The museum doors open once more, traveller, and tonight I invite you into a room where the sky itself became the killer.
On an ordinary Sunday afternoon in 1638, the people of Widecombe-in-the-Moor gathered inside their church, expecting nothing more than a sermon and the comfort of familiar prayer. Instead, darkness descended without warning, thunder shook the ancient stone walls, and a blazing fireball crashed through the roof.
When the smoke cleared, lives had been lost, dozens more lay injured, and whispers of the Devil spread across the moors.
In Exhibit XIII: The Great Thunderstorm of Widecombe, we travel back to one of England's most extraordinary and unsettling historical mysteries. Together we examine the eyewitness accounts, the terrifying reports of voices heard moments before the disaster, the strange survivors who escaped without injury, and the centuries of folklore that transformed a violent storm into a tale of divine judgement and supernatural terror.
Was it an exceptionally rare natural phenomenon? A tragedy exaggerated through fear and faith? Or did something far stranger visit the little church that autumn afternoon?
Step carefully, traveller.
Sometimes the greatest horrors do not rise from beneath our feet.
Sometimes they fall from a clear sky.
The Great Thunderstorm of Widecombe is waiting.
Ireland