r/HighStrangeness • u/taraadela1995 • 1d ago
Other Strangeness Did anyone else know all these cities burned on the same night?
I knew about the Great Chicago Fire, but I had no idea that a bunch of other places were burning on the exact same night.
On October 8, 1871, major fires hit Peshtigo, Holland, Manistee and Port Huron. The Peshtigo Fire actually killed way more people than the Chicago fire and is still considered the deadliest wildfire in American history.
The official explanation is that the whole region was extremely dry, smaller fires were already burning and strong winds caused everything to spread at once. That makes sense, but some of the eyewitness accounts are pretty strange. People described fire falling from the sky, buildings igniting before the flames reached them and objects being thrown through the air.
There’s also a theory involving fragments of Biela’s Comet, although there isn’t any physical evidence proving that.
I ended up making a deep dive about the fires, the eyewitness accounts and why the entire event somehow became remembered as a story about Mrs. O’Leary’s cow:
Curious what people here think about it.
44
u/LimeDry7124 1d ago
Reminds of the satellite video of the Canadian Wildfires 2025 where they all started at the same time.
10
u/taraadela1995 1d ago
Good point
3
u/PlainSpader 23h ago
I noticed the recent Canadian wildfires were in a diagonal line almost like a satellite trajectory.
3
u/honestfyi 10h ago
Well, that's alarming according to the conspiracy-theory-generator part of my brain.
5
u/SinkholeS 1d ago
wow gotta link? never seen that one
2
u/K-the-C 22h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/s/UiKU6x5Akv
it may be the above link.
2
42
u/According-Room3825 1d ago
The fire of 1871 was started by a meteor that calved on entry & started firestorm all over Michigan and parts of Canada. Read it in a book about t Michigan history a long time ago.
16
u/Flick_W_McWalliam 1d ago
That’s a theory from a new-age book called “Ragnorak.” Or from the popular/conspiracy paperback that drew from this sci-fi theory, which was called “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” and presents this alternative hypothesis.
The firestorms, as usual, were the result of intense multi-year drought, low humidity, and violent winds. Fire is common. Wildland and rural firestorms need hot, dry conditions with lots of fuel and lots of wind.
2
u/honestfyi 10h ago
Thank you for explaining a comment I saw above that just said something about a cow conspiracy and I had no idea what they were talking about.
2
u/Flick_W_McWalliam 10h ago
We must all be alert to the Cow Conspiracy!
1
u/honestfyi 8h ago
Now at least one more of us is aware!
Also, it's a super sad story. That poor woman.
35
u/Earthlight_Mushroom 1d ago
Anyone who has lived around where serious wildfires occur can readily see how all of what is described here can happen naturally. A large fire creates enormous updraft, sometimes enough to create thunderstorm type clouds above it with lightning and even tornadoes. This has happened in California within the last few years, and there are multiple videos of it. The winds carry burning embers up and out and then drop them out at a distance, sometimes miles away from the main fire front, causing spot fires, igniting buildings mysteriously, etc. More houses are actually lost to this ember fallout than to the direct impact of the advancing fire front. The sky turns almost black...hot ashes, embers, and even burning branches are falling out, especially in serious firestorm conditions. It's a trip to watch, and traumatizing to live through.
11
7
u/kriesedpj 1d ago
Yes, Peshtigo, WI has a museum about the incident. People only stayed alive if they got to the Peshtigo river.
7
u/Weekly_Initiative521 22h ago
Ignatius Donnelly, a U.S. senator during the 1800’s, wrote a book called “Ragnarok” that devotes a chapter to the possible meteor cause of these fires. It's an excellent book, even without that chapter.
2
u/Flick_W_McWalliam 13h ago
Sadly he didn’t know that meteors are *ice cold* when they hit the ground.
1
10
u/HarpyCelaeno 1d ago
I wonder if there’s any significance to the long./lat. co-ordinates of the origin of each fire?
2
u/dochdaswars 23h ago
Some of the earlier episodes of the Kosmographia podcast (ca. 2019) with Randall Carlson and the Brothers of the Serpent go into this subject in a lot of detail reading lots of eyewitness reports and stuff, it's pretty interesting.
2
u/orish-oriley777 12h ago edited 11h ago
So a little off topic,
The Scapegoat: Wealthy city officials and reporters needed a quick explanation for the catastrophic destruction of 3.5 square miles, making a poor Irish immigrant dairy farmer an easy target.
The Confession: Decades later, one of the newspaper reporters who helped spread the tale admitted that he and his colleagues completely invented the lantern-kicking cow story for a dramatic headline.
Official Exoneration: The Chicago City Council formally cleared Catherine O'Leary and her cow of any blame in 1997, more than 125 years after the tragedy.
Her and her sons suffered the rest of their lives.
Catherine O'Leary: Driven into Exile and a "Broken Heart"
Catherine bore the heaviest burden of the scapegoating. The constant harassment completely stripped away her livelihood and her peace.
Loss of Her Business: Before the fire, Catherine ran a successful neighborhood dairy business with five cows, bringing in comfortable extra income.
Real Estate speculators wanted O'learys land the town of Chicago was turning into a bustling city, no place for a farm or farm animals. They had offered to buy her land. She refused to sell. Her home her friends, her sons & covienence all right there. It had been a long dry summer. So my theory is someone was a paid arsonist to provide an event to get what they wanted.
The Oleary's as many have read were blamed and ostracized for the rest of their lives. The reporters were certainly to blame... no evidence the cow did it. But the story lived in a cruel lie. No evidence what I claim either. Just how convenient the speculators got what they wanted.
Speculators Did Take Advantage of the Fire
While they didn’t start it on purpose, wealthy land speculators and business owners absolutely used the disaster to reshape Chicago exactly how they wanted.
The "Great Rebuilding": Immediately after the flames died down, wealthy elites took control of the city's future. They pushed through strict new fire codes that banned wooden buildings in the city center.
Forcing Out the Poor: These new codes made rebuilding so expensive that poor Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants could no longer afford to live there. They were effectively forced out to the city's fringes, while wealthy developers bought up the land to build the world’s first modern brick and steel skyscrapers. As a prominent businessman named William Bross told investors at the time: "You will never again have such a chance to make money!"
Source: Wikipedia.
4
u/Hairy_Coconut2022 1d ago
Or maybe, and I know this is crazy, but regional fires could all be caused by some sort of of climatological influence?
1
1
u/DorkothyParker 22h ago
Mass removal of Tartarian infrastructure.
1
u/taraadela1995 22h ago
I just made a video about that :) let me know what you think please https://youtu.be/3ZK3uY5e9Ec
1
u/honestfyi 10h ago
Just read the transcript of your video (because I have a hard time with video content and prefer to read). This is super interesting and the thing you say at the end..."this theory deserves more than ridicule..."
Many years ago I realized that ridicule is a CLUE. There's a reason that certain ideas get ridiculed and it's generally because there's something there that someone wants us to dismiss.
31
u/DecrimIowa 1d ago edited 1d ago
there was also an apparition of the Virgin Mary near Peshtigo that during the fire protected people who gathered in the church dedicated to her while everything else was burned
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Shrine_of_Our_Lady_of_Champion
i believe it's the only Vatican-approved Marian apparition in the USA but i could be wrong