"Hardly anything written about Nikola Tesla fails to exaggerate his inventions and deify the man. Factually wrong descriptions of his accomplishments are found all over the place. His name is broadly smeared by association with virtually every crank conspiracy theory on the planet. They want magically easy answers to complicated problems, and when they hear that Tesla invented such answers and that the government and industry suppressed them, they trumpet his name to the world. This group has become little more than a cult, an insult to the man and his accomplishments."
"Tesla is not known to have ever mentioned ball lightning in any of his writing or speaking, and no record from his time is known to exist stating that he created, demonstrated, or knew about anything that could reasonably be called ball lightning — despite intense rumormongering to the contrary"
"Tesla posed for a famous publicity photograph, that you've seen many times, of himself sitting in a chair inside his lab taking notes while the air all around him is filled with such streamers from his giant coil."
"During the final decade of his life, Tesla was essentially penniless and living in a New York hotel, consumed by what we think today was probably obsessive compulsive disorder. It was during this period — and not earlier during his productive laboratory years — that he openly spoke of having built and tested a Death Ray."
Source: 'The Cult of Nikola Tesla', http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4345