Recalling ball lightning

In the summer of 1983 or 1984, when I was 13 or 14, my family rented a holiday house on the road to Constantine Bay in Cornwall. There was our immediate family of four, plus my uncle and aunt and their four children and our grandparents. At about 10pm after a very hot day we were getting ready for bed. In my room was my younger sister, myself and our 16-year-old twin cousins. We had a large room with a fulllength window running down the middle of the far wall that looked over the bay. We liked to sleep with the curtains and window open to hear the sea. We also like to hear the thunderstorms, as invariably after a hot day we would have one. This night was no exception and it had been thundering for about 20 minutes.

We had just turned the lights off and were chatting when we heard a strange crackling and screeching noise that sounded a bit like a firework. We noticed a light shining in from the window and shot out of bed to see a ball of yellowy fire about the size of a football, slowly coming down the garden about 2ft (60cm) off the ground and straight towards our window. The crackling noise stopped. We all screamed, which brought Mum and Nan into the room. My Nan ran to the window and shut it and drew the curtains. She told us it was just ball lightning and not to be frightened but to come away from the window. Mum and Nan were born in India and apparently saw things like this frequently there. We could still see the light through the drawn curtains for a few more seconds before it all went dark. I don’t remember much more about that night so I’m presuming I went straight to sleep.

I don’t recall talking about it again. However, I was chatting with my sister recently and mentioned this event as I was sure I had dreamed it. She didn’t remember, so I called my Mum. She remembered and was very matter-of-fact about it. One of my twin cousins remembers but the other one doesn’t. Nicola Maasdam Lincolnshire

a ball of bright fiery light floated through the kitchen window

I recently remembered a story my grandfather told me when I was roughly eight years old, about an encounter with what in hindsight sounds like archetypal ball lightning, although he didn’t use the term. As I recall, he said it happened in the garden of his family’s house in the small town of Parkstone near Poole in Dorset, most probably in the late 1930s or early 1940s. It was the middle of the day, the weather was calm and he was sitting in the garden playing with his grandmother or aunt when a ball of bright fiery light about the size of a football came through the garden fence and floated silently along a perfectly straight trajectory across the garden and through the kitchen window, penetrating the glass without damaging it – and then disappeared. I wish I had been old enough to have asked him more questions about it. John Hope Southbourne, Dorset