The Winecoff Fire: The Deadliest Hotel Disaster in American History
On the night of December 7th, 1946, a woman working the night shift at the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia smells smoke. A few floors up, a man is woken by cries for help. Within two hours, almost half of the guests will be dead.
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SOURCES
https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/20691
How Catherine de Medici Made Gloves Laced with Poison Fashionable - Atlas Obscura
Dangerous beauty: hazardous chemicals and poisons in historic cosmetics - Science Museum Group
Digital Collections - National Library of Medicine (nih.gov)
18 Dec 1910, Page 1 - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at Newspapers.com
https://archive.org/details/abrahamlincoln1910john/page/48/mode/2up
Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present, Alison Matthews David, Bloomsbury
TRANSCRIPT
Winecoff Hotel
It was 3am on December 7th, 1947. Alice Edmonds sat in a closet reading a comic book. She was a few hours into her overnight shift at the Winecoff hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, and at this point she needed some quiet. Whenever the nights overwhelmed her, she’d close herself in a utility closet and read comics until she was notified a guest needed help. That night had been rowdy. There was a group of teenagers staying in the hotel for the Georgia Youth Assembly who had been running up and down the halls, causing a ruckus for other guests who were quick to complain to her.
They had finally gone to sleep, but even still, in the wee hours of the morning, she could hear a loud poker game happening in the room next to her. She knew at any time they’d come grab her for more sodas, some alcohol, to ask for some sandwiches from down the road. But for now, she was in her own world, curled up with her book enjoying being off her feet.
that’s when she smelled something. It was as if the cigarette smoke from the poker game had wafted into her closet. She tried to bat it away, but it became thicker, and now she could see the haze swirling in the hallway light that leaked in through the slots in the door.
She’s about to get up and tell the poker players to tone it down, but another waft of the smoke hits her, and this, Alice realizes, is not cigarette smoke. It has a different, dangerous smell, like burnt tires.
she hears a scream, a guttural, life and death woman’s scream come from down the hall. Fire! Fire! Fire! It shrieks
She pushes open the closet door to see what’s happening, but she cant see anything, the entire hallway is choked in thick, black smoke, and through the haze she can see orange flames jumping towards her.
So Alice does the only thing she can think to do, she hops back in the closet and closes the door. But the smoke is getting worse, there’s no ventilation in there, no fresh air to cancel out the growing black haze. She puts her hand to the closet’s door knob and now it’s hot to the touch. What is she going to do? She doesn’t know, so she starts screaming, and screaming, and screaming until her voice goes hoarse. At the end, she still has no idea what she’s going to do, but she knows she has to get out of this closet
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Today, we’re going to talk about the deadliest hotel fire in American history, the Winecoff Hotel fire of 1947. This event has been largely lost to history, but on a chilly night, two years after ww2 had ended, nearly half of the guests at the Winecoff Hotel in atlanta died as a result of a devastating blaze that broke out. Most of this information comes from the book The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America’s deadliest hotel fire by Sam Heys and Allen b Goodwin
For this story, I want to go beat by beat through what happened that night, through the perspectives of a few guests so we can get a better understanding of what was going on, and also why this happened. The Winecoff, after all, was lauded as being Fireproof. After a short break we’re going to dive in. and as always, listener discretion is advised.
The friday night of 1947 started off like any weekend at the Winecoff hotel. And by that, i mean the hotel was completely packed. 280 guests were staying there that night, and Every room was rented out, which was not unusual. With the holidays coming up, many people had come to downtown Atlanta to shop and were staying for the weekend. Teens from the Georgia Youth Assembly laughed and ran around, buzzed on coke a cola and sugar. In a fun bit of dark disney history, Song of the South was actually playing in a theater a few blocks away, and some people had come to the city to watch it.
Also, at the time There was a huge housing shortage across the country. For the last few years, american manufacturers were tied up with war efforts and weren’t making materials for homes. As a result, the hotel was also full of law and med school students from local universities who couldn’t find housing near campus. The winecoff was affordable enough to rent a room while pursuing their education.
The hotel itself was built on October 30th, 1913. Just a year and a half prior to this, time had stopped in America when a ship calling itself unsinkable had hit an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the ocean. Some took what happened to the Titanic as an ironic disaster, but the people building the Winecoff took it as a challenge.
