I always remembered a story I had read in Reader's Digest as kid, about strange phenomena that occured in a hosue due to downed power lines. I was delighted to stumble upon a text copy of the actual story, apparently released to public domain (story attached). After re-reading it now, I can't help but wonder how accurate the details are, or if the author made the whole thing up. Web searches for the names, places, etc in the story don't turn up anything. Its a hell of a story either way though, but I'm curious what you guys think.
here's the full story, posted as found:
Originally published in Reader's Digest, June 1973
An Electric Nightmare
By John Robben
I awoke that Saturday morning of August 28, 1971, knowing that something was wrong. Outside our house in Stamford,Conn., the woods were dripping from an all-night rain. But who, or what, had awakened and alerted me? I got out of bed to look around, feeling a curious chill on the back of my neck. "Dad?" my eldest daughter, Sue, 16, called from her room. "Is something wrong?" "Did you hear anything?" I asked. "No. But something woke me up. I'm scared." On the stair landing, I strained my ears but heard nothing. Perhaps something other than a noise had awakened me. A light? Yes, it had been a light, unusually and oddly white. Or had I only dreamed it? Then I looked down the stairs, and noticed a tiny light flickering at the base of the double front doors. A firefly? At this time of morning? I went back to the bedroom, slipping on a pair of sneakers and went down to investigate. At the door, there were now two flickering lights. As I leaned down to take a closer look, the two lights erupted into 10 or 12 and began to bzzzzz. Electricity! What had awakened me was a flash of light. I bolted back up the stairs, shouting, to arouse my wife and all five children. My first thought was to get everyone out of the house. I herded them all toward the back door. But as we came into the kitchen, an odd, gurgling sound -like sloshing water- started up from the basement. I yanked open the cellar door, and was greeted with a cloud of blue smoke, shot through with orange and yellow flashes of light. Instinctively I turned on the light switch-and got a terrific shock. "Don't touch any thing!" I yelled. The children began to panic and cry. I slid open the back glass door leading onto the stoop. We stood there a moment, poised in fear. The woods were shrouded in mist, dripping with rain, and in the gray halflight of dawn looked eerie. It didn't seem any safer out there than inside. To run or stay? Our large and willful dog made up our minds for us. Determined to get out, Trooper made a dash for the door. My wife grabbed him by the collar, but he pulled her out onto the landing. "Hang onto him, Margie!" I shouted. How strong is habit, even in a crisis. I was worried about his running around, barking, and waking up the neighbors at this hour. He bounded down the five wooden steps of the stoop, dragging Margie with him. He was pulling her off balance and I yelled at her to let him go. Too late! As the dog's paws touched the wet grass he yelped and leaped away, jerking my wife to the ground. Instantly she began screaming and thrashing convulsively on the grass. I ran down the steps. "I'm being electrocuted!" she shouted. "Don't touch me!" I froze. "Oh, God!" she cried. "Save the children." I saw what looked like a wire beneath her twisting body. If I touched her, I figured, I would be trapped and helpless as she was. I don't know where I got the strength to leave her and return to the house, but there was no choice. I had to save the children first. They were gone from the kitchen. They'd fled back upstairs when their mother screamed. At my order, they came running down again. "We've got to get out," I said. "Hurry!" The walls were humming ominously now, the buzzing and sparking from the basement growing louder as I led the children out of the kitchen and down the steps. On the slate walk, single file, we went past Margie. She was still writhing on the grass, screaming for God's help and for us not to touch her. "Is Mom dying?" Sue cried. "I don't know," I said. The children wailed even louder. I took them down the walk and past the corner of the house, where the grounding rod for our house's wiring system was spluttering and shooting flames like a Roman candle. We ran across a bluestone driveway and through evergreen bushes onto our neighbors' property. Apparently awakened by my wife's screams, Stan and Rhoda Spiegelman were standing on their high porch. I saw terror in their eyes as they must have seen it in ours. "Margie's being electrocuted. Our house is on fire!" I shouted. "Call the ambulance. Call the police!" Then, pointing the children toward our neighbors' house, I started back for my wife. But I hadn't taken more than three steps when I heard the children begin to scream. Spinning around, I saw that while three of them had reached the safety of the porch, Sued and her youngest sister, Ellen, were down thrashing on the ground. For the first time I realized that the earth itself was electrified. Suspended between wife and daughters, I stood paralyzed, unable to move in either direction. Any moment now I expected to be grabbed and flung to the ground myself. I could feel a tingling sensation through the soles of my sneakers. Unlike my wife, whose entire body was pinned to the earth, the two trapped girls, crouched on hands and knees, were able somehow to crawl. Ellen inched toward Stan, my neighbor, who had started out to help her, felt a shock on his feet, and retreated to his wooden steps. His wife ran through her house, flung open a ground-level door and called to Sue from there. When I saw that the girls were going to make it, I started after Margie. She was still thrashing on the ground. The wire I thought she was lying on was only a piece of rope. But when I bent over and touched her, a terrific shock slammed my arm. I let go. Then I grabbed an ankle and jerked her toward me, letting go as the shock struck again. I continued to grab and jerk, six or seven times, to get her away from the electric field to safer ground. On about the seventh pull I received no shock, and Margie lay still, sobbing. After a moment she was able to raise her head off the ground. I lifted her up and held her in my arms. "The children ?" she asked "They're okay." She wept helplessly. I helped her walk away from our house, past the now quiescent grounding rod and into our neighbors' back yard. There, waiting at the ground-floor door, were the children. They came running into our arms.
