Bizarre and unpleasant weather has always been a perennial topic in this area. On occasion, the tendency toward severe elements goes right off the grid, and conditions allow for meteorological occurrences of a more inexplicable nature.
On August 23, 1892, a large number of Pittsfield residents witnessed a cloud formation behaving in a most uncanny way in the midst of a hailstorm. The cloud was moving fast, and very low to the ground, when suddenly it tore asunder, with two parts blowing off in different directions. The larger part passed across the tops of some tall poplar trees, cleanly shaving the tops right off, as though an airborne lawnmower had passed by.
Another curious hailstorm struck Bennington on June 17, 1950, pelting the town with metal. Around noon that day, a heavy hail storm swept through town, and as the hail melted local people were perplexed to find that it had left tiny pieces of metal behind everywhere.
Word spread quickly, even garnering some national attention from Life magazine. Meteorologists in Boston and Albany for the most part scoffed, calling the phenomenon impossible.
Still, this is not the worst form of precipitation seen hereabouts. On March 27, 1960, Mrs. Larry Roche of Dalton heard what sounded like an explosion in her front yard. Running out to see about the commotion, she found a large hole containing three pieces of what had been a chunk of ice weighing over 30 pounds.
There were no airplanes listed as being over the area at the time, and the ice bomb seemed to have fallen out of a cloudless sky.
Even more damaging was a hurricane of stones and mortar chunks that hammered two buildings astride the border with Connecticut at Sage’s Ravine in 1802.
For five days, stones struck from no identifiable source, destroying over 50 panes of glass but otherwise leaving the buildings largely unharmed. As similar bombardment occurred at the farm of Thomas Paddock in North Pownal in 1879, where stones not only fell from the sky, but rolled upwards along the roof against gravity, and when picked up felt hot to the touch. Some call it a mysterious prank, others by the name “lithobolia”… the “stone throwing demon.”
What’s the oddest thing you’ve seen fall from the sky?
These Mysterious Hills 