What happened
It was Sunday, October 21, 1638 (in the Julian calendar), and an afternoon service was under way in St Pancras Church in Widecombe-in-the-Moor. A violent thunderstorm was passing over Dartmoor. According to contemporary accounts, a ball of fire about 2.5 meters wide burst into the church, smashing windows, breaking pews, and tearing stones from the walls, while the interior filled with thick smoke and a sulfurous stench. Four people were killed and about sixty were injured or burned. The event was described in printed pamphlets that presented it as divine punishment, and local legend attributed it to the Devil. Today the case is cited as one of the earliest descriptions of ball lightning.
Witnesses
Worshippers attending the service and village residents; their accounts were recorded in pamphlets published shortly after the event.
Explanations and hypotheses
The description of a ball of fire bursting into the interior fits ball lightning, although the damage may also have been caused by one or more powerful lightning strikes on the church tower. Ball lightning itself is now considered a real phenomenon, but its nature is still disputed: hypotheses include glowing silicon vapor from vaporized soil, plasma, and microwave discharges. Seventeenth-century accounts cannot be verified in detail.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
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