The Peshtigo Fire Demon

150 years ago the Great Peshtigo Fire happened. It remains the most destructive fire disaster in American History. On October 8, 1871 a massive line of tornadic firestorms swept across the parched northeast Wisconsin landscape wiping out the thriving town of Peshtigo and covering an area that included Door County. The death toll remains unknown. As many as 3,000 could have perished. In it’s wake, a macabre natural wonder - a fragile forest of ephemeral glass trees spun up from the sandy soil by the intense heat of the fire. In the 20th century “The Peshtigo Paradigm” - a formula to calculate the combination of wind, topography and ignition sources that create a firestorm at the boundary between human settlements and natural terrain was born and used to horrific effect in the allied bombings of German and Japanese cities in World War Two. The ignition source of the Great Peshtigo Fire remains unknown. In it’s immediate aftermath, recently settled European peasant farmers in the counties surrounding the fire had their own version of events. From Catholic German settlements in Outagamie, Brown and Manitowoc counties came different versions of an eye witness sighting - the figure a demon boy with a long fiery tail riding a large black, multi-horned stag, spreading fire in his wake. Such is folklore.

Special Thanks to Sue Sacharski who provided the following - From Anton Stoll's Chronicles of St. Nazianz: "It was already told from a reliable source, that a man in that area had seen a deer with a super large horn, and between his large horn a boy between 12 and 13, with an extraordinary tail, which threw fire everywhere he went."