What a fright I got.

[Miss Chicken]

I was lying on my bed looking at a DVD when I heard this roar and the whole house shook. I was certain that a large plane was coming down so I jumped up and ran outside because I thought I would be safer there. The roaring continued from the time I first heard it until I was well out of the house. Outside I could see nothing so I came back inside as it was pouring with rain.

I looked out of the window and saw a flash of lightning and then a second loud noise which was obviously a thunderclap. It wasn't until then I realised that the first noise was actually thunder.

I rung my best friend up and she said that at first she thought something had exploded. She thought it might have been the oil refinery on the other side of the river. Unlike mine, her house didn't shake. However she doesn't live in a beachside suburb like me and her house would be on bedrock.

The noise made our local newspaper.

IT'S not a war zone or even ATM bandits. Where were you at 1.29pm when the loud clap of thunder hit Hobart's CBD?

The thunder sent shock waves through the floors of CBD office blocks.
Sounding like a small explosion, it sent office workers ducking for cover.

Some comments readers made were

I was sitting on my computer and this flash of lightning came through the house and then after that my whole house shook. My photos are all lop sided. I was s***ing myself.

(that was from someone who lives in the same suburb as me)

Working on the Eastern Shore, our Japanese student flew into a panic thinking it was an earthquake when the whole building started to shake!

That wasnt just a usual clap of thunder so i dont blame people for being scared and considering my house shook in Cambridge i think it was pretty major. To those people bagging out the article, I think its good enough to make Hobarts newspapers because i think it was quite unusual... I know i was frightened, i knew it was raining but i wasnt expecting that to happen! At first i didnt realise it was thunder and i thought we were getting bombed! I seriously thought i was about to die.. Alot of people are commenting on how this article is crap but at least were not hearing about bad news

Howevr most people are just laughing at the people who were so scared by it but in 50 years of life I have never heard thunder anywhere near as loud as this one.

So I am asking people here - have you ever heard thunder so loud that it scared you?

 

[RJDiogenes]

Sure, there have been a few near hits that scared me, either because of their proximity or because they were unexpected. One hit right outside my house in the middle of the night, waking me up and making the house shake.

Usually, though, they're abrupt and you can tell it's thunder, although it could be mistaken for an explosion; I've never had one that sounded like a plane or earthquake. That must have been pretty weird.

 

[An Officer]

Wow. I can't imagine what that must have been like... We're glad you and your house are safe though. You probably feel like you've lost several years of your life, right?

I've experienced torrential rainful that scared the hell out of me, and seen lighting stretching at least a couple of hundred kilometres across... I wouldn't have been perturbed if this had happened whilst I was warm and cosy in bed... but it occured while we were on a motorway in Italy... it rained so hard, I thought were going to slide off the road completely - visibilty fell to no more than a yard in front of us... since we were passing beside a huge black lake, with only a short barrier between us and the lake, it looked like a very bad situation indeed. There was no place for us to stop, in fact it would have been more dangerous to stop than to keep going. I was sweating and my heart was pounding. This was all compounded by my recently watching a Top Gear show, in which they had talked about the large number of people who die as a result of their car plummeting into water - you really don't want to be in that situation, it sinks fast, and the windows become impossible to open because of the pressure.

Now, I can laugh about it, because it probably wasn't as bad as I thought, but at the time, I was mighty nervous, to say the least!

 

[ria 75]

have you ever heard thunder so loud that it scared you?

In my sleep, yes. Really scared until I woke up and could make sense of it. I'd thought the house was in danger. After waking up I realized once again that feelings are heightened during sleep and dreams - senses too, sometimes.
One night in Spain I head strange, loud, unidentifiable hissing sounds like a windstorm that turned out to be just cars hissing by on the street below, at 5am, on their way to a rally. The second I moved my head, switching from half-asleep to awake, the noise was tuned down, as if muted.

One night in the southern French countryside I was pulled out of bed by a long, low roar accompanied by a shake of the windows longer than a plane breaking the wall of sound. In the morning, I had forgotten about it until I heard about a mild and rather distant earthquake on the news.
My parents, sleeping on the ground floor, hadn't heard or felt anything. Being upstairs made me feel the shaking. (Or was it just hearing the roar and the windows shaking?)

