The top two:

• Hurricane Fran, which actually made landfall 30 years ago today. Our house at the time was about 120 miles (200 km) inland, but the storm was moving fast and still had a lot of power even that far in. Combined with the ground already being saturated with days of rain before the storm, the state lost millions of trees. We had my grandmother come stay with us because she had a large tree right next to her house. We lost power that night around 9:30 or 10. Maybe around 2 or 3 AM things started getting really bad. At some point my dad thought he heard a different sound in the wind and we all got in an interior closet on the ground floor. Eventually it sounded better but I didn’t go back to sleep until daylight. Our house didn’t have any damage but there was a thick line of trees in the woods behind our house that were all knocked down, kind of spiraling along the line. Never got the weather service to verify if that was a tornado because there was so much damage everywhere. Surprisingly my grandmother’s house was fine and she had electricity back the day after the storm, so we all went to stay with her except for my dad, who kept staying at our house to keep an eye on it. It took us a week to get power back at our house.
• When I was 5 an F4 tornado came about a mile from our house. It actually crossed my cousin’s street a quarter mile from their house. Other than a young tree that was permanently bent sideways our house was fine, but 4 people were killed. We used to drive down a street where a couple people died pretty regularly, but once my parents realized it was scaring me they had to take a longer route. All that was left there were foundations and staircases. If a house doesn’t have a basement, the closet under the stairs is my next choice for tornado shelter.