1871 Chicago Fire and Agnes’ House
Part III: The Blue Fire
By Leu Seyer – November 5, 2025
Chicago Before the Fire
Chicago's development in the nineteenth century was fueled by a large influx of foreign immigrants and internal migrants, all of whom transformed the city into a vibrant industrial and cultural hub (Chicago Historical Society, 2005; PBS, n.d.). However, this progress was sharply interrupted by the Great Fire of 1871, which destroyed entire neighborhoods and prompted a reevaluation of urban planning. Rather than serving as a complete setback, the disaster strengthened Chicago's story of resilience and propelled its path toward modernization (Miller, 2000; Chicago History Museum, n.d.).
Previously on Part 2:
The city burned, yet Agnes’s house stood like a calm eye inside a furious storm. Sofia learned that permission can be given—and perhaps taken back. Before dawn, she laid a small, faceless doll upon a threshold the fire had spared.
The Unexpected Counterspell
Before the destructive fire grew worse, Sofia and her daughter quietly left her house. Her hands trembled, and her chest felt like it was burning. She walked down the alley behind Agnes's house, where the vines still bloomed brightly despite the wreckage. That's when a blackbird swooped down from the branches and landed on her shoulder.
Sofia's heart skipped a beat. The bird was lightweight, its beak sharp, and its eyes seemed like a bottomless pit. Then the impossible happened: the blackbird brought its beak close to her ear and spoke.
“Now she fears you." That's what the bird told her, or what she thought was said to her. Sofia felt her blood freeze and boil at the same time. She had no doubt about what she heard. The bird took off, black against a gray sky, and vanished.
"Now she's afraid of you." That was what was left boiling in Sofia's mind. That was all she needed. If Agnes could be afraid, she could be defeated, she concluded.
That same night, Sofia went back to the ruins of her old house. She sifted through broken bricks, charred wood, and twisted nails. She was searching for something, any sign of what had been hers, something that still survived among the ashes. And there, beneath a pile of damp rubble, she discovered a rose. A single red flower, wilted yet still alive, lay protected beneath the fallen bricks. It was small and delicate, yet genuine. Sofia's heart pounded with a strength she hadn't felt since her husband's death. She reached out with trembling hands and brought the flower to her lips.
She crushed it into a paste, mixing it with ashes from her home, hardened wax from her destroyed altar, and a little salt she had collected from the burned kitchen. She prepared a small cloth bag, sewn with thread she found in the trash, and placed the mixture inside. The result was rough, earthy, but it vibrated like a wounded heart.
She spent the next few days gathering more ingredients: singed pigeon feathers, dripping wax from candles salvaged from the church, still-warm earth from the charred streets. She did it quietly, without drawing attention to herself. People were too busy looking for food or shelter to suspect her of plotting anything.
Finally, on a moonless night, Sofia shaped a small doll from wet clay. It was delicate and imperfect, but she embedded a rose, turned into red paste, in its chest. The doll had no face—only that flower-shaped heart.
At dawn, Sofia wrapped the object in burlap and tied it with a strange string: a bleached bone she had found in the river, worked until it had become as thin as thread. The package was rough to the touch, but it vibrated like a hidden drum.
She left it at Agnes's doorstep and hid in the shadows. She didn't wait to see what would happen, only knowing that as soon as she left the package, the air around the house grew heavier, as if it were holding its breath.
The Beginning of the Fall
Agnes opened the door a moment later. She wore a dark robe, and her hair was loose. Seeing no one, she looked at the package with a suspicious frown. She knew exactly who had sent it. With steady hands, she carried it inside, unwrapped it slowly, and found the clay doll with the tiny red rose pressed against its chest.
Agnes smiled bitterly. "A counterspell," she murmured, her voice almost mocking.
She turned to her bowl, the one she had used for the raven's blood. But she found it had changed: it was no longer clay. It had turned to stone, heavy and useless. She lifted it, and the stone slipped from her hands, breaking in two.
