Here's another one from me. Back in 2001, we had hired a contractor to replace the siding and roofing on our home, which we were nearly done remodeling. One day they came and stripped the old siding off our home and wrapped a house wrap around it. That night at about 4:00 in the morning, I woke up to the sound of thunder in the distance so I got up and closed windows in case it rained. I always enjoyed the sound of thundershowers. They seemed to give me a sense of tranquility. So, I was laying there listening to the storm approaching.
As usual there was the flash of lightning followed by the bang of thunder, nothing unique, until I started to notice that the thunder seemed to roll on continuously and out of sync with the lightning. Curious, I got up and looked out our bedroom window. In the light from our yard light I could see the wind picking up leaves, sticks, and dirt and whipping it across our lawn in a large arch. The trees that we planted a few years earlier were now about 10'-15' in height and laying almost horizontally. I remember thinking to myself, "What a big dust devil." Then reality hit me. I was looking at a vortex from a twister on our front lawn! I yelled to me wife, "Grab a kid and head to the basement! There's a tornado!" We each grabbed one of our two daughters and headed down two flights of stairs to take shelter.
I had never heard wind like that before in my life. It got very loud and we heard a crash. My wife said, "There goes the windows!" Water began to run down the walls of our basement and we both thought for sure that there would no longer be a house above us. I remember praying for protection for my family. The wind blew like that for just a few minutes and then things got deadly silent. I commented that it was the eye of the storm going over us. Sure enough, the wind picked up again and continued for just a few minutes and then it was over.
Turned out the crash was the contractor's scaffolding falling over. There was one large elm tree, about 2-1/2 feet in diameter that the storm twisted the top half about 180° and dropped it into the grove. Surprisingly we had no broken windows. The floors in our house had about 1/2" of water over them and that is where the water we saw running down the walls came from. It had blown the rain right through the walls that had no siding!
I jumped into the car to go check on our neighbor who lived NE of us on top of a hill, thinking they were more likely hit harder. Fortunately, they didn't get hit and there were no homes seriously damaged in our neighborhood. That's as close as I ever want to be to witnessing a tornado