What's the CRAZIEST spooky shit you've seen in the aftermath of a tornado?

The home my Dad, Brother and myself built was destroyed in the 1991 Andover KS F-5 tornado. Thankfully, my parents had sold the property two years previously but we still went out there the next day as a family to offer our help to our old neighbors. For about 1/4-mile all around, the Sheriff already had the entire neighborhood cordoned off from sight-seers, but the Deputy passed us once My Dad explained why we were there. And, I was lugging along my video camera.

It was a bittersweet day with people silently moving around picking at the rubble, the only sound the loud whine of chainsaws as they cut away debris flung everywhere by the "moving finger of God". They despaired at their losses but were still thankful to even be alive as they quietly cried and hugged one another, a shared look of deep pain in their eyes.

My camera picked up many images that day but two especially stand out:

When I was 16, I helped my dad mount a new mailbox post at the end of our 100' driveway. This was back in the mid-60's when likkered-up J.D.'s liked to cruise dark suburban neighborhoods and bash mailboxes with a baseball bat. So, my Dad and I installed a 3" steel post that would give them a good shock when they tried it again. We set that post in a 2'x2'x2' concrete footing so NOTHING would move it. And for the next three decades, nothing ever did.

But my camera showed that after the twister the mailbox -and entire post and concrete block- was turned 180-degrees around, facing what used to be the house... but the ground around the base of that post was STILL UNDISTURBED. Not a single blade of grass was broken and the post was still solidly mounted in the cement and couldn't be turned by itself. And I thought, "HOLY SHIT!"

But there was another surprise waiting for me in our old backyard...

When I was about 10, my Mom decided we needed a windbreak out back since there weren't too many trees to stop the gales. So, we trooped into the old Ford coupe, went out into "the sticks" and dug up a bunch of Cottonwood seedlings by a creek bank to fill in the gaps. One tree was my own to water and fret over, hoping one day I'd be climbing it's big branches. And boy, did it grow but by then I was too old to dream of a Tarzan-treehouse.

Across the street from us we had a neighbor who had a large carpentry shop where he crafted custom furniture, gunstocks and just about anything else you could imagine from wood. That place was packed with tools... and his massive barbed-wire collection!

As I went out back to see if my old tree was still standing I was delighted to see that it was. But, with one addition: when the storm hit Mr. Seery's workshop, it picked up a 10" circular saw blade and spun it in the air until it sank a good 4" into the trunk of that Cottonwood tree. It was embedded so deeply, when I flicked it with my finger, it didn't ring but just gave off a dull thud. It made my blood run cold to think what that blade could've done to a human body.

I learned later that when KG&E [the Kansas Gas and Electric company] linemen came out to restring power cables, they cut down my old tree but saved that entire section of the trunk with the saw blade still intact. And it's still on display today in their corporate offices. KG&E may have changed their name over the decades, but that tree trunk still sends chills down the spine of all who see it.

A grim reminder of just how puny we superior human beings really are.

BTW: I eventually left Kansas and moved to Northern California for ten years where I experienced many other rumblings from God: earthquakes. And given the choice of experiencing an EQ or a tornado, I'll take a 'quake anytime! You see, whenever we hear those wailing tornado sirens or inevitably relentless TV-weather reports, we KNOW disaster could be only a few minutes away... and that only builds the dread of what could be a life-ending few moments.

But, with an EQ you have no warning; no time to worry and barely enough to pray. The irony is that during the past few years here in Wichita KS we've had increasingly frequent swarms of EQ's ourselves... with the most recent flurry just last weekend.

Proving you may run from nature but you can NEVER hide!

I had a client who had been an insurance man in Texas, he told me that the worst part of his job was going out after tornadoes and looking for bodies in trees.

I was in the debris field of one that blew up trailer homes and turned cars upside down. I was out trying to wake all the neighbors as it was hot, after ten at night and they had their air on and the trailers were sealed tight.

I was watching tv when it said take cover.

Out in it, the adrenaline kicked in and everything suddenly went into slow motion and I saw all kinds of projectiles go by my head. Later I found a huge box of Christmas ornaments on my lawn, completely unbroken.

The next day we went out and saw the line on the ground that the tornado had traveled, it picked up a few feet from where I was , made a right turn and broke off a line of heavy oak trees.

We followed the trail over ten miles and everywhere we saw where trailers had exploded.

Prayer works.

<<<<snippage>>>>

BTW: here's a bit of trivia... back in '91 Wichita's KSN TV-station had a handsome anchor who made a REAL name for himself when he famously shot footage of that F-5 passing directly overhead as he hunkered under an overpass on Highway 54. That footage was played and studied endlessly over the next several days all across the nation and within 6 months, that young reporter was hired by CNN and moved to Atlanta. That reporter's name was Gregg Jarrett. As I recall he also won an Emmy Award for that reportage.