What 100 Million Volts Do to the Body and Mind
Photographs by Stacy Kranitz
What does it feel like to be struck by lightning?
There is no easy analogue. A defibrillator delivers up to 1,000 volts to a patient’s heart; inmates executed by electric chair typically receive about 2,000. A typical lightning strike, by contrast, transmits 100 million volts or more. But lightning races through the body in milliseconds, and therefore often spares it. Some people black out instantly upon being struck. Others recall the moment vividly, as if in slow motion: the flash of light whiting out all vision; the sound, which many survivors say is the loudest they’ve ever heard. The pain, for some, is excruciating, yet others feel no pain at all. “It felt like adrenaline, but stronger,” one survivor reported. “I felt an incredible pulsing,” another said, “a burning sensation from head to toe.”
The severity of the resulting injury depends on, among countless other variables, how the electricity enters the body, and where, and the path the current takes through it. Direct strikes are the deadliest, but most strikes are indirect—a side flash coming off a tree, a current running through the ground, a streamer rising up from below—and most people survive these.
In some cases, the damage is immediately apparent. Lightning, in addition to being very bright and very loud, is very hot—the air around it can hit temperatures about five times hotter than the surface of the sun—and so it can singe or burn people. The shock wave from the strike can fling victims a great distance, breaking bones or causing concussions as they land. The current inscribes some victims’ skin with mysterious scarlike patterns called Lichtenberg figures, which resemble the limbs of a barren tree—or the branching structure of lightning itself.
[Read: What it’s like to be struck by lightning]
Just as often, though, survivors manifest no burns, bruises, or scars. Even Lichtenberg figures generally vanish within a few days; no one knows exactly why. On the outside, survivors look normal. Which doesn’t mean they feel that way.
Many of the body’s essential systems—the heart, the brain, the nervous system—depend on electrical signals, and lightning can throw these thoroughly out of whack. Forgetfulness, sleep problems, sexual dysfunction, and headaches that manifest as intense pressure—like “my eyeballs are just popping out,” one person told me—are common. Some people become hypersensitive to noise; others lose their hearing entirely. A few, almost miraculously, are freed of a prior ailment: a bad leg healed; vision, once impaired, restored. Pretty much all of them feel permanently off balance. Some have to relearn simple things, things they’ve done their whole life—how to read, how to sing, how to ride a bike.
Phantom sensations are prevalent. One woman told me she often feels as though water is running down her limbs. Another, in a Facebook group for survivors, said she feels “an indescribable itching” coming from inside the back of her head. Inexplicable odors can emerge; food can taste like cardboard or glue. The symptoms can last for decades. Yet standard neurological imaging, such as MRI scans, almost never detects abnormalities, and most physicians, who understand the symptoms’ basis in only the most rudimentary sense, can offer little useful counsel. Faith in survivors’ stories—among friends, colleagues, even loved ones—can waver.
The most fundamental consequences of being struck by lightning are often metaphysical, and not easily communicable. How does falling victim to one of the most notoriously unlikely of all misfortunes reorient your sense of chance, of fate? How does it feel, when you’re trying to describe the most transformative experience of your life, to be met, routinely, with disbelief?
Last May, I attended a conference of Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International. It was held, as it often is, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a smallish town on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains best known as the home of Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s Appalachia-themed amusement park. The town’s main drag resembles a sort of family-friendly version of the Las Vegas strip. Instead of casinos, there are dinner-show theaters, go-kart tracks, and a sprawling Margaritaville megacomplex, its central fountain inhabited by giant animatronic Brachiosaurus that roar from time to time.
The conference was staged at a Staybridge Suites just off the strip. About 30 people were there, mostly men who looked to be over the age of 60, many of them conference regulars who’d been struck long ago, though there were some women and younger attendees too. Most had brought their spouse and were making a weekend of it. They were there primarily to connect with other people who understood what they had been through.
Like senior prom, the conference always has a theme, and this year’s was Hawaii. Survivors wore leis, and pineapples adorned with sunglasses sat on every table in the Staybridge’s modest meeting room. A folding table converted into a makeshift tiki bar dispensed virgin piña coladas and hurricanes. Against this backdrop, specialists gave presentations on trauma therapies. Attendees compared notes on which treatments have worked for them and which haven’t.