They would make sure that no catastrophe could ever strike the hotel. So, It was built out of 12 inch or 30cm thick brick. The walls were made out of hollow clay tiles which had been plastered on both sides. The roof and floors were concrete, and the elevator shafts were tiled. This was all wrapped up in a protected steel frame. The foundation was intentionally built of non flammable materials, and to prove how serious they were, the Winecoff was publicly labeled as “fireproof”
And fireproof it seemed to be until one night in February of 1942, 5 and half years before Alice locked herself in the closet at the smell of smoke.
Then, A guest on the 11th floor appeared to have dropped a lit cigarette into a wastebasket, catching its contents on fire. The fire itself was contained to the one room it had started in, but that didn’t stop the entire floor from panicking. Smoke filled the whole 11th floor, and as people opened their windows to let it out, it seemed to form a draft that just sucked more smoke into their rooms.
Firefighters rushed to the scene where they found mostly anxious uninjured guests down on the street. One man on the 14th floor had crawled out of his window and waited on the ledge. The firefighters were not able to reach him with their ladders, and rather than crawl back inside, he scooted around to the front of the building where they were able to help him down.
As for the guests in the room that was lit on fire, they exited the building in a different, more death defying way. Next to the Winecoff, only separated from it by a 10 foot wide alley way, was the Mortgage Insurance Building. When the people inside heard that the Winecoff was on fire, they opened their windows and laid planks across the alley to the window of the blazing room. The guests were able to crawl to safety over the boards, 11 stories up.
But history has a way of forgetting itself. The day of the fire, February 19th 1942, was just two months after Pearl Harbor, when a fleet of Japanese Bombers sunk four battleships off of the coast of Hawaii, killing over 2400 americans. The morning after the fire occurred, the headlines were all about the war against the Japanese, hardly giving any space to the Winecoff fire.
So perhaps that’s why, 5 years later on the evening of December 7th 1947, which was actually 6 years to the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, no one was really thinking about a fire.
Alice Edmonds wasn’t thinking about it as she started her evening inspection of the building, walking every floor to make sure guests were all settled.
Jimmy Cahill definitely wasn’t thinking about it that evening when he and his wife entered their room on the 6th floor. He had just said goodnight to his mother, who was staying only a few doors down from him and then skulked off to his room.
Cahill had been having a rough time. When he came back from fighting in WWII, he thought he’d have many more opportunities than he was finding. His GI bill was supposed to cover the cost of his education, that is, if anyone would take him.
He and his wife were in town for the weekend so he could chat with the dean of an Atlanta university about enrollment. But the whole meeting was taken up by the dean commenting on how bad his grades were before he was drafted. Of course they were bad, Cahill thought. My friends and neighbors were off dying in a war that I felt obligated to go fight in.
That night, Cahill figured he’d sleep it off and start fresh tomorrow. Perseverance. That’s what he learned in the military and that’s what he was going to do now.
Two floors above him, a 27 year old woman named Sammie Sue Leadbetter kissed her husband goodbye as he left for his overnight shift as a dispatcher for Plantation Pipeline. He stayed in the winecoff during the week for work as his office was far from their home. But that friday night he missed his wife, so he called her and told her to pack her suitcase and come meet him for the night.
Sammie sue didn’t go to sleep after her husband left, though. She was a night owl and knew she wouldn’t be tired for a few more hours. But that night at the winecoff she didn’t feel so lonely being up that late. She could hear the sounds of her neighbors' doors opening and closing as they asked the front desk for drinks and sandwiches, and if she opened her window she could hear the teens from the youth assembly still talking down on the mezzanine. So she hung out in the room reading and entertaining herself for a while, and then, around 2:30 am she jumped in the shower.
That was when Rozena Neal came back from her lunch break and took over the hotel inspection from Alice, who told Rozena she’d be helping guests if she needed anything. Rozena then watched Alice grab a comic book and close herself in a linen closet. Helping guests, hm.
So Rozena went back down to the lobby to see if there were any guests that needed help getting to their rooms. It was a little after 2:45 in the morning at this point, but she knew that on a friday night there would always be people coming back this late. And sure enough, when she arrived in the lobby a few guests were waiting for her to help them up to the 10th floor. She rode up with them and showed them their rooms, and then got in the elevator to head back down.
