Roy Sullivan.
Roy has experienced something that, statistically, only about 1 in 751,447,478,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 people experience.
Because of his unlucky occurrences, Roy began to be called the Human Lightning Rod and the Spark Ranger.
Roy was struck by lightning 7 times, and survived each one.
(Sources, so you all don't think its some fake story: Meet the Man Struck By Lightning 7 Times, http://mentalfloss.com/article/66863/meet-man-struck-lightning-7-times , https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/inside-the-life-of-the-man-known-as-the-spark-ranger/2013/08/15/947cf2d8-ea40-11e2-8f22-de4bd2a2bd39_story.html?utm_term=.e579ef6416c5)
1st Strike
Roy was first struck in April of 1942.
He was stationed for the Forest Service at a fire tower when a storm blew in.
The tower was new, so a lightning rod had not yet been installed on the structure.
After the building was struck several times by lightning, Roy decided to flee the structure for fear of being electrocuted, but soon after going outside, Roy was struck. The bolt burned a strip down his right leg and blew his big toe off of his right foot.
2nd Strike
After the first strike, Roy had three decades off before he was struck a second time in 1969.
This time, he was driving his truck down a road during a thunderstorm.
At one point, lightning struck two trees on one side of the road and jumped to a tree on the other. In the process, the bolt used Roy’s car as a bridge and flowed through it and him in the process.
Roy blacked out and almost drove off a cliff before he came to. His only injuries this time were singed-off eyebrows and eyelashes.
3rd Strike
Roy was struck a third time only a year later, in 1970.
This time, he was at home gardening during a storm when lightning struck a transformer near him and jumped to his shoulder. Other than being knocked down, Roy’s only injury was some mild burns of his skin.
4th Strike
The fourth strike took place two years later in 1972. He was registering people at a campground on a drizzly day when a monumentally loud thunderclap shook the area. This time, lightning had destroyed a fuse box near Roy and had once again bridged to him. Roy sustained no major injuries this time, although the strike did set his hair on fire, which he extinguished with wet paper towels.
5th Strike
Strike 5 came just one year later, in August of 1973. Again in a truck, he noticed a storm coming in and decided to try to outrun it, fully aware of his past bad luck. After a period of furious driving, Roy decided that he was a safe distance from the storm and decided to stop driving, get out of his vehicle, and take a look. Unfortunately, Roy was wrong in his assumption that he was far enough to be safe.
This time, as he looked up at the clouds, he saw the bolt coming for him. It hit him directly in the head, again setting his hair ablaze. The bolt blew Roy several feet backwards and knocked off his right shoe.
6th Strike
There is little to be said about the sixth time that Roy was struck. He was just walking down a trail in the forest when he was struck once again. He sustained no injuries whatsoever this time around. However, up until this point, all of his strikes had been while he was employed as a Forest Ranger. Apparently, this was the final straw for the job, as Roy retired less than 5 months later.
7th Strike
Apparently, his retirement didn’t put him out of harm’s way.
One day in 1977, Roy was out fishing when the lightning once again found him. Hitting him in the head, this strike left Roy with burns of varying degrees on many parts of his body and caused him to lose hearing in one of his ears.
And, to add insult to injury, he ran into a bear on his way back to his car, which he had to fend off by hitting it in the face with a large tree branch. Roy eventually passed away in 1983, not by a lightning bolt—well, not directly. Roy died when he put a pistol up to his right ear and pulled the trigger.
But although lightning didn’t physically stop Roy’s heart, was it at the core of why Roy did himself in?
Did Roy live in constant fear of being struck again? Did he want to die on his own terms and not at the hands of a fatal bolt?
Did each strike take a psychological toll on Roy? Did each bolt cause him to be a little more fearful of the world, and to consider his own self a little less lucky?
Did the repeated incidence of the strikes instill in Roy a deep-set, pernicious depression that influenced him to take his own life?
Nobody will ever know.
But what we do know is that Roy Sullivan is quite probably the most unlucky person to ever walk this earth.
And that at some point, Roy did something to really piss off the weather.
DAAAAANG. Reminds me of this...
hahaha!!
He might aswell just wear a rubber suit with that kind of luck. But then again, surviving 7 lightning strikes is a miracle by itself. Maybe he's luck is always maxed out on both poles? Thanks for sharing this fascinating story.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@luzclaritareyes/i-am-new-to-steemit-luz-clarita-reyes-introduce-your-self