General Discussion

knowledge (none, really) of how electricity and lightning work other than Franklin's experiment to prove that lightning is electricity.

But post #2 has a link to some fascinating descriptions of ball lightning in a Wikipedia article, along with several hypotheses on how it forms and what it consists of.

When I read those descriptions, a couple of them sounded like what happened to my paternal grandmother. The only other person present at the time was my uncle who described it to me years later. There was a severe thunderstorm some miles away from their farmhouse, which was at the top of a hill. My grandmother was peeling apples in the kitchen. My uncle was on the other side of their large kitchen table.

I had been told by other relatives that she was killed by a lightning bolt, which I figured was a streak of lightning like you see in the sky during a storm. But my uncle told me that it was a ball of light that came into the kitchen and moved straight to my grandmother, who had a metal peeler in her hand and was seated next to an old-fashioned iron cookstove. He said that the ball seemed to explode with a force that knocked him a off of his chair and a few feet sideways. There was a booming sound at the same time, and a sulfur smell afterward.

My grandmother was still breathing, but died either at the hospital or on the way. Cause of death was listed as heart failure due to a lightning strike. My uncle was a teen at the time and suffered heart damage and a couple heart attacks at a young age. A few operations and pacemakers replaced at intervals allowed him to live to age 92.