![]() The seventh and final strike was in June 1977. “When a storm blows up,” Sullivan explained, “I put my wife and three kids in the living room and go off by myself and sit in the kitchen, scared.” A storm appeared while Sullivan and his family were hanging out in his back yard, but the lightning missed him and struck his wife instead. Sullivan did manage to escape at least one time. Who wants to be near somebody that’s all the time getting hit by lightning?” I was walking with the chief ranger one day and lightning struck way off and he said ‘I’ll see you later, Roy.’ There’s a restaurant on Loft Mountain that even it’s just overcast they won’t let me in. “Naturally,” Sullivan said, “people avoid me. Sullivan, while surveying a campground, felt that a cloud was following him, and tried to run- but it got him anyway. Satisfied that he’d outrun it, he got out of his car to watch the storm and was struck through by more lightning. In August 1973, he got in his car and floored it at the first sign of a forming storm cloud. Best I can figure is that I have some chemical, some mineral, in my body that draws lightning. “If he was, the first bolt would have been enough…. “I don’t believe God is after me,” he theorised. Too late to hide.” Now, Sullivan had come to expect it, to fear it, though he was no closer to understanding the reason for it. In about two seconds, no longer than three, it hits. “Just before it strikes,” he said, “I smell a certain smell, like sulphur, and my hair bristles all over. The lightning set his hair on fire, which he extinguished with a damp towel from his ranger’s cabin. When I hear it thunder now, I feel a little shaky.” He was struck that year - number four - while on duty at Shenandoah. “I have tried to lead a good life,” Sullivan told the press in 1972. ![]() “Bolts From Sky Have Struck Gentle, Upright Roy 7 Times,” boasted an Octoarticle in the Lakeland Ledger, above the headline “‘Bubble Boy’ is Normal Mentally.” The media caught on to Sullivan’s weird and statistically improbable tale around this time. And so a pattern emerges: the lightning strikes were getting closer and closer to where he lived. In 1970, the year of Sullivan’s third strike, he was in his front yard when it happened. ![]() By some accounts, the truck veered off the road and slowed to a stop at the edge of a cliff, which seems too insane to believe, but then again, what about this story isn’t? Lightning deflected off some trees and into the open window of Sullivan’s truck, knocking him out. Sullivan’s story picks back up in 1969, with the ranger driving a park truck along a mountain road. There’s not much information out there about what he did over the next seventeen years, likely because he was not being struck by lightning at any point. Sullivan recovered, and returned to work. It’s like being cooked inside your skin.” “Ever been shocked real bad?” Sullivan would say later. Sullivan fled outside, but the lightning quickly found and struck him, burning through his leg and escaping out a hole in his shoe. He was stationed as a fire lookout in the Millers Head lookout tower in April, when a heavy storm set the newly constructed tower ablaze. Sullivan was thirty years old in 1942, six years into a park service career at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. He met his end in Dooms, Virginia at the age of 71, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest - a suicide that had nothing to do with lightning and everything to do, supposedly, with a mysterious, unrequited love. Sullivan was hit by lightning a preposterous seven times, once in 1942 and on six more occasions between 19 - a rate of almost once per year. Roy Sullivan, who died in 1983, was a park ranger and fire lookout better known for having survived more lightning strikes in his life than any other human. The Dharma Bums is now sitting by my bed in the neglected pile of still-to-read research books, along with Fire Season by Philip Connors and Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever (for its depiction of a bear working in a fire lookout tower on page 35).”īut, Rodkin added, “Nobody has – as of yet – told me about the guy who was struck by lightning.” * * * “WHEN YOU TELL PEOPLE you’re making a game about something like a fire lookout,” Jake Rodkin, the Campo Santo creative director, said to me, “they will tell you about everyone they’ve ever heard of who has done that job, and all the books about it you should buy.
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