I'm Lauren Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.

Thank you. We're sure that you've picked up on this by now,

but one of our favorite tasks in researching this wondrous and unbelievable world is digging through regional news archives and coming upon stories that unfolded day by day

in the local papers. We like to imagine small town Americans sitting at their breakfast tables

coffee in hand, scanning the columns for updates on, say, the Sasquatch who'd been terrorizing the local elementary school.

But we also imagine the questions locals must have been left with when stories faded from

the papers, with no satisfying explanation for the fantastic events that had entertained

and perhaps even frightened them. The tales that we bring you tend to do

that, leave the towns they unraveled in feeling well at loose ends. But that's not always the case.

Sometimes our stories do wrap up nicely, if weirdly. Today, we're bringing you to eerily similar events, which took place just eight years apart,

back in the 1940s.

Although one of the families lived in Odin, Indiana, and the other in Macomb, Illinois,

and there's no connection between them, they do share a common element.

That element is fire.

Sudden, seemingly spontaneous fires, erupting through two homes and leaving local officials with serious investigations on their hands.

Different theories were proposed, and, yes, strangers, dark histories and secrets were unearthed.

It's a tale of two homesteads, up in flames.

In Odin, the stories become known as the tale of the fire poltergeist.

And in Macomb, those events have been mostly forgotten.

Well, until now.

To keep things simple, we'll tell you one tale at a time,

and we'll start with the earlier event,

...