There's nothing like a good thunderstorm.

I say that of course as someone who grew up in the Midwest.

With a flat landscape and open sky, it was possible to see dark storm clouds roll in from

a great distance and they always seemed to put on a show.

Jarls wasn't born in the Midwest like me, but he had a powerful attraction to the natural

world.

If it happened, he wanted to document it, and that hunger for knowledge extended to the

weather, unusual storms, extraordinary occurrences, and unexplainable conditions.

Stories like that made up the bulk of his first nonfiction work called The Book of the

Damned.

Stories like this one.

It seems that a storm blew into the Kansas City, Missouri area on July 12th of 1873.

The sky became incredibly dark, the sort of dark that makes you think of apocalyptic

movies, and then a torrent of rain was unleashed on the city below.

Rain and frogs.

Living, breathing amphibians that fell from the sky and covered the landscape.

Turtles went on to build a career out of gathering and sharing these extraordinary tales, and

while much of the world has forgotten the name Charles Fort, almost everyone has encountered

the term for his particular brand of paranormal research.

Forty-in.

Even today, we're still left scratching our heads at the wonders of the natural world.

There's so much that we know, and yet in the grand scheme of things we've barely scratched

...