Agnes felt a shiver run through her. She hurried to the window and looked at her vines. They shimmered, but not with dew. Instead, they were stained with gray moisture, as if they were crying. Some leaves were already quietly withering.
Over the next few days, the change became obvious. The blackbirds, which had always been with her, stopped sitting on her windows. The garden, once lively with strange herbs, fell silent, without sounds or whispers. The house windows began to fog up, as if they were crying on the inside. The shadows in the corners grew darker, and every time Agnes lit a candle, the flame flickered with the sound of laughter.
Agnes tried to respond. She burned sage, recited invocations in her native tongue, and asked her grandmother's spirit for help, which appeared in the smoke only to scold her for her reckless magic. Nothing worked. The counterspell was ingrained, alive, and thriving like a thorn in her own heart. By fate, Agnes never knew about the coincidences that accompanied her luck during the fire, but this spell born from the very depths of Sofia’s hearth was real and could be felt in the atmosphere.
One night, Agnes looked out the window and saw something that took her breath away. Across the street, among the ruins, stood Sofia. Dressed in white, with her skin stained with soot and rose oil, she remained motionless. She watched Agnes and smiled.
Agnes closed the curtains, but the cold remained in the room.
Some weeks after the counterspell, Agnes Mortensen began a slow, harsh decline. Her house, which had survived the city's worst fire unscathed, began to change. At first, it was subtle—just small, almost unnoticeable signs: a creak in the wood that shouldn't have been there, a foggy window on a sunny day, a crack that appeared and vanished depending on the light. But soon, the deterioration became impossible to overlook.
The vines that covered her walls, once proud and bright, turned dull with dark spots spreading like a disease. The birds no longer visited; the blackbirds, her former companions, had deserted her. The garden fell silent. Where once lush grass had grown, now there was hard, scentless earth and voiceless soil.
At night, Agnes heard strange sounds. Initially, they were whispers—brief and almost indistinguishable from the wind. But each day, they became more distinct, until she finally recognized Sofia's laughter in every crackle of the candles. When she tried to sleep, she dreamt of wilted roses emerging from her mouth, choking her with thorns.
She tried to resist. She burned sage, recited ancient spells in archaic Swedish, and even offered her blood to the familiar spirits she had summoned as a child. But every ritual failed. Her magic turned to ashes between her fingers. Her power, which had once protected her home, was now turning against her.
Perhaps that was all she thought or decided to believe now, unaware that losing her self-confidence was the real reason for the declines around her. When she was the one overwhelmed with envy and fought the injustices in her life, things went well. But now that she was the only one lucky, her bitterness had weakened and dimmed her inner fire.
The Invisible Mourning Blue Fire
Sofia, from the ruins where she lived with her daughter, watched every change.
She did not do so with joy, but with fierce determination. Every time she saw a withered leaf in Agnes's garden, she felt a pulse of victory. Every new shadow on her enemy's walls was confirmation that her counterspell was working.
But she also felt it in her own body. Revenge was not free. She had feverish dreams where she woke up covered in soot with no fire nearby, or found red petals stuck to her skin. Once, looking at herself in a makeshift mirror, she swore she saw Agnes's gaze behind her eyes. It was as if they were connected, as if every wound inflicted on the other left scars on both of them.
The city, meanwhile, kept rebuilding itself. The sound of hammers and saws echoed during the day; at night, the silence made them remember what was lost. People discussed insurance, new building codes, and ways to stop another disaster. But in the alleys, kitchens, and in children's whispers, the true story was different: it was all about the house that survived the fire, the woman who let it, and the widow who now smiled as if she knew a secret.
Then, one early morning, Agnes woke up feeling incredibly cold. The walls of her house exhaled mist, as if they were breathing in winter. Candles extinguished as soon as they were lit. The air was thick with absolute silence, a silence that hurt her bones.
