The Fire

Back in the 80's, I got really tired of the 5 am - 5 pm grind of running a business, so we sold it and I took a break. I used my time off to help one of my friends set up his electrician business.

Starting up a business can be hard, because it takes a while to find customers, which means that the business isn't making much money. Meanwhile, the business has expenses such as rent and payroll. So, in order to help my friend keep his expenses low, I learned how to do electrical work and did some jobs with him. I only got paid if the job made a profit.

Anyway, one day we got a call to re-wire a house. The house was in the Outer Sunset district of San Francisco, which is the area between Golden Gate Park, the San Francisco Zoo and Ocean Beach. It's the flattest part of SF, so it gets the most fog and the most wind. This particular house was 2 blocks from the beach.

When we arrived on the job, we found a two story building with the main living space on the top floor and a garage on the first floor. There was also an illegal apartment, known as an in-law, in the back of the garage. The front of the building consisted of a garage door and a doorway on the ground floor with windows on the second floor. The doorway was protected by a steel gate.

The outside of the building looked fine, but once we entered, you could see that it had had a fire.

It was obvious that the fire had started in the in-law and had spread upward. It didn't seem like the fire was too serious, because the frame of the building was still intact. The inside of the house was like a skeleton; all of the sheetrock covering the walls was gone and the frame of the house was exposed. Before the walls could be re-covered, the wiring had to be replaced. That was our job. We also had to reconnect the house to the power line coming from the street.

It was a simple job. All we had to do was run new wire, put in new switches, plugs and a new circuit breaker box. We didn't have to drill holes or anything. It took us two days.

The first day we ran all the wire and put in all the plugs and switches. All that remained was to install the new breaker box in the garage and bring power in from the street. This was a one man job, so only I went back on the second day.

The second day was a typical summer day in the Sunset: cold, foggy, windy. I arrived at about 9 am and went to work.

While I was in the garage hanging the breaker box and connecting all the new wires to it, I thought I heard footsteps coming from upstairs. It sounded like two people, a child and an adult. It sounded like the child was running, and the adult was chasing it.

I knew I was alone at the site and that it was windy, so I thought I was just imagining things.

Minutes later, I heard the footsteps again, only this time they were going in the opposite direction.

I upstairs to see if anyone was there. Nothing. I went back to work.

I heard the footsteps going back across the room.

I went back upstairs. Nothing.

I went out into the street and looked at the houses next door. It seemed like no one was home in either house.

I looked at the fog and listened to the wind and told myself that it was just my imagination. I went back to work.

The job took about 4 hours. Every few minutes throughout that period, I heard footsteps running back and forth across the floor above me. I tried to ignore it, but at the end of the day, I was thoroughly rattled and couldn't wait to leave.

Two days later, my friend and I went back to the house to meet the contractor so that he could check our work and pay us.

After we were finished walking through the house, I asked him what had happened there.

He gave us kind of a funny look and said: "Didn't you know? Sad story. Real tragedy."

"The tenant in the basement left something on the stove," he went on, "whatever it was caught fire. Fire spread to the wall above the stove and through the garage. All in all, not much damage, but lots of smoke. Unfortunately, the two people upstairs couldn't get out because most of the smoke went straight up the stairwell and they didn't have a key to the gate. They died from smoke inhalation."

"Who were they?" I asked.

"A two year old boy and his grandmother."