If you read old books or modern Twitter with any amount of regularity, you’ll see a lot of things attributed to divine judgment. Plagues, wars, storms, sundry disasters — it’s easy, and often appealing, to point to things beyond human control and suppose a conscious and morally just will behind them. For most people, though, it’s to come across something that really does sound like God went out of His way to personally ruin someone’s day. A prime example of this is The Great Thunderstorm of 1638, in which a number of churchgoers in the small British town of Widecombe were violently killed by what was either the temporary suspension of normal laws of physics or possibly the Devil.
The story survives in two printed accounts, written not long after the events they describe. They’re difficult to parse — whatever happened, happened quickly, and with incredible violence. A group of people were gathered at a church service when there was a sudden “strange darkenesse” followed by “a mighty thundering.” It grew so dark that the parishioners could no longer see one another. Lightning struck the north side of the church tower, ripped through the wall, and raced down the stairs. Hitting a wall, it bounced back and blew through the window of the church. It shot across the interior before striking “against the North-side wall of the Church, as if it were with a great Cannon bullet.” It bounced again, down the aisle, where it blew apart the pulpit and exploded a man’s skull:
[the lightning] strook off all the hinder part of the Warriner's head, the braines fell backward intire and whole into the next seate behind him, and two pieces of his scull, and dasht his blood against the wall [...] and some of the skin of his head, flesh and haire was carried into the Chancell…
When they found the man afterwards his face was so untouched they thought he was merely sleeping, until they noticed that the back of his head was gone.
It wasn’t over. The “power or force” then divided itself in two, with one part of it blowing out another window with enough force that the dust and shrapnel from the shattered stones blinded onlookers. The other part ripped through the wall into the Chancel, where it threw eight boys around the room — without harming them — before striking another man in the head and killing him outright. It hit the wall again, bounced again, shattered some more stone and timber, and finally disappeared. All that was left was burned and shattered stone and a smell like sulfur.
At least four people were dead and many others were hideously injured. One old woman had her hand burned so badly it needed amputation. Several people suffered serious skin burns, though their clothing was untouched. Some were fine, though their clothing was singed. Also a dog died.
Normal lightning does not, generally speaking, do this kind of thing. The working assumption is that this was an example of ball lightning. No one knows what ball lightning is or how it works — something something plasma, mumble mumble ionization — so we can’t be sure what, exactly, was the mysterious “slimy powder tempered with water" that smelled "odious even beyond expression” left behind by the event. We just have a bizarre and frankly horrifying account of people being killed or disfigured by inexplicable Star Trek stuff.
The initital pamphlets characterize this event as inexplicable act of God, but before long a story had grown up claiming that the Devil had come to Widecombe to claim the souls of one of its parishioners — which, honestly, maybe. Strangest of all, this is just one of a few accounts of what were either bizarre meteorological phenomena or the work of dark spirits which hit several British churches around this time. Jeremy Harte, in his book Cloven Country, cites a 1612 story from Kent in which during a storm “a thing in the middle aisle of the church burned, as one might perceive it, but yet was like unto a black cloud and smoked.” That doesn’t sound like ball lightning at all. Most famously, a black dog was said to have burst through the doors of two separate Suffolk churches — again during a storm — killing two people in each and collapsing one of the steeples.