In the ruined houses all the iron work was found to have been strongly magnetized, so that pokers, flatirons and other metal objects were found adhering to each other.

Just off the tornado's track the same effects were noticed, and several persons experienced sharp electric shocks during the passage of the storm.

Afterward it was found that the magnetic influence was so strong that clocks and watches were stopped and rendered wholly useless.
The scooping action of the tornado sometimes makes considerable changes in the topography of the country, as when it gathers up the water of a large pond or water course and makes a new pond or opens a new channel.
At Wallingford the water in a pond of very large size was taken bodily from its bed, carried up a hill and dropped nearly in one mass, so that gullies and ravines were cut in every direction.
There is a divide in Northeastern Illinois between streams flowing into Lake Michigan and those running to the Mississippi.

So level is a portion of the land on the summit, and so slight the elevation above the lake, that in wet seasons the surface-water seems almost as willing to go one way as the other; and on one occasion the upper streams of the Desplaines River were nearly permanently diverted toward the lake by a tornado that gathered up the water and scored the surface in its track toward the east.
Many are the stories told of the way in which objects are carried away by the wind and left in strange places.

In one Illinois tornado two children and an infant were caught up.