More tales of ball lightning

MY DAD HAD come home on furlough (R&R) to Mount Scott farm, east of Kingston, SA, during World War II in 1942.

Late one hot and humid night, he took the stallion down the hill from the house to lock him in the stallion yard, because one of the mares was coming on heat and they didn’t want her to get pregnant.

He had let the horse go in the yard after fitting the two sliprails across the gateway, and as he climbed through between the rails, he saw a bright ball of light drop from the sky. It seemed to float away from him, passing over the crest of the hill and striking the side of one of the large pine trees in the row running down from the house where the working dogs were kept on chains. The ball petered out as it floated on down towards the swamp and passed out of sight. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he realised that the stallion – also shaking violently – was standing next to him, but now on the outside of the yard, which meant he’d made a standing-start jump of at least 1.5m.

He put the horse back in the yard and fetched a lantern from the house so he could check the dogs and examine the tree. All the dogs were fine, but none wanted to come out of their kennels.

The tree had a scald mark on the side, with splits running up in the thick bark and a strong smell of cooked pine resin, and was unlike other trees he’d seen that had been hit by forked lightning, and which had had great pieces ripped out of them or the whole canopy blown apart.

Next morning, Dad could see the grass around the tree was also scalded, and within a week, the pine needles all started to wilt and drop. The tree slowly died. Unlike the relatively quick demise usually associated with pine trees that die, rot and fall over quickly, this one retained all its twigs and small limbs for years afterwards. As the bark fell off, the trunk and limbs remained smooth and shiny, and looked like it had some sort of preserving varnish on it. It didn’t really start to decompose and drop limbs until 35 years after the encounter with the ball of lightning. The main trunk was still standing the last time I visited in the late 1990s, but it was looking pretty sorry for itself by then.

ROB ENGLAND, KINGSTON, SA

An aerial view of Mount Scott farm, no longer owned by the family of our reader, Rob England. You can see, Rob writes, “two gaps in the row where two pines have died [due to ball lightning], and been taken out by the new property owner. They now reside in the heap [circled] directly facing the viewer from the end of the garage.”