Chase Shustack

The story of the abandoned house on White Street made it into the Gazette the next morning, but it dropped by the wayside.

No one had been killed in the fire, and there had been talk about bulldozing the whole damn lot anyway.

If anything, a couple of teenagers probably broke into the place to smoke marijuana, as teenagers do, and accidentally dropped a lighter on some old curtains.

The police promised to find an answer, although with more pressing matters, they forgot the case by Sunday afternoon.

The fire on White Street would have been another footnote, an unsolved mystery in the town's history, had the second fire not broken out.

It was a scorching Tuesday afternoon just after lunch, when the Sycamore Hill shopping plaza erupted.

A clerk in the furniture store caught smoke emanating from the back room, discovering to her horror that a raging wall of flame had consumed the entire inventory of sofas and love seats.

From there, the destruction poured into the showroom, rivers of searing fire racing across mattresses and varnished chairs in ceaseless hunger, chasing away shrieking mothers and panicking salesmen as it tore through lampshades and dressers.

When the fire department arrived, they found unbelievable chaos.

Men and women poured, screaming, pushing, burning out from the store's double doors and into the street.

A sales clerk covered in extinguisher foam was pulling a colleague.

His pants burned away and his socks singed to his feet.

Out onto the curb while a mother screeched in hysterics about her missing daughter.

From behind the glass windows, black smoke licked its filthy tongue.

and the balls of fire rolled through the charred roof.

Firemen were pushed back by the crowd as they surged out the door, to the point that lighter hoses were used to keep the panicked mob away and allow them to enter.

Only after a four-hour fight was the roaring inferno finally quelled and, in a parking lot full of water, debris, and the walking burned, they deemed it safe.

Unlike the White Street fire, the plaza held two terrible differences.

The first and most noticeable were the casualties.

Fifteen people, a combination of customers and employees, had been killed, their bodies littered throughout the gutted store, petrified in their desperate final moments.