The 28 fires of Odon
By: Dale M. Brumfield
Tags: Cultural Archaeology, Spiritualism, Paranormal, History, Ghosts

One day in 1940, William and Minnie Hackler’s house inexplicably caught on fire 28 times

After 78 years, the Hackler house fires remain unexplained. But the true background narrative of this Odon, Indiana-based phenomenon, where 28 fires broke out in one day at a single home, is much more complex than the breathless and factually incorrect cookie-cutter accounts splayed across numerous badly-designed paranormal web sites.

“In the Town of Odon, we are defined less by boundaries on a map than by the sense of shared values our residents hold dear,” states the town website. “Small town values, guided growth, preservation of historical, cultural, and natural heritage are just a few of the core principles that make the Town of Odon a wonderful place to call home.”

The Hackler family may have disagreed after the events of June 21, 1940.

Sad history

William and Minnie Hackler and their five children William Jr., Dorothy, Garland, Dale and Virginia, lived as a farming family in a large older two-story home surrounded by large pine trees about 100 yards off a main road four miles northwest of Odon.

The two-story frame house was built just after the Civil War by an early Daviess County settler named Marshall (or Marshel) Ketcham, a native of Tennessee who moved into the area in the 1840s. In 1852 he married Margaret Sedgerwood, and while two children are listed in the 1860 census, it is believed they had more.

Sometime in the 1880s disaster struck the Ketcham family, and according to a story in a 1940 edition of the Mitchell Tribune, five members of Ketcham’s family died in the house of “burning fever,” most likely Typhus.

Marshall Ketcham died in 1899 of “general debility.” A short obituary in the Indianapolis News stated that Ketcham “was identified with the history of the county from its organization to the present time, and was prominent in its affairs.” Margaret’s death is unknown.

After Ketcham’s death, the house was sold to a shadowy former Southerner named Andrew J. Wilke (or Wilkey), who claimed to be a spiritualist, and his wife. Tragedy struck again at the house when one of his two sons was killed in a hunting accident. Wilke was inconsolable and grieved over the loss of the boy for years. He reportedly even buried his son a few hundred yards west of the house, in a casket built with an embedded glass window so the child’s face could be seen.

Wilke also insisted that his deceased son made his presence known to him, and that he regularly conversed with him. After Wilke died it was rumored that his wife moved the boy’s casket to a nearby cemetery.

What the hell?

By the Spring of 1940, the Hackler family had been in the house for about a decade without incident. Then, on an unusually warm late June morning, something began going horribly wrong.

Just after 8:00 a.m., William was heading outside to start his farming chores when someone smelled smoke. The family fanned out throughout the house, and daughter Dorothy found a strip of wallpaper on fire under a window in an unoccupied upstairs bedroom. The Odon fire department was called, and after putting out the fire they suspected a defective hidden chimney, as the fire’s origins seemed to be behind the wall. After ripping off the plaster, however, they found there was no chimney behind it and no fire damage. Plus, since the weather was so unseasonably warm, there was no fire in the stove anyway.

The fire also was not electrical in origin either, as like most rural Indiana farmhouses of that time the house had never been wired for electricity. It was a mystery, and both parents and all the children pleaded ignorance of how the fire may have started.

But the real mystery was just beginning.

1941 house image used in an ad for Traveler’s Insurance.

No sooner had the firefighters returned to Odon that they were called again when Minnie discovered another fire smoldering inside a mattress in another bedroom. Then while the fire department extinguished that fire, all hell broke loose.

Fires started everywhere — a pair of William’s coveralls hanging innocently behind a door went up in flames. A fireman noticed smoke pouring from between the covers of a book, and upon opening it found the book’s interior in flames. Another fire broke out on the opposite side of the house from the first. Again, it seemed to be from inside the wall, so firemen tore plaster and lathes off down to the studs, but found no evidence of where any fire had traveled either underneath the lathes or between the ceiling and floor of the second story. It had simply broken out, just like the first, only this time on the opposite (west) side of the house.

