"Lest We Forget": Chicago's Awful Theater Horror

by Marshall Everett

The crowds from the galleries rushed down the stairways and fell or jumped headlong into the struggling mass below. Of the 1,000 people in the theater 297 perished. They were either burned, suffocated or trampled to death. The actor Murdoch was one of the victims.

That same year, 1876, a panic resulted in the Chinese theater of San Francisco from a cry of fire. A lighted cigar which someone playfully dropped into a spectator's coat pocket caused a smell of burning wool. The audience became panic stricken and rushed madly for the exits. At the time there were about 900 Americans in the auditorium, and of this number one-quarter were seriously injured. The fire itself was of no consequence.

The destruction of the Ring theater at Vienna, Dec. 8, 1881, remains the greatest horror of the kind in the history of civilization. It was preceded on March 23 of the same year, by the burning of the Municipal theater in Nice, Italy, caused by an explosion of gas, and in which between 150 and 200 people perished miserably, but the magnitude of the Vienna holocaust made the world forget Nice for the time. The feast of the Immaculate Conception was being celebrated by the Viennese, and Offenbach's "Les Contes d'Hoffman," an opera bouffe, was the play. The audience numbered 2,500.

Fire was suddenly observed in the scenery, and a wild panic started. An iron curtain, designed for just such emergencies, was forgotten, and the flames, which might thus have been confined to the stage, spread furiously through the entire building. The scene was changed from light-hearted revelry, with gladsome music, to one of lurid horror.

The exits from the galleries were long and tortuous and quickly became choked. As in the Iroquois theater fire, those who had occupied the gallery seats were the ones who lost their lives. But few escaped from the galleries. The great majority of the spectators were burned beyond recognition by their nearest relatives. One hundred and fifty were so charred that they were buried in a common grave, and the city's mourning was shared by all the world.

The next fire of this nature to attract the world's attention and sympathy was the destruction of the Circus Ferroni at Berditscheff, Russian Poland. Four hundred and thirty people were killed and eighty mortally injured. Many children were crushed and suffocated in the jam, and horses and other trained animals perished by the score. This was on Jan. 13, 1883, and the origin of the conflagration was traced to a stableman who smoked a cigarette while lying in a heap of straw.

TWO GREAT PARISIAN HORRORS.

The burning of the Opera Comique in Paris, May 25, 1887, was a spectacular horror. Here again an iron curtain that would have protected the audience was not lowered. The first act of "Mignon" was on, when the scenery was observed to be ablaze. The upper galleries were transformed into infernos, in which men knocked other men and women down and trampled them in their eagerness to save themselves, while the flames reached out and enveloped them all.

Many of the actors and actresses escaped only in their costumes, and some rushed nude into the streets. The scenes in the thoroughfares where men and women in tights and ball dresses and men in gorgeous theatrical robes mingled with the naked, and the dead and dying were strewn about, made a picture fantastically terrible. The official list of dead was seventy-five, but many others died from the fire's effects.

The theater at Exeter, England, burned Sept. 5, 1887, was ignited from gas lights, and so much smoke filled the edifice in a short time that near 200 were suffocated in their seats. They were found sitting there afterward, just as though they were still watching the play. This was the eleventh, and the Oporto fire the twelfth of the big conflagrations of the country. One hundred and seventy dead were taken from the ruins of the Portuguese playhouse after the flames which destroyed it on the evening of March 31, 1888, had been subdued. Many sailors and marine soldiers in the galleries used knives to kill persons standing in their way, and scores of the victims were found with their throats cut.