The elevator had a cage like front and glass doors on every floor, so you could see out into each hall as you passed through the hotel. It also had transom windows on each floor, which were little open windows at the top of the elevator door allowing air in.
Around floor 5, Rozena noticed a change in the air. It smelled like smoke. Through the transom windows on the elevator, she could see what seemed to be smoke hanging in the air, getting thicker the further down she went and looking the worst on the third floor. She started panicking, she had to get to the lobby and alert the front desk. But once she got down there, someone instructed her to go back up to the 5th floor and get Bill Mobley, the hotel’s bellhop.
So back in the elevator she went, this time, the smoke was looking more dense and smelling stronger, By the time the doors opened on the fifth floor, the smoke was so thick she couldn’t see the end of the hallway. She took the biggest breath she could muster and screamed at the top of her lungs, Fire! Fire! Fire!
Bill Mobley somehow heard her. He appeared through the smoke and got onto the elevator with her. And this time as they were heading down, the third floor was full of flames. Alice, Rozena thought. And just as she had that thought, she sees the linen closet Alice closed herself into pop open, and a head emerges. But before she can see anything else, the elevator dips below the floor and alice is out of their eyesight.
Alice burst through the closet door, she knew that this was her only chance to get into a room, the flames were getting so big soon the entire hallway would be uninhabitable. She ran to the closest door, room 304 where two soldier brothers were staying and started pounding. Let me in, let me in she screamed, the flames surrounding her on both sides. The door opened just enough for her to spill onto the floor of their room. At this point, she was crying uncontrollably.
What is happening!! Screamed bill Casey
Lord, have mercy on my soul, was all Alice could get out.
As the Casey brothers are trying to help the crying Alice up of the floor, a few floors up, Jimmy Cahill wakes to the sound of screaming.
And at first, he thinks it’s just the incessant noise the hotel’s guests have been making all night. So he tries to go back to sleep. But the screaming becomes more panicked, and he thinks he just heard the word “help”.
If you’re wondering why Cahill woke up to screams rather than say, a fire alarm, well, that’s because the Winecoff hotel was built in 1913, and therefore had to adhere to fire codes of that time, not firecodes from 1947. In the 33 years since the hotel was built, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory burnt to the ground, killing 146 garment workers. In 1934 the Kerns hotel caught fire in Michigan killing 34 people. Hell, around the corner in Atlanta just 9 years prior 34 people died in the Train Station Hotel fire.
When these disasters struck, new fire safety regulations were put into place. Sprinkler systems, emergency exit plans, fire escapes. But none of those were retroactive, so the Winecoff didn’t enforce any of them.
The cry for help gets him up out of bed, and he shakes his wife awake. At that point, he starts smelling smoke in the air, and the first thing he thinks of is his mother down the hall. So he runs to the door, but by the time he opens it, the hall is full of flames and smoke.
And this is not long after the fire was first spotted on the third floor around 3am. Firefighters started arriving on the scene at 3:20, when the alarm for them was first sent. To this day, it’s unclear why more than 20 minutes elapsed before the firefighters were called. Once they arrived, they could not explain how quickly the fire was climbing up the hotel.
Part of it could have been that the hotel was so slim, it was much more slender than other hotels in the area, the lot it was on was only 4400 square feet (METERS). On top of that, the stairwell was in the middle of the hotel, wrapped around the elevators, open all the way to the penthouse. This acted like a chimney, giving the fire a quick way to climb floors.
Then, once the fire got up to a floor, residents were quick to open their windows, letting in more oxygen. This sucked the fire towards them, rapidly pulling it towards the fresh air.
And that’s what Jimmy felt right after he closed the door to the hallway. He went back over to the window with his wife and started throwing their luggage outside. Only, when he opened the window, he watched as the flames started creeping into his room, under the door and around the door frame. Then coming close to the bed.
Not knowing what else to do, he stuck his head out the window to get a better sense of the scene. And what he saw was overwhelming.
About 40 fire trucks had already arrived on the scene, and firefighters were everywhere. It looked like every firefighter, off duty, volunteer you name it in the atlanta area had been called. A bunch were dousing the hotel with water, some were running in and out with guests, and another group was getting the ladders out.
