The odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are roughly one in a million. The odds of being struck seven times and surviving are so vanishingly small that statisticians essentially refuse to calculate them. And yet, a U.S. Park Ranger named Roy Sullivan managed exactly that between 1942 and 1977, earning himself a Guinness World Record and the nickname "the Human Lightning Rod."

Sullivan worked at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, which sits atop a ridge that acts like an atmospheric magnet during thunderstorms. But geography alone doesn't explain his rap sheet. The strikes ranged from the almost-comedic to the genuinely horrifying:

• 1942: Hit in a fire lookout tower, burned a strip down his leg and blew the nail off his big toe.
• 1969: Struck while driving with the windows down — the bolt came in one window and out the other, knocking him unconscious. His truck rolled to the cliff's edge before stopping.
• 1970: Hit in his front yard while crossing to check the mail.
• 1972: Struck inside a ranger station, setting his hair on fire.
• 1973: Hit while driving away from a storm cloud that seemed to be chasing him — set his hair on fire again.
• 1976: Hit while trying to escape a storm cloud, injuring his ankle.
• 1977: Hit while fishing; then had to fight off a bear that tried to steal his trout on the way to the hospital.

Here's where the Faraday cage connection gets fascinating. Your car is generally considered one of the safest places to be during a thunderstorm — not because of the rubber tires (a common myth), but because the metal body conducts current around the passenger compartment and into the ground. It's a Faraday cage on wheels. Sullivan's 1969 strike is a physics lesson in what happens when that cage has openings: with the windows down, the lightning found a path through him rather than around him.

The 1973 incident is even stranger. Sullivan reported that a cloud seemed to follow him — he tried driving away and it kept pace. Meteorologists have since documented that certain ridge-line storm systems can indeed "track" moving objects because updrafts respond to localized heat sources. A running vehicle on a bare road is a thermal beacon.

Sullivan's wife was also struck once (while hanging laundry — he was standing right next to her). His colleagues eventually stopped standing near him during storms. He took to carrying a jug of water in his truck to douse his hair when it caught fire, which happened often enough that he considered it routine equipment.