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A bizarre incident in 1927 resulted in tragedy for one local farming family.
“Numerous instances of freakish pranks played by heavy discharges of electricity during thunderstorms have come to light through accounts appearing in scientific publications, but none of them present a stranger or more devastating effect resulting from a direct contact of tremendous voltage from clouds with objects on the earth than that which occurred on February 18 near Cave Spring.”
That was the opening line penned by C.N. Snead in his Roanoke World News article on the 1927 electrocution of John Henry Grisso.
Grisso, a farmer, was doing his usual chores at dusk when a severe thunderstorm moved across the horizon, an unusual spectacle for mid-February. The storm approached quickly forcing Grisso to take shelter in his barn. His wife, Susie, had been milking near the spring house, and their young son, Price, had taken cover in the woodshed. The hard rain and flash lighting prevented any of them from getting to the house.
Around 6:15 p.m., a bolt of lightning struck a massive oak tree, two feet in diameter, on a knoll some two hundred yards from Grisso’s barn. The strike was so severe that the tree was ripped apart, including the stump. Currents from the strike went into the house and shattered the radio; fence posts split, fence wire melted and one hundred feet of telephone line melted such that none of it could be found.
At the spring house, Mrs. Grisso was shocked as the current burned a hole in the galvanized milk can she held. Furrows were burned through the ground, emanating from the base of the oak tree, and at the barn a piece of wood was jolted from one corner with such force that it penetrated into the wood frame on the opposite side.
On the main floor of the barn were three horses and Grisso. As the storm subsided, Susie and Price made their way to the barn where they discovered their husband and father dead. Grisso had literally been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. The horses, just a few feet from Grisso, were unharmed.
The sight was as mysterious as it was unimaginable. Grisso, at the time of the strike, was standing directly under an electric wire where the current, induced to seek the ground, moved from the wire down through its victim. The current traveled from Grisso’s head, where it burned his hat but not his hair, coursed down through his body and exited the right foot, splitting his leather shoe. The rims of his eyeglasses were burned off, but Grisso’s body showed little external signs of the fatal strike.
Three days later, scores of friends attended the funeral held at Cave Spring Methodist Church and processed to Evergreen Cemetery for the interment. Grisso left behind a widow, two sons and a daughter (my grandmother). Grisso was 55 years old.
Snead, in his news piece several days later, wrote about the interest the bizarre occurrence had created. “Since news of what happened on Mr. Grisso’s farm began to be circulated, there have been scores of motorists a day visiting the scene. They continue to go and marvel at the strangeness of the lightning’s tragic manifestations.”
Scientists from area colleges visited the farm and concluded that the lightning strike had electrified fencing across ten acres. The current had leapt across wide gaps in the wire fencing, a phenomenon not seen before in nature or the laboratory.
At the epicenter of the strike where the large oak had stood was a trench up to the knee. The reporters, neighbors and academics could only shake their heads in awed bewilderment at the scene of nature’s devastation upon a farm and family.
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