The police arrived a short time later and drove Margie and Sue to the hospital. The firemen came, but the fire was already out. Stan and I inspected the damage. It was remarkably little. The electricity was off, of course, and the clocks stopped at 6:10 a.m. The motor in the freezer in the basement was burnt out. That was the extent of the fire. We opened the cellar windows to let the smoke and smell out. There was no damage upstairs, but the nails in the cedar shingles on the front of the house had charred the wood. Opening the front door, where I'd spied the first sign of danger, I got a good look at what had happened. The broad trunk of a dead tree, its stability weakened by several days of wind and rain, lay sprawled across our driveway, about 150 feet from the house. In falling it had knocked down a cluster of wires. Including -we were told later- a two-cable circuit that normally carried 13,200 volts. Ordinarily these two cables would have touched, short-circuited and blown a power-line fuse, cutting the current off. But for reasons still not entirely clear to us, this failed to happen. Instead, the electricity ran wild. First it had gone into our well, burning out the pump. "But that didn't satisfy it," said the electrician who came to repair the damage the following day. "So it kept trying to find a ground for its force somewhere else." That's when it slithered into our house like some evil thing, into our food freezer and our wiring. The "fireflies" I had seen were actually droplets of rain which had become energized when they rolled onto the metal stripping at the base of the front door. And, in its relentless hunger, the electricity spread itself over a section of wet ground, creating an "energized field."**(see note at bottom) It was probably the diffusion of its energy over this comparatively large area that saved my wife's life. Strong enough to cause her to lose muscular control and keep her pinned to the ground for seven agonizing minutes, the current wasn't concentrated enough to kill her. The doctor who examined her at the hospital that morning said she had suffered no heart damage. However, for months afterward she suffered recurring pains in her arms and legs. Meanwhile, repairs to our electrical system and freezer cost only $437.25. For the next three nights we slept in the home of friends who were away on vacation. They had a large new house. We each could have had a bedroom to ourselves, but instead we chose to sleep, side by side, on the floor of their playroom. Even together like that, we were uneasy, and we left the lights burning all night. On the fourth day we returned to our own house, after an electrician had checked it out from top to bottom. The first night there was eerie. My wife turned in with some of the children and I with the others. Finally, toward morning, I fell asleep, but awakened suddenly with a strange feeling. I looked at the clock and saw that it was 6:10 -the precise moment when time had stopped for us four days earlier. At breakfast, when my wife proposed selling our house, I agreed immediately. It has been well over a year now since that terrifying morning. Though we still have nightmares about it, in our new home we have chosen not to be fearful. As a philosopher once said, "The story of Job is man's lot. But it does no good to audition daily for the part."
**Apparently - as electrical engineer Bernard Schwartz explained later- the "hot" cable fell to the earth, while its companion "neutral" cable caught in a tree or came to rest on a non-conducting boulder. Thus for the circuit to be completed, the current had to reach the nearest point where the neutral cable was grounded: at a transformer installation, two poles away. Under the given geology and ground conditions, the route lay through the Robbens' house and yard. As a result, there was a current flow -lasting approximately 20 minutes- which was finally sufficient to blow a line fuse.