Cool stories but I'm glad it didn't happen to me!

As kids playing in the woods one morning we happened upon most of a tree that had stood 200-300 feet from the cottage we were visiting; it lay felled beside its remaining stump as though snapped in two like a matchstick and dropped. It was a relatively clean break compared to what I read above--yes, splinters aplenty but mostly still attached either to the stump or the tree. The amazing feature to us was the charred core of the trunk. Someone's dad explained that it was almost certainly from a particularly terrifying bolt & thunder crack the night before, which had all but deafened us during a wild storm. I still remember that horrific sound, and I dare not imagine how much more intense such things must be to shatter/explode/peel the tree too!