In one session, a man I’ll call Matt, a young, redheaded survivor who for a year and a half after his strike could hardly feel pain, temperature, or most other sensations on much of his skin, said laser therapy had eventually restored his nerves. Having a massage therapist work on his vagus nerve had helped too. For a while, he’d slept inside a Faraday cage, to protect him from static electricity during storms. Today, to cope with intrusive thoughts about lightning, he dumps a packet of salt in his mouth because when you do that, he said, “that’s all you can think about.”
A woman I’ll call Caroline, who’d been struck on the job two years earlier, used that same strategy, she said, only with Warheads candies instead of salt. One problem she had not solved was that no matter how hot she gets, no matter how hard she exerts herself, she can’t sweat anymore. Matt said he’d had the same problem for a while. What fixed it for him was spending significant time in a sauna—up to 90 minutes three times a day.
If the discussion had a certain DIY quality to it, that reflects the paucity of medical literature on what lightning does to the body. Few systematic studies have been conducted, and most physicians have never treated a strike victim. Many survivors’ experiences defy medical explanation, so doctors have little to say.
Given the limited counsel that the medical establishment can offer them, survivors tend to be open to alternative therapies, but they’re also wary of being taken advantage of. At the conference, several attendees reminisced about the year when two “hippies” had shown up and started hawking New Age–type products. “They said they were linked in voodoo,” one survivor recalled.
Much of the group conversation focused on Caroline, whose injury was the freshest. She used to cook her family elaborate meals, but “after the accident,” she said, “I left the oven on so many times that I even ended up burning the element out.” For a while she refused to get a new one, because she worried she’d burn the house down. She leaves sticky notes everywhere to remind her of what she needs to do, but even so, she rarely has the energy to do all of it. She has to ask for help, which makes her feel bossy. She worries that others think she’s lazy.
Gary Reynolds’s experiences after he was struck in the summer of 2007 were similar. He was grabbing sodas from his family’s extra fridge, he’d told me earlier, when lightning hit him through the open garage door. For months, he could barely get out of bed. His whole body hurt constantly. He had trouble concentrating, and simple tasks that had once been second nature now seemed complex. On warm afternoons, he watched the sky warily. A therapist diagnosed him with PTSD, which by some estimates afflicts more than 25 percent of lightning-strike survivors. In 2009, just a few months shy of their 20th anniversary, Reynolds and his wife divorced. Initially she’d been sympathetic, he said, but over time she lost patience. “You’re not over this yet?” Reynolds recalled her saying. “It can’t be that bad.”
“I just keep thinking, I want to wake up the next day and it’s going to be normal,” Caroline said at one point during the session. But she wasn’t even two years out from her strike. She had not yet come to the conclusion that the veteran survivors at the conference had reached long ago: that no matter what you do, no matter how many therapies you try, you still have to accept that you’ll never be the person you were before. “You still look the same and everything else, but it’s like a different person inside,” Reynolds said. “It’s a different soul.”
The odds of being struck by lightning in the United States in a given year are roughly one in 1.2 million, according to a 2019 analysis by the National Weather Service—about the same as flipping a coin and landing on heads 20 times in a row. But this is only a generic estimate. The likelihood of being struck in San Francisco is not the same as the likelihood of being struck in Orlando, last year’s urban lightning capital of America. The likelihood of being struck for lawyers is not the same as the likelihood of being struck for roofers.
The majority of people killed by lightning—about 20 each year in the U.S.—are struck while engaging in some sort of outdoor leisure or labor. But in truth, almost anyone can be struck almost anytime. People have been struck while talking on landlines, while using computers, even while sitting on the toilet, according to the National Weather Service, because current can travel through telephone wires, electrical connections, and metal pipes. When lightning survivors insist, as many do, on unplugging their appliances in preparation for a storm, this is not tinfoil-hat mania. And the old advice about not showering during a thunderstorm? Sensible.
[Read: Almost no Americans die from lightning strikes anymore—why?]
Steve Marshburn Sr., who founded Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International in 1989, told me that he was struck at age 25 on a seemingly clear November morning in 1969. He was working as a teller at First Citizens Bank in Swansboro, North Carolina, sitting at the drive-through window, and he thinks the bolt must have passed through an ungrounded speaker. For years, he struggled not only with debilitating headaches and back problems, but also with the sheer improbability of the event that had produced them. Many of the doctors he visited didn’t believe his story. For a long time, even his parents wondered whether he was making the whole thing up.
