The Unluckiest Man On Earth
Sometimes, people feel unlucky. It’s easy to attribute a rejection or a failure to the rotten hand of chance. But everyday errors and mishaps pale in comparison to the misfortune that made Roy Sullivan famous. He was struck by lightning on seven separate occasions, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
The first time Sullivan was struck, it made perfect sense. In April of 1942, while working as a park ranger, his tower was assaulted by lightning. After around eight strikes, he fled, and was struck by lightning himself. As lightning strikes go, this is pretty standard stuff. Out in the middle of nowhere in a national park and high up on a newly constructed tower that had no lightning rod is a prime place to be struck by lightning. The odds are literally less than one in a million, but hey. It happens.
Here’s where things truly started to roll downhill for Roy. It was 27 years until Zeus decided Sullivan had pissed him off again. He was driving his truck down a mountain road in July of 1969 when lightning found him again. The metal frames of vehicles usually act as Faraday Cages, blocking the interior from any electrical effects outside. Unfortunately for Sullivan, the stars aligned in just the wrong way. The lightning rebounded off of a tree and hit him through the open window. He was knocked unconscious, and his eyebrows and eyelashes were burned off along with most of the hair on top of his head. In what would be his last stroke of luck in a long while, the truck came rolling to a stop just before the edge of a cliff. That moment created a karmic debt he was never able to pay off. Eight years from that day, lightning had struck him an unbelievable five more times.
Roy again caught a rebound jolt about a year later in July of 1970. Lightning rebounded off of a nearby transformer while he worked in his yard and hit him in the shoulder. As lightning strikes go, this one was rather mundane. Remember, the odds of being struck three times are around one in 337 million. At this point Roy tied the world record for most lightning strikes absorbed. He was less than halfway through the gauntlet.
1972 rolled around, and so did the wrath of the sky. Roy was in a ranger station in Shenandoah national park minding his business when a bolt of electricity kissed him on top of the head. His hair went up in flames, and after trying unsuccessfully to smother it with a blanket he ran to the bathroom and tried to stick his head under the faucet. His head didn’t fit, so it was a damp towel that finally stymied the fire on top of his head. If there was a silver lining to any of this, it was that Roy Sullivan saved money on haircuts.
After this fourth strike, one hardly could blame Sullivan for becoming suspicious. He began to feel as if some unexplainable force was bringing about his plight. Some theorized the ranger had made an enemy of God himself. He didn’t think so. “I don’t believe God is after me,” he said. “If he was, the first bolt would have been enough…. Best I can figure is that I have some chemical, some mineral, in my body that draws lightning. I just wish I knew.” For my money, he was probably right. Either way, Roy got paranoid. He would lie down in the front seat of his truck any time he was caught in a storm. He started to carry around a can of water in order to deal with the flame his hair was constantly beset by. It’s a very rare thing to be struck by lightning. It’s even rarer to be struck by lightning when you go to great lengths to avoid it. Despite this, anyone who thought Roy’s troubles were over at this point was dead wrong. They were just beginning.
On August 7th, 1973, Sullivan saw storm clouds forming, got in his car, and drove away. This cloud, he would later say, followed him. Of course it did. When Sullivan was confident he outpaced the storm, he got out of his truck to admire it, which is arguably a very strange choice to make for a man who has been struck by lightning four times. It should come as no surprise that immediately after getting out of his car, Roy was struck for his fifth time. Thankfully, he was able to crawl to his truck and use the trusty can of water to douse the fire on top of his head. A small victory in the face of nature’s wrath, but a victory nonetheless.
On June fifth, 1976, another cloud started following Roy Sullivan. He ran, of course, and this time he didn’t stop and wait around for it to catch him. It caught him anyway, setting his hair ablaze once again. This time, he didn’t make it to his water can. I can only imagine what his barber had to say about this.
The final and certainly most ridiculous of Sullivan’s lightning strike events came on June 25th, 1977. Sullivan was fishing when a bolt of lightning struck him on top of the head, set his hair on fire, and then burned his chest and stomach. Sullivan began to make his way to his car before whatever cosmic entity he had pissed off so many years before decided to switch tactics and send a bear after him. Attracted by the trout on the end of his line, the bear approached from out of the woods. Sullivan whacked it in the face with a stick and sent it packing. This was, he said, the 22nd time he hit a bear in the face with a stick. Roy Sullivan, it must be said, is one tough bastard.
The greatest damage ever done to Roy Sullivan wasn’t caused by lightning, bears, or unscheduled haircuts. It was by the people around him. Sullivan developed a fear of being near others almost as great as the fear they had of being near him. On one occasion, he went out to help his wife with the laundry and she was struck by lightning standing just next to him. By this point, Sullivan had developed a reputation as a lightning attractor. People started to avoid him more and more, including his wife. Afraid for her own life, she ended their marriage. When it rained, Sullivan would put her and the kids in the living room while he hid in the kitchen. Lightning couldn’t kill him, but it had other ways of making its presence felt.
Isolation followed Sullivan closer than The God of Lightning. The ranger lamented to a newspaper once, “Naturally,” he said, “people avoid me. I was walking with the chief ranger one day and lightning struck way off and he said, ‘I’ll see you later, Roy.’ There’s a restaurant on Loft Mountain that even it’s just overcast they won’t let me in. I can’t blame them. Who wants to be near somebody that’s all the time getting hit by lightning?” Lightning didn’t pack enough of a punch to bring Roy Sullivan down. Neither did at least 22 bears. But in the end, the thing that finally killed Roy Sullivan was himself. On September 28th, 1983, he shot himself in the head. For all that he had stubbornly endured in the face of the lightning god’s wrath, it finally got its way. Less than 15 years from the second strike, he was gone.
The legacy Roy Sullivan left behind was the legacy of a human lightning rod, arguably the most unlucky man who ever lived. There is a one in 10 septillion chance of being struck by lightning seven times. And yet perhaps Roy Sullivan was one of the luckiest men on earth. He survived till the age of 71 despite more than a score of occasions where he was attacked by bears, to say nothing of his seven absorbed lightning strikes. Life threw everything it could at Roy Sullivan, and he escaped mostly unharmed. It is the ultimate tragedy that a man who endured so much would die from an illness of his own mind.