It didn’t take Cahill very long to realize the ladders were not going to be tall enough to reach all of the floors. And he was right, the winecoff was 155 feet tall, the tallest ladder the fire department had was only 85 feet tall.
They actually had a 100 foot ladder, but it had been sitting in a shop awaiting repairs for some time. Same with another one of their 85 foot ladders. So most of what they had at this time were 55 foot,d, and Cahill’s window was 56 feet up.
The rest of the scene was pretty grisly. People who had jumped to escape the flames were sprawled out on the pavement, the Mezzanine, one woman was even draped across the marquee. People were sitting on their window ledges, just the friction of their skin against the brick holding them in place. The smoke pouring out of their windows was making it hard to breathe, even though they were sitting outside, and flames were starting to peek out from behind them, flickering against their skin.
Cahill looked up where he saw Sammie Sue, who had just said goodbye to her husband a few hours earlier, leaning out of the 8th story window with a man, an older gentleman named Mr. Fluker.
Sammie Sue had smelled smoke as she was drying her hair just after 3am. Soon afterwards she heard screams and cries coming from outside her window. She threw on a robe and opened the door joining her room and her neighbor, Mr. Fluker’s.
Hey! The building’s on fire! She yelled.
Mr. Fluker was delirious from being woken up in the middle of the night by a woman he had never met before, and replied to her with a string of expletives. But soon the smoke was enough to jolt him awake. He jumped out of bed and Sammie ran into his room to help him. He profusely apologized to her, and together, they opened the window.
But again, opening Mr. Fluker’s window allowed a surge of oxygen into the room, and soon, the fire had pushed past the door and was swallowing the walls. It burned picture frames, lit up the carpet. It was insatiable, and moving FAST.
Sammie Sue couldnt take the heat, so she stepped out onto the small window ledge, her feet burning from a piece of metal that had melted off a window above her and fallen onto her ledge. It was so hot, she couldn’t even hold on to the inside of the room. she had to move her arm outside, so now all of her was balancing on the ledge. And worse yet, as she looked down, she could see that the ladders were not tall enough to reach her room. If her and Mr. Fluker were going to get out of there, they’d have to find another way.
And that’s when she sees it, Firefighters are stretching out wide nets with white bullseyes painted in the middle. The only problem is they’re almost 80 feet down, and anything that far away would be nearly impossible to aim for. On top of that, a lot of these nets weren’t built for jumps this high.
Cahill also watches the nets as they get stretched out, and he can tell jumping is not a good idea. There’s no order to people jumping, so sometimes two people aimed for a net at the same time. When that happened, the net split in half and both people hit the ground with an awful thud.
He also watched as people above him missed the nets entirely. One of the jumpers even ripped the jacket off of a firefighter as they desperately reached for something to catch them in their last few milliseconds before hitting the ground.
Cahill knew they couldn’t jump, but how were they going to get down?? All he could think about was his mother in the other room. Was she scared? Was she even still alive? Time was running out if he was going to get to her.
A 55 foot ladder gets placed just below him and his wife, and even though it’s a little bit of a drop down to get to it he doesn't waste any time. He holds his wife’s hand as she disappears over the window ledge, her feet feeling back and forth for the top rung of the ladder. Once she’s on it, he does the same. And together they descend step by step, past the screams, the flames jumping out of the windows.
Finally, they reach the ground, and the scene is even worse than Cahill imagined. He has to run away from the building as fast as possible because of the bodies and luggage falling from the windows.
Amongst the chaos he sees firefighters peeling people off the pavement and loading others into emergency vehicles. One woman is running around asking if anyone has seen her sweetheart. She was 19 years old and had gotten married just two days before. This trip was supposed to be the start of their honeymoon, but she lost track of her new husband when she exited the building before him. The two would eventually be reunited in the hospital. However, it would be a while before they tried to honeymoon again.
Cahill also caught a glimpse of Alice Edmonds being helped out of the hotel by the Casey brothers. They had been some of the last people to be able to exit using the stairwell. Alice was burned, and her voice was hoarse from screaming, but she was alive.
