We lived in the mountains of eastern Kentucky that night. I was staying with my grandpa that night. All night long he was turning the tv on getting weather reports and it finally went out and he turned the radio on. The power flicked off and at one point we went out of the porch and listened to the storm raging. It sounded like a freight train over towards my parents house and he grabbed me and ran inside and called them to see if they were okay, thankfully the phones were still working. Dad was mopping water in the basement and heard the tornado go over the house at a higher altitude. The house was at the foot of a mountain and the next morning one could see where the tornado had hit dead center some communication antennas on top of the mountain and apparently hadn’t dropped down but continued on at it’s same altitude saving my parents house and lots of others. It was a long scary night.
We now live in a particularly prone area of N Alabama and it’s pretty clear from the history here (’74, ‘11, ‘14, etc)that living next to a mountain can help a lot but it’s not 100%.