One of the freakiest natural events I've been involved in was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Kaikoura_earthquake. It was a long rolling earthquake that went on for a while at midnight.
I'm not even on the same island that it happened on. I was hundreds of kilometres away from the epicentre, but it still had an amazing strength to it.
Of course it had to happen at the time I was watching porn.
The eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980.
I lived about 200 miles to the east, and we sat out on the deck watching ash clouds roll in. Little did we know how much of it was going to fall. Some towns north of us had to use front loaders to clear the streets.