Much of the documentation for weird weather comes from the American researcher, Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932). Fort spent years collecting data from newspapers in the libraries of New York and London. He was interested in anything which could not be explained by science - events now called "Fortean phenomena" in his honour. Fort catalogued these in four books, written in a unique, witty style. To get a flavour of Fort, this is from the opening page of his third book, Lo!

Showers of frogs and blizzards of snails – gushes of periwinkles down from the sky – The preposterous, the grotesque, the incredible – and why, if I am going to tell of hundreds of these, is the quite ordinary so regarded?

The "gushes of periwinkles" referred to fell on Worcester, together with heaps of crabs, on May 28, 1881, where they covered a number of fields. Several correspondents wrote to the local papers, describing the winkles and crabs, and suggesting that they must have been left there by a fishmonger. This explanation led Fort to imagine a possible scenario:

A fishmonger, with a procession of carts, loaded with several kinds of crabs and periwinkles, and with a dozen energetic assistants, appeared at a time when nobody on a busy road was looking. The fishmonger and his assistants grabbed sacks of periwinkles, and ran in a frenzy, slinging the things into fields on both sides of the road.

Fort catalogued hundreds of similar strange falls, including live and dead frogs, fish, frog-spawn, eels, snails and snakes. He suggested various possible explanations, including a cosmic practical joker using "teleportation" (a word he invented) and a "Super Sargasso Sea" hovering above the earth, which occasionally drops its contents on us. Fort wrote that he did not believe his own explanations, for he was a skeptic, opposed to all forms of belief. His main aim was to challenge the certainties of the scientific establishment.

Showers of frogs and sprats

Since Fort's day, many more such falls have been reported. In March 1998, a lady in Bracknell rang the Croydon Met Office to report that an early morning rain shower was accompanied by hundreds of dead frogs, which were scattered over her front garden and surrounding streets. Another local said that his dog tried to eat the frogs as he took it for a walk. On August 8, 2000, the fishing port of Yarmouth was showered with dead, but fresh, sprats.

Scientists no longer dismiss such reports out-of-hand, as they did in Fort's lifetime. The Met Office suggests that their cause could be a miniature tornado, called a waterspout, which sucks up water, together with aquatic creatures, and then drops them over land. So why do so many creatures of the same type drop together? The scientists' answer is that, as the water spout travels, heavier items fall first. So objects of a similar weight and size, such as frogs, fall together.

Ball lightning

Another weird, but well-documented, phenomen is "ball lightning", which takes the form of a short-lived glowing ball of light. One of the earliest accounts of this dates from 1638. On the afternoon of October 21, the parish church in Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Dartmoor, was packed with worshippers while a thunderstorm raged outside. Suddenly, a "ball of fire" ripped its way through a window, and bounced down the church, killing four people and injuring 60 more. A local legend claimed that this was a visit from the devil, who had come to claim the soul of a gambler.

A more recent report dates from July 24, 1994. In their home near Oxford, Mr and Mrs Langer were sitting in their living room, during a severe thunderstorm. Mrs Langer later wrote:

The storm was almost overhead and I knew the next one would be a cracker, but almost five minutes went by in perfect silence. The window is very big, almost one wall in glass, and was wide open. My husband and I sat in recliner chairs side by side with our backs to the window. Suddenly a shaft of brilliant light came over our heads into the middle of the room and seemed to form itself into a white ball as big as a car tyre. It bounced gently upwards and about five feet from the ground it exploded with a terrible noise.

            Quoted by  Adrian James, Journal Of Meteorology, 1995

For many years, the very existence of ball lightning was controversial. Most scientists now accept that it does occur, but there is still no agreed explanation of what it is.

Learn more about ball lightning here