Like Being In a Plasma Globe

[ManhattanSkyline]

I wanted to share this experience expressly for feedback and opinion. This was a rather strange experience I had in my mid-teen years that did involve lightning (a theme of my life), but whereas I am convinced the lightning phenomena I experienced as a small child was due to UFO activity, I am really not sure what this particular experience was all about. It could have been UFO/otherworldly being related or it could have been entirely natural. I simply don't know and would like to know if any of you guys have a possible explanation for it.

Here it go: I was a junior in high school and my family lived briefly (1yr) in a creepy two story house. We were merely house sitting. One of my mom's co-workers had an elderly mother who had to go live in a nursing home. We were allowed to live in the house in her absence since the house we had been renting sold. This was a REALLY creepy old house. My mother had her bedroom downstairs and the rest of us kids had bedrooms upstairs. I had one of the biggest bedrooms. It was a hexagon-shaped room with incredibly tall ceilings, a big sled bed, and a small closet at the opposite end of the bed. There were two windows on the outside wall. One night, there was a big storm. I woke up to the sound of big crashes of thunder. They weren't so much crashes as big loud booms as if the lightning was striking right outside the windows. It was one of those storms where you can feel the electricity in the air so much so that it hurts, like you can feel it in your chest. The flashes were so loud and so violent, I have never encountered the like since. The odd thing was when I woke up to hear the booming that seemed to shake the whole house, I could hear birds singing. It sounded like there was a whole bunch of birds perched in one of the trees near my windows and they were singing their heads off loudly during all this nighttime ruckus, singing like little nightingales. I remember looking out the windows not being able to see anything, except I kind of remember looking up at the electric pole and the transformer thinking it could blow any second. I remember the lightning flashing being so near and so bright I couldn't look outside for long. I really felt the lightning was striking just outside my window, and it would come through my window and strike me at any second.

I crawled back into bed and another strange thing about this night was that I fell asleep while all this banging and booming and house shaking was going on! The next thing I remember is waking up again in the night in a pool of sweat and a pain in my chest and finding something I could not wrap my head around inches from my face. It wasn't an alien or anything. It was like electricity. It looked like a small, stationary ball of electricity (yellowish/white in color). It was the size of a tennis ball and hovering about 1 1/2 to 2 feet above the surface of the middle of my bed. And it had this thick "tail" of electricity that undulated like a snake that went down into my bed. The place where the tail connected with the bed was maybe 5 inches from my side (it was nestled in-between my arm and side). It scared the pants off me. I had no idea what I was looking at. The top ball was still but the rest of the tail wriggled like a snake. The whole thing was glowing and buzzing. I couldn't see very well because I didn't have my glasses on. It looked fuzzy but there was no mistaking its basic shape. I remember staring at it for a long time. I lost track of time. I had no idea if I had been staring at it for hours or minutes. There was so much electricity in the air I had a hard time thinking and forming complete thoughts. I was terrified to move. I was afraid if I moved, the tail would hit my side and that much electricity would kill me.

After laying there staring at for god knows how long, I decided I had to try to get away from it or I would surely be electrocuted. I decided I would slowly slide myself away from the base of this thing and off the bed. I first moved my leg, and I felt an excruciating pain course through my body. I had to wait for it to pass before I could move again. When I moved again, another sharp pain. I began to look around the room, and I'm telling you it looked like there were faint blue arms of lightning crawling up the walls. With the central core and tail and the lightning branching away from it going up the walls, my entire room looked all the world like it was one of those plasma globe things, but my room was the globe and I was in it! I tried moving my leg and saw one of those thin blue electrical arcs hit my leg and oh the pain was horrible. Every time I moved one of those things would hit me and pain would course through my body in waves. I could feel go up my body and when the wave hit my head it was like I couldn't think, like my brain was being scrambled until the worst of it went away and I could form a thought again. Finally, I slid over to where I was almost off the bed. It seemed like it took me forever to get to that point. Then, I just went for it and fell off the bed and hit the floor. I was able to stand up with some difficulty, still in a lot of pain and disoriented. I immediately put on my glasses to see what was going on. When I stood up and looked, there was nothing there. All electrical phenomena had vanished. I did see, however, I strong light under the bedroom door, so I knew my sisters must still be up. I had to get to them and tell them what happened.

