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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

The Unexplained Fire in Odon



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