Firestarter: The Pyromaniac Desk

 One of the most bizarre stories I've heard (although some might deny its ghostly aspects) came from a student while I was teaching at the University of Minnesota, Duluth in the late 'Sixties. This story involving a late Victorian desk is so striking that it was picked up by the Associated Press.

                                                 A late Victorian highboy secretary desk

Adorned with turnings and carvings, the highboy desk had been acquired by the family twenty years before the incidents occurred. The family had bought a house that had originally been built as a church in Cloquet, a town about 20 miles southwest of Duluth, and the desk came with the house.

Seventeen years after the family moved in, this house was gutted by fire. Only the desk and three other pieces of furniture survived the blaze. One of the sons took the desk to his house near Duluth. A year later the son's house went up in flames, but not the desk, which sat unscathed among the ashes.

All was quiet--or should I say "cool"?--for a few years. The man then asked his brother-in-law if he would temporarily take the desk to their house. The brother-in-law agreed, and the desk was moved to the hallway of their house. Six months later, fire broke out in the hallway where the desk stood. As in the other instances, the desk suffered no marks from fire or smoke, even though the room where it stood was completely charred.

That was enough for the man's mother, who pleaded with him to get rid of the desk immediately. She was concerned that three conflagrations around the mysteriously fireproof desk had to be more than mere coincidence.

But the man found it difficult to accept any connection between the fires and the handsome old desk. So when his new house in Duluth was completed (you may recall that his other house had burned to the ground), he decided to take the desk to his new home. Less than a week after he moved in, he was awakened in the dead of night by the smell of smoke. Racing into the kitchen, he encountered a wall of flame engulfing the room only a few feet from the desk. Damage to the kitchen was extensive, but there sat the desk, untouched.

Investigators determined that the fire had been kindled from a short in the wiring. The man and his family, however, thought otherwise. The wiring was brand new, and it had been carefully inspected before they moved in. With growing alarm, they became convinced that the desk, survivor of four major house fires, in some terrible, inscrutable way, had been the incendiary.

They decided to sell the desk, but not surprisingly, no offers were forthcoming. While the idea of a desk starting fires seems preposterous, the track record of this particular piece of furniture did not encourage prospective buyers to test their luck.

At last report, the desk was being stored in a fireproof concrete structure near Duluth. This was over 50 years ago, and I sometimes wonder what eventually happened to the desk. Did it give up its incendiary tendencies? Is it still in storage or was it destroyed? We probably will never know.