When my mother was alive she would turn all the mirrors round and put any cutlery away at the first peal of thunder. She'd also open a window and the back door to 'let the lightning out'. From her description she saw ball lightning in a field behind the house as a child in the 1920s - though she didn't call it that, she said it was a thunderbolt that dropped out the sky and rolled across the pasture - which killed the horse and set fire to a barn. Years later lightning put the chimney through my bedroom roof in spite of the fact we lived in dense terracing surrounded by tall factory chimneys.