One last story: one summer night, same house, I watch the night sky and I see a shooting star disappear behind the Pyrenees mountains. 2 days later, a newspaper mentions a meteorite falling in a Spanish garden (very close to a house

).

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I've never heard it, but a house in my neighborhood got hit by lightning (I was at work at the time). I came back and it had nearly burned to the ground.

I'm glad you're safe and didn't get hit, btw.

 

[Mutai Sho-Rin]

When I was a student pilot, I landed at my home airport in Atlanta just minutes before a thunderstorm arrived. I was standing under an awning with several of the mechanics and the fuel truck guy when lightning struck an aluminum light pole about 75 feet from us. It was the single loudest noise I've heard in my life. To add drama, the fuel truck was parked right next to the pole!!! Nothing happened though. The pole was a perfect ground and the truck was safe. My underwear, however, weren't safe!

 

[Miss Chicken]

When I was a teenager the church about 2 blocks from me was hit by lightning. That was loud but nowhere near as loud as what I heard yesterday. The minister was in the church steeple when the lightning struck so it must have been scary for him (I have no idea why he was in a steeple in the middle of a thunderstorm).

The thing about the thunderstorm yesterday was all I heard was the two rolls of thunder and one lightning flash. I realise that they must have been an earlier lightning flash but because I was in my room with the TV on and the curtains drawn I must have missed it so, except for heavy rain, I had no warning that the noise was thunder.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

I've definitely had enough thunder-and-lightning experiences!

Once, I was dreaming, and oddly enough, in the dream I was actually explaining the physics to someone of the delay between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder--and then explaining that when it's right on top of you, there's no separation at all.

Suddenly I wake up right in the middle of the night. And what happens? Simultaneous FLASHBOOM. It scared the daylights out of me!

More recently, I was at my house and heard this REALLY loud crack of thunder, and I remember thinking that something had been hit.

Sure enough--come to find out the next day, there was this family in our church that had been working on building a new house. The new house was just a mile or so from where I lived, and sure enough, lightning had hit it and totalled it that day, during that very storm. I am convinced that what I heard was the strike that hit their house.

 

[captcalhoun]

thunder and lightning/very very frightening me...
[/bohemian rhpasody]

 

[SLWalker]

I came about ten feet from being struck once. ::laughs:: And ever since then, have been just a little jittery about storms. Just a bit.

 

[JuanBolio]

A few years ago a bolt of lightning struck a tree in my back yard, maybe 40 feet from the house, while I was sleeping. My first thought was that the nearest town, 3 miles away, had exploded.

 

[the 4th hanson bro]

I was in a building that got struck by lighting. I've never seen colors like that before, and the thunder was deafening.

 

[JuanBolio]

I also once saw lighting hit a lake I had just been fishing. It turned the water into a negative photograph version of itself, and for an instant I could see all the fish and weeds and rocks on the bottom.

 

[An Officer]

^ If only you'd caught that on camera!

 

[ria 75]

I also once saw lighting hit a lake I had just been fishing. It turned the water into a negative photograph version of itself, and for an instant I could see all the fish and weeds and rocks on the bottom.

^ If only you'd caught that on camera!

Wow! Yes, it sounds amazing. I'm also curious about 4th hanson bro's experience.
FLASHBOOM!

 

[An Officer]

^ He must have heard the storm on a subconscious level, and that probably directly activated his dream... either that, or he's got unusual gifts.

 

[ria 75]

^^What dream? I'm referring to real experiences, I believe.

 

[An Officer]

^ Ah, mixed up Nerys Ghemor and 4th Hanson bro's experiences!

I really ought to make more use of the quoting system.

 

[marillion]

I've had a couple of close brushes with lightning/thunder...

As a young kid, I happened to be looking out a second story window during a rainstorm and witness a bolt streak past our house and hit the vacent lot next to us. Almost instantaniously, an incredibly loud thunderclap shook the house.

A few years later, during football practice in highschool, lightning struck one side of the practice field, basically knocking us (or causing us to dive) to the ground.. As soon as the thunder hit, we were racing down the hill for the lockeroom.. We didn't even wait for the coaches to tell us to get the hell out of there. We were lucky that no one got hit.

 

[Mooch]

this sounds lame, but recently(a month or two ago) my wife and I both heard what we agreed was the loudest thunderclap we had ever heard. the lame part is that I can't remember anything other than that. I had totally forgotten about it until I read this thread.