unexpected occurred – a bear approached the pond and tried to steal trout from his fishing line. Sullivan had the strength and courage to strike the bear with a tree branch, despite the fact that his hair was on fire. He claimed that this was the twenty-second time he hit a bear with a stick in his lifetime. All seven strikes were documented by the superintendent of Shenandoah National Park, R. Taylor Hoskins. Hoskins, however, was never present at any of the reported strikes and was not an active and present superintendent in Shenandoah National Park for many of the times Sullivan was supposedly struck. Sullivan himself recalled that the first time he was struck by lightning was not in 1942 but much earlier. When he was a child, he was helping his father to cut wheat in a field, when a thunderbolt struck the blade of his scythe without injuring him. But because he could not prove the fact later, he never claimed it. Sullivan's wife was also struck once, when a storm suddenly arrived as she was out hanging clothes in their back yard. Her husband was helping her at the time, but escaped unharmed. Statistics The odds of being struck by lightning for over the period of 80 years have been roughly estimated as 1:10000. If the lightning strikes were independent events, the probability of being hit seven times would be (1:10000)7 = 1:1028 or 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. These numbers do not quite apply to Sullivan, however, who by the nature of his work and his physical location was exposed to more storms than the average person. Virginia, where he lived, averages 35 to 45 thunderstorm days per year, most of which fall in June, July, and August. Between 1959 and 2000, lightning killed 58 people and injured at least 238 people in Virginia. In the United States, 3,239 people were killed and 13,057 injured by lightning in the same period. Most of those were males between 20 and 40 years old caught outdoors. In popular culture The lyrics on the 2005 album 3 Songs by I Hate Myself are inspired by how Sullivan was lucky enough to survive being repeatedly struck by lightning. In the 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the character Mr. Daws often tells the title character that he was "struck by lightning seven times" (a detail that does not appear