The following recollections were sent to TheBostonChannel.com from New England residents who described were they were in June, 1953 when the Worcester Tornado touched down in the Bay State.

D. Leombruno, of Saugus, Mass.:
I was 11 years old at the time. My friend and I were down at Lake Park, now Quinsigamond State Park on Lake Quinsigamond. It got very dark out and the waves on the water seemed like the ocean.

We saw the tornado at the far end of the lake at Lincoln Street bridge. You could see the funnel and things being picked up in the air. We ran hope and told our parents but the didn't want to believe us. We showed them pictures of a tornado in the encyclopedia. This got them thinking. My friend's brother came home from work in Framingham and said he saw the tornado cross Route 9.

I remember the big hale stones and the heavy rain that came down. This is something I will never forget.

L. Sardo, formerly of Leominster, Mass.:
I was 9 years old when the tornado hit Worcester in 1953. My Grandmother was an employee at the Worcester State Hospital. Every Friday after work, my dad would drive my mother and I from Leominster to Worcester to take her home with us for the weekend and bring her back on Sunday. This time it was different.

As we approached the city line, we were stopped and only those coming to pick up residents were allowed to enter the city. I say 'city' but what we saw was entirely different.

Three-story tenement and single family homes were leveled with wood and shingles scattered. Trees were torn from their roots laying all over the place; clothes and household items were everywhere. Cars were turned over and crushed. It looked like a meteor struck the land. Very spooky atmosphere.

My grandmother had watched the tornado skirt the State Hospital the whole time. Patients were screaming and crying while others just prayed. Thank God she came through it safely.

A. Wood, formerly of Worcester, Mass.
My mom, P. Moran, was 11 years old when she was in the Worcester tornado of 1953.

She was on her bike on the way to the store to get milk when the tornado came through. She describes the air becoming very heavy and it turning very green. Like others, she says it sounded like a loud freight train; but she does not remember much else.

She was blown quite a ways until she was stopped because a climbing spike attached to a telephone pole impaled her through her shoulder.

Meanwhile, her sisters, Judy and Carole, were babysitting in a nearby apartment. The older sister grabbed the younger and two other children and hid in a closet. The wind ripped the door open and started to pull Carole out. My aunt Judy grabbed her and yanked her back into the closet. She had a long scar where a nail cut her as she was being dragged back in to the closet.

It took my grandparents three days to find my mother in the hospital. The Worcester Telegram and Gazette published papers with pages and pages of names of hospitalized people and what hospital they were in. My mom's face was so swollen that she could not pronounce her name correctly and that contributed to them not being able to find her right away.

They did find her mangled bicycle, which was scrunched up in a ball like a giant would crunch a can.

Later, when she was married and had three children of her own, every time the sky would darken, and thunderstorms would threaten, my Mom would call us in (it became somewhat of a neighborhood joke) and we would have to sit on the basement stairs until she would let us come up. I remember she would give us cold hotdogs to snack on.

My Aunt Judy later moved to various locations in the mid west and would send back newspaper clippings of tornadoes that had touched down in her area.

Needless to say, I grew up intrigued and fascinated by tornadoes; but of course saddened to hear of the devastation they can cause.

Mary R.
In 1953, I was 20 years old and had a part time job at Filene's in Chestnut Hill, Mass. I got out of work at 6 p.m. and took a bus to Brookline Village, arriving at about 6:20 p.m., where I had to wait for another bus connection.

While we were waiting for our bus in Brookline Village, everyone was stunned by the thousands of leaves that were suspended in the air. They just hung there, and none of us knew why. It wasn't until I got home that I heard of the tornado. It was one of the strangest sights I have ever seen, and I've told the story many times.

The memory of that day is still with me -- 50 years later.

P. Masnik
I was 11 years old and living on Worcester's West Side, about two miles from the nearest point where the tornado hit. I was at home with my grandmother.

I remember a very hot, humid, close day with a severe thunderstorm around 5 p.m. The thunder was the loudest I ever heard and the lightening seemed to be coming into our house a few feet through our screen front door.

There were hailstones the size of baseballs. We had been studying the weather in school, and I was very aware of the killer tornadoes in the previous day or two at Waco, Texas and Flint, Michigan.

Fortunately, no family member or friend was injured, and I do not remember ever meeting anyone who was, although I lived in Worcester for another 21 years.

My grandmother had given me a barometer and I used to check its changes every day and that day the pressure dropped by far more than it ever had before.

We must have learned of the tornado from a local radio station we would have turned on around dinnertime. Curiously, when my mother was finally able to get through by phone the next morning to tell her sister in New Jersey we were OK, she didn't know what my mother was talking about.

The Worcester tornado had not made the national news.