On June 3o, 1940, at about 8 AM, a farmer in Odon Indiana named William Hackler had breakfast with his wife Winnie and their
four children and then headed out to his barn to begin his chores.
Once out in the yard, he noticed
smoke coming out of an upstairs window on the west side of the house. Because
the house had never been wired for lights and there was no fire in the kitchen
range, the cause was a mystery. The Odon Fire Department extinguished the fire
and left, but scarcely had they got back to town when smoke began pouring from
a downstairs bedroom.
This time the fire was in a layer
of paper between the springs and mattress of a bed. Between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m.
nine fires broke out in different parts of the house, all without apparent
cause. A calendar on a wall went up in a quick puff of smoke. Another fire
started in a pair of overalls hanging on a door. A bedspread was reduced to
ashes. A book taken from a drawer of a desk was discovered to be burning
inside, though the cover of the volume was in perfect condition. By 11:00 that
night, 28 fires had broken out inside the home. (But none outside the house) The
fire department from Odon had to have help from a nearby town. None' of the
blazes caused much damage and the total loss was estimated at perhaps several
hundred dollars.
The house was built by Marshall
Ketcham in the reconstruction period after the Civil War. Tragedy soon followed
when five members of the family became afflicted with "burning
fevers." The place was then sold to Andrew J. Wilke who was said to be a
spiritualist. The Hacklers moved into the property in the early 1930s.
The county fire marshal advanced the
idea that lightning rods attached to the house became charged and caused nails
in the -house to become hot. Another guess was gasses from a nearby well sparked the flames, or
magnetic fields caused the outbreaks, or….the most probable of all…. pranks caused by children. There were three
children in the house, Virginia Hackler, age11, Dale Hackler age 14, Garland
Hackler age 17, as well as one older child, William Hackler Jr. age 23. Again,
the house had no central electric system of any kind, matches were freely available
in every room.
The Hacklers moved out and set up
beds under a tree, where they spent the night. The next week the Hacklers
abandoned the house. In the month following the fires, the house, which was
just Northwest of Odon, was torn down to make way for a new highway. Except for
a constant stream of visitors who wanted to see the house for themselves,
nothing unusual happened in the property again