A Chicago area tornado took a bizarre looping path that tracked over the same neighborhood twice in less than 10 minutes.

The seven weak tornadoes in Chicagoland around midday on July 27 weren't as destructive as the strong tornado in Appleton and Menasha, Wisconsin, that also occurred that day.

(MORE: The nation's top tornado state in 2026 is...Illinois)

But zooming in tighter on a south Chicagoland tornado, you might notice something weird about its track.

Instead of a typical straight-line path, it made a tight hairpin loop, as the arrows in the animation below show.

That weird looped track meant the same tornado hit a neighborhood in the suburb of Hazel Crest twice in less than 10 minutes.

That's the area just east of Interstate 294 and north of Interstate 80 where the loop closed on itself, like a knot in your shoelace.

Why did this happen?

Shortly after the tornado formed, a separate surge of high winds spread out south of the tornado, with estimated gusts up to 100 mph, according to the National Weather Service damage survey.

It was this surge of winds that pushed the tornado temporarily to the north into the suburbs of Markham and Harvey before the tornado was yanked back south toward that same Hazel Crest neighborhood it just struck, the storm eventually ending in Glenwood.

NBC-Chicago meteorologist Kevin Jeanes had a wonderful analogy of a typical walk with your dog to explain this.

Your dog suddenly veers in a different direction, maybe seeing another dog, squirrel or rabbit, while you, with the leash, continue walking forward.

Playing the part of the tornado, the dog eventually gets pulled back in the direction you're going with the leash.

The tornado reached its peak intensity along the western side of that loop as it was pulled quickly south, according to the NWS survey. Its maximum winds were estimated at 110 mph.

A roof of an industrial building was removed and an apartment complex roof and walls were damaged in that Hazel Crest neighborhood hit twice.

The tornado only lasted 16 minutes as it traveled its 11-mile path.

(MORE: How NWS damage surveys estimate a tornado's strength)

What are the odds?

Based on a recent 30-year dataset, the SPC calculated the chance of at least one tornado passing within 25 miles of any location in the U.S.

That twister may not strike your home, but if it's no more than 25 miles away, you'd probably receive a tornado warning.

That "within 25 mile" yearly tornado chance in the southern Chicagoland suburbs is 84%, and in much of the eastern two-thirds of the country, it's over 50%.

That's one reason why you should take shelter with every single tornado warning.

But what about hitting your house?

NOAA's Storm Prediction Center estimated each square mile of land in the U.S. is hit by a tornado "about every thousand years on average."

However, they caution there aren't comprehensive records of tornado paths extending back hundreds of years to make more precise calculations possible, and that this average varies greatly across the country.

So, the chance of a single tornado hitting an area twice in one day is likely much smaller than "every thousand years".

There have been other oddities

In 2013, a strong tornado took a weird, fish-shaped path west of Bennington, Kansas.

During the historic April 2011 Super Outbreak, Cordova, Alabama, was hit by two separate tornadoes in less than 12 hours.

Even more jarring, Marshall County, Alabama, was affected 15 separate times by a tornado on April 27, 2011.

Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.