How can you resist a subtitle like “The World’s Strangest True Weather Stories”?

Or, I guess, how could I?

I actually think this might have been a gift from my friend, Cindy who, if she had been born in a different time and family, may have become a storm-chaser. Whenever we’re traveling together, if there’s funky weather, we want to be in it, watching thunderstorms from the porch or leaning into the wind or standing in the Pine Barrens, an area seemingly sometimes devoid of breezes, the air hanging heavy and thin.

In this book, the author devotes chapters to Tornadoes, Lightning, Hail, Hurricanes, Snow, Wind, Dust Devils and Waterspouts – as well as, “Hot, Cold, Wet, and Dry”, “The Oddest Weather Extremes”, “Oddest Forecasts”, and “State Weather Oddities.”

What is a weather oddity? Well, one example reflects reports of chickens caught in a tornado, stripped of their feathers and found naked and dead or alive, but seated perhaps on a rail or in a chicken coop as if nothing had happened except that they were stripped of their feathers. Is this a hoax, perhaps, an example of the American sense of humor?

Or could there be a real weather reason why this would happen. A meteorologist tries to run an experiment: shooting wind at a chicken covered in feathers. But the windspeeds needed to rip out the feathers also rip the chicken’s body to pieces. (I’m going to hope, for the chicken’s sake, that it had predeceased the experiment.) Perhaps it wasn’t the wind, another meteorologist suggests, but lightening which regularly blows people’s shoes and clothes off.¹ Or, posits another scientist (perhaps a poultryologist), the feathers weren’t removed from the chickens by a freak of weather – perhaps the stress of being caught in the storm caused the chickens to spontaneously molt.

Each chapter talks a little bit about the weather in question, followed by some freaky stories, and scientific speculation about what people might have been observing., followed by a short section on how to keep yourself safe in that kind of weather. In the chapter on lightning, he describes stories of ball lightning (one, not included, is the anecdote by Laura Ingalls Wilder, as she and her sisters had stayed home at the Little House on the Prairie, when Ma and Pa had gone to Independence. They were little children – Mary maybe 8 or 9, Laura a couple of years younger, Carrie just a toddler. The weather turns freaky and ball lightning comes down the chimney, runs around the room, then disappears.)

The chapter on Hail describes extremely large hailstones (in some cases, as large as boulders that take several days to melt), hailstones of cricket-ball size that kill hundreds of people, “hail” caused by ice sliding off plane wings. It also covers hail that encases ladybugs, frogs, and fish. Rain’s chapter describes “blood rains” caused by ochre-colored desert dust sucked up into clouds and acting as the irritants that cause raindrops to form. Hurricanes – well, hurricanes are always freak storms, with people describing narrow escapes and newspapers huge numbers of deaths.

“Hot, Cold, Wet, and Dry” describes heatwaves, cold snaps, floods, droughts, and – my favorite – fogs. Fogs, we think, are deadly because of lack of sight. But they can also trap air pollution, pushing it down into the streets and houses of manufacturing towns like Pittsburgh, filling people’s lungs with poisonous gasses. “Snow” covers sudden blizzards that take out herds of animals, as well as red snow (dust), yellow snow (no, not that yellow snow, this one is caused by pollen), black snow (ash), bug snow (yech), snow in unexpected places like Miami, and pogonip (which my sister calls snog when it descends on her small town each winter).

“Wind” covers windstorms, dust storms, winds blowing trains down the track, prairie schooners (literally wagons driven by wind in their sails, not the covered wagons), the dustbowl, and animals killed by static electricity caused by wind, and “wind madness” which Arthur Upfield, Australian mystery author, often included in his books. (My favorite wind story, which is in one of Fagan’s books, but not in this one, is about a thriving estate of farmland and timber near but not on the coast of the British Isles. After several days of wind, the entire estate was buried deep in sand, to the height of the trees, and the owner was ruined.)

If you like reading about disasters and weather mysteries, this is a great book for that. You can still find it pretty easily online, in p-book format. So go for it!

1. A real thing. Apparently the sudden heat of the electricity causes a sudden rush of sweat that turns into steam that explodes outward, taking your clothes and shoes with you. ↩︎