We had the same experience in Missouri. It began with a godawful hail storm. Then, the tornado sirens right behind our house in the neighborhood playground. Even though the funnel cloud passed overhead and petered out without ever touching down, there was a lot of wind damage. That was the day most of the Bradford Pear trees so prevalent in our neighborhood came down.

There is nothing unreasonable or hysterical about being afraid in such a situation. It's irrational to expect someone NOT to be so, IME.

When I was a teenager in Tennessee, a tornado passed on the ground between our house and the next one up the hill about half a mile from us. We huddled in the interior room that was our den as the entire house was going to rattle apart around us. Neither house was damaged, but the stand of trees on that hillside was obliterated.

The scariest, though, was the one that passed through Fayetteville NC when I was a kid, right up the Merc – that's the Murchison Road that runs from the main downtown artery out to Fort Liberty (formerly Ft. Bragg). We saw the cinderblocks and detritus of a house the tornado picked up and flung across the Merc into the backyard of another house – without touching the second house. We didn't see it, but a mother and daughter were hurrying home from the store and were killed. One of them was flung into the branching of a tree; the tree split at the branching as her the force of her body sliced it almost to the roots of the tree. The other was forced through a retaining wall "like a straw through jello" (as my Gran described it when she didn't realize I could hear).