That was when she saw her. Through the window, in front of her door, stood Sofia. Dressed in white, her hair covered in ash, her skin stained with soot and rose oil. Her lips were curved in a smile that held no compassion. Agnes pulled the curtain aside abruptly, but the image remained etched in her mind.
At dawn, revenge began to take control of Agnes’s destiny. It started with a small fire, but it wasn't ordinary. No black smoke or red flames appeared. What happened felt more like a stripping away, as if the house itself was tired of hiding its true self.
The vines pulled away from the walls, transforming into snakes that slithered into the open field and vanished. The wood of the walls turned pale, fragile as salt, and then crumbled into dust. The glass wept water before shattering. Then the fire appeared, but it was a blue fire, gentle and silent, consuming without noise, crackling, or smoke.
It was as if the house were being erased from reality.
No one saw it except Sofia. The neighbors, busy building new walls, hardly noticed the strange silence on that block. By the time anyone passed by, only a patch of scorched earth remained. In the middle, a single blackbird feather.
Sofia observed the destruction quietly. She didn’t celebrate or cry. Instead, she took a deep breath and held her daughter's hand.
The Legend of Agne’s House Burning
Over the years, the story of Agnes and her burned house became a legend. People kept saying that there was a house that hadn’t burned during the Great Fire, but that, strangely, it did burn sometime later, on a clear and quiet morning.
Some believed Agnes had made a pact with the devil, and when her power waned, the devil claimed her with blue fire. Others claimed it was God's punishment for meddling with forbidden forces. The most imaginative whispered that the fire itself had become conscious and that the house had been its prison until it managed to break free.
No one mentioned Sofia. Only a few children claimed to have seen her talking to birds or picking flowers in scorched fields. But these stories were forgotten with time, swept away like dust in the wind of a city that no longer had room for ghosts.
Decades went by. Chicago grew again—bigger, stronger, with buildings of stone and iron. Immigrants kept arriving, and voices speaking different languages filled the streets once more. The Great Fire became a shared memory, a warning, a scar.
No one knows for sure what happened to Agnes, nor was there any interest in discovering her fate. Sofia grew older amid ruins and rebuilding. Her daughter matured, started her own family, and moved to a new neighborhood. Sofia was left alone, her hair gray and her hands calloused from work. But at night, when the houses were asleep, she told a different story.
“Hate, when mixed with fire, creates monsters," she would tell the curious children who dared to listen. "And in Chicago, long ago, fire obeyed the pain of one woman and was then destroyed by another's revenge.”
No one knew whether to believe her. Some laughed; others trembled in silence.
But Sofia kept the proof.
Under her bed, in a wooden box wrapped in old, brittle vines, there was a clay doll. It had no face. Only a red rose pressed against its chest, still warm to the touch.
Every time she held it, she felt a gentle warmth spread through her veins. It was not the warmth of a home or an ordinary fire. It was a warmth that reminded her she had won, yes, but also that the cost of revenge never fully disappears. So, when she finally closed her eyes on her deathbed, those who watched over her swore they heard, very softly, a fluttering from a blackbird's wings flying out of the room.
REFERENCES
Chicago Historical Society. (2005). The growth of Chicago: Immigration and migration in the 19th century. Chicago History Museum. https://www.chicagohistory.org
Chicago History Museum. (n.d.). The Great Chicago Fire & the web of memory. Retrieved from https://www.chicagohistory.org/fire
Ellis, B. (2003). Lucifer ascending: The occult in folklore and popular culture. University Press of Kentucky.
Miller, R. (2000). Chicago's Great Fire: The destruction and resurrection of an iconic American city. University of Chicago Press.
PBS. (n.d.). Decades of immigrants: Chicago’s ethnic transformation. American Experience | PBS. Retrieved July 8, 2025, from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/chicago-decades-immigrants/
University of Washington. (n.d.). Illinois: From settlement to urbanization. Moving Beyond the Page: U.S. Migration History. Retrieved July 8, 2025, from https://depts.washington.edu/moving1/Illinois.shtml
