Note: The name of the town has been seen spelled in various ways: Babb Switch, Babb’s Switch, etc. but I’ve decided to go with Wikipedia’s spelling of Babbs Switch.
Everyone knows about the Great Chicago Fire. A fair number now know about the Peshtigo, (Wisconsin) wildfire that broke out the very same night as the Chicago blaze and killed many more people. Quite a few people know about the fire at Boston’s famous Cocoanut Grove nightclub in 1942.
But few know the story of the Christmas Eve fire that broke out in a one-room schoolhouse in Babbs Switch, Oklahoma in 1924. By any standard, it was a terrible tragedy.
On that Christmas Eve, the little school building was packed with students and their families enjoying a Christmas program. A teenage boy was up on the stage, dressed as Santa Claus and distributing presents. Also on stage was a Christmas tree ablaze with lit candles.
Suddenly the boy playing Santa accidentally bumped against the tree, and one of the candles was knocked loose. It immediately set the cotton trim on his Santa suit alight. After that, things spiralled out of control with frightening speed.
Flames spread quickly within the small school building. People naturally ran to the door to escape, but found it opened inward, as most doors in public buildings did. Panic set in as people began piling up at the door, preventing anyone from opening it.
Others looked to the windows for escape. But unfortunately, those windows had recently been fitted with bars, after the glass had been shattered during several severe windstorms. Some managed to break the glass and pass smaller children out to safety between the bars. Mrs. Florence Bil (some sources say Bell) saved several of her students’ lives this way, but she herself perished in the flames.
In all, the fire claimed 36 lives, among them several entire families.
The Babbs Switch disaster led to stricter building codes and, along with the Cocoanut Grove fire, is widely believed to be the catalyst for modern fire precautions such as outward-opening doors.
A strange twist to the Babbs Switch story unfolded in 1957. A woman named Grace Reynolds, living in California, came forward and claimed that she was actually Mary Elizabeth Edens, who’d been presumed killed in the fire back in 1924. Mary Elizabeth had been only a toddler at the time, and her body was never identified. Reynolds’s story was that she was handed out the window by her “real” mother into the arms of a childless couple who assumed that none of her relatives survived the fire and informally adopted her and raised her as their own.
(It was never explained how this couple came to be outside a tiny school in a tiny town just as it happened to catch fire.)
Grace Reynolds became a minor celebrity, appearing on Art Linkletter’s TV show and in various newspapers and magazines. Mary Edens’s family accepted her story and were thrilled to be reunited with their long-lost daughter.
Sadly, it was all a hoax. Nobody knows why Grace Reynolds believed, or claimed to believe, that she was really Mary Edens. It’s possible she suspected that the people who raised her were not her biological family; perhaps she was adopted, and her adoptive parents told her of the fire, for reasons of their own. Then again, perhaps Reynolds was delusional, or greedy, or just bored. Or perhaps she was even inspired by the story of Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, who at the time was widely believed to have escaped assassination in 1918 and to be alive and well; this fanciful version of history had been dramatized in the movie “Anastasia” starring Ingrid Bergman, right around the time Reynolds made her claim.
In any case, a newspaper editor uncovered the hoax for what it was, and informed Mary Edens’s biological father. The father asked that the editor not publish his findings, as he (the father) felt that his wife would not be able to cope with losing her daughter for what would have seemed like the second time. The editor, in a rare example of journalistic restraint, agreed, and his findings were not revealed until 1999.
A sad conclusion to a very sad episode of history.