And to some extent, Marshburn understands why. “It’s so unbelievable that it’s hard to talk about,” he said. Eventually, a doctor introduced him to another patient who had survived an electrical injury, and that experience led Marshburn to start his survivors’ group. Membership now numbers about 2,000, and in September the organization hosted its first-ever West Coast conference, in Scottsdale, Arizona. For years, most people found their way to the group via their local weather station, or after seeing it featured in news outlets or on TV. Now more find it through Facebook.
That’s how Gary Reynolds did. His second wife, Lisa, discovered the group while searching online for other people who’d been struck, people who could understand him. Doctors never had. When he first went to the emergency room, they ran a battery of tests, but the results all came back normal. After he’d been at the hospital for about nine hours, a doctor said, “I’m not really sure what to tell you,” and sent him home. Roughly the same thing happened when he visited his primary-care physician. Other doctors told him to his face that he was making the whole thing up.
Not until his first conference did he meet people who could truly empathize with him. He’d never spoken with a fellow lightning-strike survivor in person before, and he was nervous on the drive up, but when he arrived he felt almost like he was at a reunion. “You walk into that room and it’s like we’re family,” he said. After he joined the group, he felt normal for the first time in years. “It was validating,” he said. “Like, Okay, I’m not crazy.”
In June 2008, Reynolds told me, he was struck by lightning a second time. It was 11 months after his first strike, and he’d woken up at 2 a.m. with an awful headache. Ever since the initial incident, his head had throbbed in exactly the same spot when he sensed a storm coming. As he lay beside his open bedroom window, he felt a shock go through his hand. “Not again,” he thought. Half of his hand turned bright red, he said, but he hadn’t yet paid off the previous year’s hospital bills, and this strike seemed less serious than the last, so he decided not to seek care. In the following months, though, his lingering symptoms from the first strike all worsened. He was often dizzy, and he couldn’t grip well. Reynolds ran a tree service at the time, one he’d started a few years after high school, and these were serious problems for someone whose vocation involved wielding a chainsaw. The divorce came about six months later.
In the years that followed, Reynolds pieced his life back together: He remarried, moved his family to western North Carolina, began working at a lumberyard, started attending survivors’ conferences. Then, while standing in the kitchen of his mountainside home on a June afternoon in 2016, he was struck a third time. And six years after that, a fourth, he said, this time while sitting in a leather recliner watching TV with his grandchildren. Must’ve been a streamer, he told me. Came up through the floor and hit him square in the back.
If the likelihood of getting struck once in your lifetime is one in 15,300, as the National Weather Service estimated in 2019, then statistically, the number of people in the United States today whom you’d expect to have been struck multiple times is … one. One single person. And yet the National Weather Service’s collection of about 50 lightning-survivor stories on its website includes two from people who say they’ve been struck twice and another from someone who says she’s been struck three times. Andy Upshaw, a North Carolina landscaper, says that he, too, has been hit three times. Charles Winlake, struck four times before the age of 30, added rubber soles to all of his shoes and began to wear only plastic-rimmed glasses. Linda Cooper, a former South Carolina schoolteacher, says she’s been struck six times, and so does Carl Mize, a former Oklahoma rodeo rider. One member of the Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors Support Facebook group says she’s been struck nine times, and another says she stopped counting after 13. Media reports document more multistrike cases. In all, my far-from-exhaustive search turned up more than two dozen.
All of this, to state the obvious, is incredibly improbable. Extrapolating from the National Weather Service estimates, the likelihood of being struck six times is roughly one in 13 septillion—that’s a 13 followed by 24 zeros. If you multiplied the number of people who have ever existed on Earth by about 100 trillion, you’d expect one person among them to have been struck six times.
It can seem cruel to suggest that some lightning-strike survivors may be lying, especially when disbelief causes so much hardship for those who are not. But because relatively few lightning strikes are documented, the question often lingers. People lie for all kinds of reasons, and there can be financial incentives to claiming you’ve been struck: workers’ compensation, disability benefits. Mary Ann Cooper was an emergency-medicine faculty member at the University of Louisville when she published the first systematic study of lightning injury in 1980—instantly becoming the leading authority on the subject in doing so. Cooper served for years as an expert witness in workers’-comp cases, brought in to assess whether the claimant really had been struck. She told me that she’s encountered some frauds, identifiable because they reported inconsistent or physiologically impossible symptoms.
