Welcome to our first annual ViralNova Presents: 25 Days Of Creepy Christmas special section! Every day, from December 1st to December 25th, we’re posting a new Christmas themed article guaranteed to get you in the creepy holiday spirit.
Not only can tragedy strike at any time, but it also tends to occur at the worst possible times, especially during the holiday season. (As they say, when it rains, it pours.) The mining town of Calumet, Michigan, learned this lesson the hard way on Christmas Eve, 1933.
Back in those days, Calumet was a copper mining town. The local mines were owned by the C&H Copper Mining Company. While they were highly productive, they were also equally dangerous. When the mining company repeatedly refused to meet the miners’ demands for higher wages and safer working conditions, all 7,000 miners went on strike in July, 1933. With neither side willing to cave, the strike went on for months. By the time Christmas rolled around, the workers were still striking. As you might imagine, after nearly 6 months with no work, most families did not have the budget for presents or a big holiday dinner.
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This is when the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners decided to hold a party on Christmas Eve for the town’s children and their families at the Calumet Italian Hall. The meeting room for the party was up a steep flight of stairs. Around 500 children and 200 adults showed up to the party, which by all accounts was a very merry gathering. At night, however, tragedy struck. When children gathered onstage to receive presents, someone shouted “FIRE!” into the crowded room.
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This caused a panic in the gathering room, as roughly 700 people tried to get out and down the steep staircase all at once. When they did finally manage to get to the bottom of the stairs, they found the door downstairs was blocked.
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That night, 73 people tragically died (59 of them were children). Their deaths occurred all because they were trying to escape a false fire. The victims ranged in age from 2.5-years-old to 66-years-old.
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It still isn’t known who sounded the false alarm and trapped the innocent civilians inside. Some suspected that supporters of the mining company were responsible. However, there has been some speculation that perhaps the doors out of the building opened inward, instead of outward. If that’s true, it would put at least some of the blame for the disaster on a tragic design flaw in the building.
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In any case, no one was ever arrested or charged for causing the massacre.
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The Italian Hall stood for years with its ghosts of the past until it was demolished in 1984. Many residents took bricks from the building as a way to remember what happened there so many years ago. Today a stone archway stands to commemorate the 1933 Christmas Eve massacre.
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The great folk singer Woodie Guthrie even wrote a song about the 1933 disaster. You can hear it in the video below.
H/T: Upworthy
This is just a holiday tragedy of epic proportions. To this day, the people who screamed “fire” in the auditorium have never been identified or arrested.
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