I went ahead and tried to turn on the lamp (in hindsight not a good idea), but it didn't turn on. Apparently the electricity was out. So I decided to walk in the dark to the hallway. I had no idea how difficult that task would be. It took me forever to get to the door because each movement, each step sent waves of pain along my body. It felt like my body was coursing with electricity. Again, when I felt the wave hit my head, I could not think. I couldn't form one thought; I didn't know who I was or what I was doing. Then it would pass, and I would remember that I was walking to the door. My chest was also hurting very badly during this time, like my heart was one big lightning bolt. By the time I reached the door (which felt like eons later), I spent some time debating whether or not to touch the metal door handle to open the door. Finally, I grabbed it and opened the door as quickly as I could. When I did, I was shocked to see there were no lights on; all my sisters bed room doors were shut; no one was up. I was so confused. I knew I saw a bright light under the door earlier. I went to one of my sister's rooms and called softly to her through the door thinking that if she had just shut off the light and gone to bed she would still be awake and hear me. No response. With great difficulty I made it down the stairs in the dark, the pain finally beginning to dissipate. I walked into my mother's room and woke her and told her all about it. That when I found out it was about 4 in the morning. She seemed a little puzzled but quickly told me to go to sleep on the chaise lounge in her bedroom. I slept on that chaise lounge for the remainder of our stay at that house; I never slept in that room again.

I remember at school I tried to confide in my science teacher what happened thinking she would have an explanation for what I experienced. To my shock, she got mad at me and told me I was lying. I was crushed. I looked up plasma globes and can kind of understand why she didn't believe me. You have to evacuate the air in those globes and replace it with noble gases to make a plasma globe. Obviously, that didn't happen in my room; I was still breathing. But I do know what I saw and experienced. Was it some sort of electrical phenomena created by the perfect mix of electrical storm and old wiring or was it some kind of visitation? I'd like to get some feedback. Has anyone else known of this happening before? Is it natural? We later guessed that maybe it was bad wiring. We guessed the ball and tail might have come from a ceiling lamp from the bottom floor up through my bed. But can electricity do that? Make a sustaining spark gap thing in a room like that? Why did I not die?! I'll see if I can make a sketch of it later. But seriously, it looked like my room was one of those plasma globe things.

[wings]

Odd... My dad used to speak of 'Lightning Balls', balls of lightning, pure plasma, created in a lightning storm. He told me once that they happened often and he had seen them as a boy in Louisianna. He said they would form, and move, like on a rail, moving along slowly. He said he saw one pass through a tree once and it split the tree in half. This is the only time I have heard of something like this before since dad telling me about balls of lightning, which I have never seen.

I have been in a bad storm once, in Ohio during a trip. The storm hit at 3AM. I was in a hotel room. I awoke to what I thought was a battle going on. I thought, 'that is the guns of a battle ship going off!' but I wasnt near the ocean. I went to the window and there were flashes of lightning going on. I couldnt believe lightning could be that loud, and constant. It just kept booming. I later went back to sleep. I was really tired from tons of driving. My goodness that was loud. I remember that storm to this day, and no one talked about it later. Really odd. When I hear the name of the Missouri battleship, I think of that storm.

[ManhattanSkyline]

I remember my grandmother saying she had seen ball lightning once. She said it flew through her bedroom window, hit the floor, and rolled sizzling and popping right where she had been sitting; she had to lift her feet up so it wouldn't touch her. Then it kind of popped out of existence.

I never made a connection between my experience and ball lightning. In most descriptions of ball lightning it was larger, like grapefruit-volleyball size and floated through the air. What I saw was tennis ball sized and it was stationary and had a tail. Plus there were the lightning like discharges that crawled up the walls. I really wonder if there was just so much static electricity built up in that room from the constant lightning strikes that it created some kind of electric cloud that the old wiring in the floor and walls interacted with activating some spark gaps. If it was ball lightning, I'm glad it didn't split me in half!