From 8:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m. a total of nine fires were extinguished. “From that time on, all day Friday it was just one fire after another,” William told a local reporter. One fire started inside a desk drawer. Two neighbor women, concerned by the seeming commotion at the Hackler place, stopped by to see if they could help and as they stood in the living room the window curtains directly behind them burst into flames. Oddly, only the curtains burned, leaving the window shades untouched. Then suddenly, the curtains across the room hanging at an adjacent window ignited in the same fashion.

In another bedroom a paper divider that had been placed between the springs and the mattress broke out in flames, destroying the mattress. A bedspread flared and was reduced to ashes within seconds while neighbors, standing in the same room, stared in horrified amazement. It was as if an invisible hand were lighting matches throughout the house.

“If I had not been in the house at the time and seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it,” one of those unnamed neighbors commented to the reporter.

Another neighbor was more cynical. “The devil is in that house.”

Like reports of spontaneous combustion in humans, only the objects that burst into flames were consumed. Everything else around them was left relatively unharmed. A calendar in the kitchen burst into flames, witnessed by a firefighter who was taking a break, but it did no damage to the wallpaper underneath.

In all, over 100 volunteer firefighters from Odon and the town of Elnora extinguished a total of 28 fires that day.

Theories

After the seeming final fire was quenched around 11:00 p.m., the shaken family decided to move any remaining undamaged beds into the yard and sleep outside in case the fires started up again. “I don’t believe in spooks,” William told a reporter, “so the only thing I was afraid of that night was fire breaking out that way.”

Story and factually incorrect headline, South Bend Tribune, June 23, 1940.

Over the next week, no new fires started, but a constant stream of curious and bewildered people visited the home, offering a myriad of explanations of what may have caused them. With no overhead power lines within miles, one person suggested the lightning rods somehow became charged, heating the nails in the structure. One man stated that the Hackler farm was situated in the center of a powerful magnetic field that triggered the fires (a theory explored during the Canneto di Caronia fires of 2004 and 2014). Some speculated that an unused well on the property was releasing gases that ignited sections of the house. Someone accused the children of playing pranks. Some whispered the house was haunted, while others went further, claiming it was cursed.

None of these speculations were validated by the Indiana State Fire Marshal, who concluded the Odon fires as “the most baffling mystery” he had ever seen and closed the case with no explanations. Damage from these blazes was estimated at several hundred dollars, mostly to belongings.

By July, the Hacklers had decided to make an interesting change. They moved all of their remaining belongings from the house, and William, assisted by neighbors, began disassembling the house, board by board. They then reconstructed it about a mile away, closer to the main highway. By August they were moved back in. They never experienced another fire in that location, although in 1964 William and his second wife Clara experienced a minor flue fire in a house in nearby Bedford that caused no damage. He died in 1981 at age 90.

Spiritual explanations?

With the fires defying scientific explanation, the question no one seemed to ask was the significance of the history and/or location of the house in those fires. Could it have been a demon poltergeist, as suggested by some neighbors? Or, was there an unknown, mystical relationship between the house, the five Ketcham family members who died of the “burning fever” and the spontaneous fires a half-century later, at the time owned by a family also with five children, mediated somehow by the presence of Wilke the spiritualist who allegedly conversed with his dead son? Did the destruction and rebuilding of the house a mile away once and for all quiet whatever restless spirits inhabited it for that one day?

With the house now long gone, no one will ever know.

Traveler’s Insurance advertisement in Collier’s Magazine, April 19, 1941

Damage caused by the Hackler fires was covered by the Traveler’s Insurance Company, who like everyone else was so fascinated by the phenomenon that they featured the house and the fires in a full-page advertisement in the April 19, 1941 edition of Collier’s Magazine.

“It is very unlikely you will ever be the victim of a mysterious siege of fires like this,” the ad stated, “but one fire, without enough insurance properly written, is one too many.”

In the Hackler case, 28 fires are 28 too many.

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Read more at www.dalebrumfield.net. New novel “Theme Park Babylon” now available worldwide.