But the people trying to cheat their way into benefits, Cooper said, are largely not the ones attending survivors’ conferences. She believes that the overwhelming majority of the people she has met at those conferences are telling the truth about being struck, and about all the calamities that followed, at least as they understand them. Which is not to say that every statement should be taken at face value.
Like several doctors and scientists I spoke with, Cooper thinks that most people who say they’ve been struck multiple times genuinely believe that, even if they haven’t. Many survivors have flashbacks as a result of PTSD, just as combat veterans and wildfire survivors do. But when a combat veteran or a wildfire survivor resurfaces from a flashback, their surroundings verify to them that they are not, in fact, caught in the middle of a war zone or a fire. A lightning-strike flashback prompted by a storm involves no such assurance. A lightning bolt is there and gone in an instant.
What’s more, because lightning leaves the nervous system damaged, it can make people feel bursts of pain—real, excruciating, and unconnected to any physical stimulus. Together, PTSD and nervous-system damage may explain many reports of second or third or fourth strikes.
Not so long ago, that explanation might have sounded far-fetched, just as some of the chronic symptoms of a lightning strike still do, to some. But the idea that trauma can alter the way people perceive the world and interpret their experience is ubiquitous now. And the emergence of long COVID, along with increased awareness of other difficult-to-diagnose chronic conditions, has created a greater respect for individual testimony, and a greater appreciation for how much the medical profession does not know. In this sense, society is finally catching up to what lightning survivors and the people who study them have long understood.
The most grinding suspicions encountered by many survivors—about whether they were ever really struck at all—may in any case be mooted in the coming years. On a recent trip to France, Cooper met with a physician who told her he’d identified a biological marker for lightning injury, which may enable doctors to determine, with a simple urine test, whether someone really has been struck. Nothing has been published on it yet, Cooper said, and no such test seems imminent, so for the moment she isn’t getting too excited. But she has an open mind to the possibility.
All of this, of course, is mostly to the good. Yet the lightning-survivor community has always defined itself by a sort of oppositional faith: There, you are doubted; here, you are believed. There, you are strange; here, you are normal. When I asked Reynolds what he made of the trauma-plus-nervous-system-damage theory of why there are so many multistrike survivors, I felt as though I was doing something almost sacrilegious, as though I was violating that ethos of mutual faith. I worried that he’d react with indignation. The notion that he might hang up on me and refuse to speak with me again did not seem unlikely. Instead, he said he thought the theory made a lot of sense.
Might then it explain his multiple strikes? I asked.
Well, he answered, not his.
What does one make of a life so fundamentally altered by an event as unlikely as a lightning strike? In Pigeon Forge, when I asked survivors whether on balance they felt lucky (for having survived a lightning strike) or unlucky (for having been struck in the first place), the question didn’t register. “I don’t think luck has anything to do with it,” Susan Deatrick told me. She doesn’t like the word providential either, she said, “but at the same time, God is in control over everything down to the minutest detail.”
This response, and others like it, initially surprised me. If lightning is a manifestation of the divine, I thought, how do people explain why it struck them? How do you make sense of a miracle that comes at your expense?
[From the July 1875 issue: Lightning and lightning-rods]
Jim Segneri, who moderated the conference’s final and most intense group discussion, has a succinct answer, one more focused on his having been spared than his having been struck. “I firmly believe that whether you worship Allah or Buddha or God or Jesus or whoever put us here, the reason we’re still here is so that we can help other people”—those who are doubted, those who are struggling.
Large numbers of survivors hold some version of this belief. Marshburn, the group’s founder, often speaks of the number of survivors—more than 20—whom he has talked out of suicide, reciting in vivid detail the conversations he’s had with people on the brink. Over her many years speaking with lightning-strike victims, Mary Ann Cooper said, “I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘I should have been dead. God must have kept me alive for a reason.’”
And yet for those survivors who hold it, the belief in destiny can cut both ways. Reynolds says that after his third strike, he felt doomed. He’d left his career, gotten divorced, gotten remarried, started a new job, moved more than 600 miles away—and still the lightning had found him. “It’s like it’s looking for me,” he told his therapist. “It’s like it’s a living, breathing creature.”
She assured him that it wasn’t, and part of him knew she was right, but he couldn’t stop thinking that he was fated to be struck again. She told him that she doesn’t believe in destiny. That there is no providence, only circumstance. That sometimes you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d believed that once. But now he can’t shake the feeling that she’s wrong.
This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “Struck.”