[Adapted from Michael H. Brown’s Lying Wonders, Strangest Things]

Can a vaccine turn you into a big microchip? We don’t know about that! 

But there are what they call (or claim to be) “the electric people,” because that’s what they are: High voltage seems to course through their veins.

This is not to speak about someone whose personality, to use a term, is magnetic: Charisma has nothing to do with it. Instead one is addressing actual electrons that seem to move through or around humans as if they’re conductors, capacitors, even generators.

There are many such accounts, and we have no idea what to make of them. Spiritual phenomena? (Spirits are famous for playing with electricity). There are those who seem to attract lightning — have been hit more than once. Indians called them “lightning shamans.” If true, it starts to seem a bit occult. Two famous near-death experiences involved lightning.

One woman named Leanna Murphy walks into the parking lot of a Home Depot and all the lights – and then the huge store sign – supposedly blink off. Another in Illinois causes street lamps to darken or flicker as she passes by in her low-slung Mitsubishi. The whole block. There are those who burn out wedding bands, earrings — anything conductive – or jewelry turns their skin black in what seems like an electrochemical reaction. An estimated one percent of the population has unusual electrical potential, with those who, at the extreme, affect street lamps classified under “street-light interference syndrome (SLI),” or simply labeled “sliders” or “HVP,” for high-voltage people.

Really?

Is it simply that they strip electrons from the air (we breathe about 25,000 times a day)? And store far more static than the average person? Or might it be that an undiscovered virus alters the lungs enough to super-charge a person?

In 1920, more than thirty prisoners held at Dannemora, New York, found that watches went haywire around them, compasses swung madly, and they could deflect small metal objects. It all began with an outbreak of botulinum poisoning.

Botulism causes dry sky and static electricity favors that.

It also disrupts the body’s electrochemical process…

Now, we all produce an electrical current. It powers the nervous system. It’s what keeps our hearts beating. As a kid, you rubbed a balloon on the top of your head, charging it enough to pin it to the wall. Or perhaps you dragged your slippers on the carpet in a dark room on a cold dry night and watched a discharge from fingertip to metal. Or combed your hair to ignited sparks. Nothing supernormal here. Electrons are no more alien to the flow of human life than oxygen…

But some people go beyond normal static – affecting televisions, house lights (the husband of one such “slider” keeps thinking it’s the dimmer), and crashing ATMs — no doubt unwelcome near slot machines (not to mention the cockpit of a transatlantic plane).

Cell phones crash; computers are known to freeze. A woman named Mary Weigant who lives along the Colorado River in Arizona told me she was doing dishes once “and when I put my hands in the water and I saw like lightning coming from the fingers on both hands.” Another had trouble in courtship: when she kissed her husband, there were sparks between them, all right — they both felt it! “Light bulbs?” complained a woman named Lisa Veillaesque in Mississippi. “Please, I should buy stock in them. I can’t seem to keep up with the bulbs going out.”

“While vacationing at Epcot in Florida, I touched the computer screen at a display and brought down the server,” testifies another. “It took about twenty minutes for them to bring it back up. I also disrupt credit card machines where you have to sign your name with an electronic pen. The machine goes haywire and makes all kinds of squiggles and stray marks where the person is supposed to be signing. My mother makes me stand about five feet away from her when we’re shopping and she wants to pay by credit card!”

Batteries don’t last. Neither do clocks. Electronic devices go haywire. Which leads one to note that nuclear missile sites have no need for anyone with such a proclivity!

Said Aimee from Tampa, Florida, “Every time I go to the grocery store I get shocked mercilessly from static. It doesn’t matter what footware I have on. Most of the time I wear ‘Chuck Taylors,’ so it’s not that I’m not wearing rubber soles. My mom has the same problem — only I actually throw tiny lightning bolts off of my fingertips to the shelves when I’m reaching for something.”

Heavy metals? Dry skin? Might they be the explanation? Do those cause the build-up of electrons?

Or is it something more mysterious?

Does one call in an electrician – or exorcist?

Such cases have been tallied at least going back to 1837. There are blogsites for folks to record their issues and commiserate.

“I too explode light bulbs, crash computers, cash registers at stores, etcetera,” says a slider woman in Arizona. “And if that isn’t weird enough, I have dreams that come true.”

Adds a woman from Albuquerque, “Walking down aisles in grocery stores and canned good-bottles jumping out and breaking on the floor. Both of my grandsons are also electric people. I made sure that the cart was in the middle of the wide aisle and the grandsons held onto the cart.”

Perhaps most poignant was the case of Jacquelyn Priestman of Manchester, England. She was living with her first husband, Ron, when she discovered it. It started with a nasty argument.

As Ron headed off on his scooter in the middle of it, Jacquelyn shouted, “I hope you break your neck!”

Later that day, Ron was involved in an accident that caused fractures in his spine and neck – dying from complications a month later.

Bathing one evening and in deep remorse, Jacquelyn says the light bulb above her exploded, showering her with glass and cutting her arm badly — a faulty bulb, she surmised. Within days, though, her vacuum cleaner inexplicably burned out; more bulbs burst; and more vacuum cleaners died, along with five irons and two washing machines. Was it her powerful emotions powering the happenings?

A stove burned out. The television went off of its own accord, or switched channels. So did her radio.

Of all things, her second husband – a witness to later events – was an electrical fitter.  He noticed that the discharges were particularly intense if indeed Jacqueline was having her menstrual cycle or upset at something. For example, when a reporter suggested it was just fraud, Jacquelyn got so angry a new vacuum clear burst into flames. (She was asked by local stores to stay clear.)

Concluding that it was a build-up of surface electricity, a local professor, Roy Gough, deduced an alkali-acid imbalance and suggested a change in her diet (more veggies). Her husband decided that Jacquelyn might carry around onions to disperse the excess static, causing it to go into the vegetable. It worked — although Jacquelyn had difficulty dismissing the notion that Ron was behind it, for when she went near his clothes, a light bulb had detonated… and while hospitalized he had joked that if he died, he’d come back to haunt her.

[resources: adapted from Michael H. Brown’s Lying Wonders, Strangest Things]