Does Lightning Really Strike the Same Place Twice?
"Lightning never strikes the same place twice" is one of those sayings everyone half-believes even while repeating it as a joke. It's also one of the most confidently debunked pieces of trivia online — dozens of pages exist purely to correct it. That made it worth checking not whether the correction holds (it does, easily), but whether the evidence those pages lean on holds up the same way.
The claim
Lightning never strikes the same physical location — a building, a tree, a spot of ground — more than once.
Source trail
The saying itself is an old proverb with no traceable single origin — it shows up as a general expression of "improbable things don't repeat," applied to lightning literally along the way. The correction is what's organized and sourced: government weather agencies, museums of meteorology, and local news all publish some version of "false — tall, isolated structures get hit repeatedly," almost always illustrated with the same example: the Empire State Building.
The National Weather Service's own "Lightning Myths" page (checked 2026-08-17) states the myth plainly and corrects it: "Lightning often strikes the same place repeatedly, especially if it's a tall, pointy, isolated object," adding that "the Empire State Building is hit an average of 23 times a year." That one sentence, or a close paraphrase of it, is what most of the debunking pages we found ultimately trace back to — directly or through several layers of restating.
What's confirmed
- The myth is false, on the National Weather Service's own authority. Its Lightning Myths page (checked 2026-08-17) lists "Lightning never strikes the same place twice" among the myths it corrects, and states the mechanism plainly: tall, pointy, isolated objects get struck repeatedly because they offer the shortest path to ground.
- The Empire State Building's own site confirms it is struck repeatedly, though it states a different number than the National Weather Service. The building's own Facts & Figures page (checked 2026-08-17) states: "The Empire State Building's antenna is hit by lightning an average of 25 times a year." The Weather Service's page says 23. Neither page shows how the number was calculated — over what years, from what data — so this isn't a case of one source being obviously right; it's two of the only primary sources behind a widely repeated fact quietly disagreeing with each other by about 9%.
- A person can also be struck more than once and survive — this is independently a matter of record, not just a structural phenomenon. Guinness World Records (checked 2026-08-17) recognizes former Shenandoah National Park ranger Roy Sullivan for "most lightning strikes survived," with seven documented strikes between April 1942 and June 1977.
What isn't confirmed
- The bigger numbers that circulate for the Empire State Building have no visible source at all. Search results turn up claims as high as "25 to 100 times a year" and a specific "about 50 times during 2015–2020," none of them attributed to anything. One widely-shared debunking page, stormhighway.com's lightning-myth page (checked 2026-08-17, resolves), states outright that an "internet search" for the Empire State Building's strike count turns up "figures ranging from the hundreds to the thousands" and cites no source for any of them — which is a more honest position than most of the pages that state one number as settled fact.
- Even the two institutional numbers don't get compared against each other anywhere we found. Every debunking page we checked cites either the Weather Service's 23 or the building's own 25 (or a rounded "about 25") as if it were the only number in circulation. None appears to have checked both.
- A related statistic — the lifetime odds of being struck — also doesn't match between the two sources closest to this story. The National Weather Service's own lightning odds page (checked 2026-08-17) states the odds of being struck in an 80-year lifetime are 1 in 15,300. The same Guinness World Records article about Roy Sullivan states the odds are "around 1 in 10,000" — roughly 50% higher. Guinness does not cite a source for its figure, and neither page references the other's number.
- Roy Sullivan's own "seven" strikes carry a documentation problem that Guinness's page doesn't mention. Wikipedia's article on Sullivan (checked 2026-08-17) states that "all seven strikes were documented by the superintendent of Shenandoah National Park, R. Taylor Hoskins," then adds that "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." The article also notes Sullivan recalled being struck once earlier still, a strike he never officially claimed because he couldn't prove it. Wikipedia attributes the Hoskins detail to a 1943 government register and a 1989 book on the park's history, neither of which we were able to check directly this session — so we're reporting what Wikipedia's article says, not an independently verified fact, and flagging that even the most-cited example of a person struck repeatedly has a paperwork gap none of the popular retellings mention.
Verdict
The proverb is simply wrong, and the National Weather Service says so directly: tall, isolated structures get struck again and again, and people have survived being struck more than once. That much is settled. What's less settled is the one number every article reaches for to prove it — the Weather Service and the Empire State Building's own site publish different annual strike counts, a related odds figure from Guinness doesn't match the Weather Service's own published odds, and the seven-strikes record almost everyone cites for a human example rests on documentation that, by Wikipedia's own account, has a real gap in it. None of that makes the myth true again — it just means the evidence usually offered for busting it is less checked than its confidence suggests.