered their topsails, but it came up so fast upon them, that, before they could raise the main tack, they observed the ball rise almost perpendicularly, and not above forty or fifty yards from the main chains, when it went off with an explosion, as great as if a hundred cannons had been dis- charged at the same time, leaving behind it a


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