I never know how this happens. It doesn't take much more than Kindergarten smarts to hook black to black, white to white, and bare/green to bare/green.
Now, if the house was wired by a clown you might have to use a multimeter.
That orange and purple arc suggests higher voltage than 120. Unless there is a transformer in that thing, not sure how they managed it.
Could be a 240v country. Or perhaps someone didn't know what they were doing and somehow crossed two breakers in the panel, creating a 240v circuit and melted the connections.
Easy to do if you're retarded and you have a multi-wire branch circuit. Even then, you're never going to have more than 240V in a US home unless you're trying to jury-rig your own solar and doing it insanely wrong.
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