Stay here, Cahill told his wife. I’m going to go get my mother. His wife tried to protest, but before she could say anything, he gave her a kiss on the cheek and was running off towards the building next to the Winecoff.
Sammie Sue could barely see Cahill running away from his wife into the lobby of the Mortgage Insurance building next door. As he took off, a huge plume of smoke wafted out of the hotel from a breeze that passed through, completely obscuring her view of the ground. She was still debating whether or not to jump, and she considered turning around to ask Mr. Fluker what he thought they should do, but the heat was so bad she couldn’t turn around to face him. Her back was so hot, she thought for sure her skin was melting off.
In that moment, as the cloud of smoke below started to dissipate a bit, she made up her mind. The net was now juuuuuust enough visible that she could aim herself, and she figured no one else would try to jump at this point, it was too hazy.
This was her chance. She steadied herself and leapt. For a moment, all fear left her body as the cool air rushing against her back soothed the burns. But the momentum of her jump kept tipping her backwards. She wasn’t lying flat anymore, her legs were tilting up, forcing her head and chest down. If she kept falling like this, she was going to land on her neck.
Sammie Sue hit the net with so much force she thought she was going to go straight through it. Her upper back hit first, which sent her knees right into her chest breaking her sternum. As she lay on the net for a few seconds before the fire fighters picked up her broken body, she looked towards her window. She had jumped, and lived! Mr. Fluker could do the same. There was no signs of him, however. All she could see were violent flames now erupting through the window, out past where she stood just seconds before. As she was loaded onto a stretcher she kept her eyes glued to the window, hoping his head would peek out, anything. It never did.
Cahill threw open the doors of the Mortgage Insurance building, he figured at this time of night it would have been locked, but now, the doors opened without any resistance. The building sat next to the Winecoff, only separated by a 10 foot wide alley way. It was a similar height too so all of the windows just about lined up with the Winecoff’s Cahills mother was on the side of the winecoff that faced the Mortgage insurance building, and so in his mind, she was only 10 feet from safety.
He ran up each floor and to the windows trying to find one that aligned with where his mother should be. But as he looked across to the hotel, all he could see was smoke blocking his view of the people in the windows. He could hear them, though, so as he climbed each floor he listened for the sound of his mothers voice.
He wasn’t having any luck, but eventually he climbs to a floor that he is certain will line up with his mothers room. And as he’s climbing, he hears footsteps coming from above him BARRELLING down the stairs.
It’s Charles Burton, the chief engineer of the Mortgage insurance building. He had heard news of the fire and ran over to the building, because he knew what to do. It was actually Burton who, 5 years ago, rescued all of the people from the small winecoff fire by laying boards across the alleyway up on the 11th floor. Because of him, no one died in the fire.
Burton has with him a 12ft board he found downstairs that painters would use as scaffolding to stand on. It’s not very secure, it’s constructed from a series of 1 inch by 2 inch boards that had been nailed together. But it was all they had
Cahill and Burton run to the window where, through the smoke, Cahill sees his mother, Elizabeth Tarver across the alleyway and a few feet down.
She’s perched on the ledge, covering her mouth with a wet towel. She’s lightheaded from the smoke, and at that point, she was trying to work up the courage to jump. There was a wet towel on her back in between her and the glass of her closed window, and steam was starting to rise from it, the fire was vaporizing the towel. She had closed her window in an effort to slow the violent flames lurching towards her
Mom! Cahill screamed, Elizabeth looked up, trying to comprehend the emotion of knowing her son was alive mixed with the anger he would be so stupid to try and save her. There was, after all, a 60 foot drop between them and the pavement. He started sliding the board across the alleyway where it rested on the small ledge of her window next to where she was sitting. He then proceeded to mount it like a horse, and scoot himself over to her.
With each move forward he knew he could never survive the fall. He didn’t try to look down, he just kept his eyes on his mother until he got to her
“I knew you’d come save me” she said. “But you shouldn’t have!”
Oh hush, was all he said to her. Cahill Turned to face back towards the mortgage building where Burton was waiting for them in the window. His Mother wrapped her arms around his torso, and he pulled her across the alley on pure adrenaline, not looking down once.
Together, they got through the window and started down the stairs, only to see a hoard of Firefighters making their way up. They had seen what Cahill did and now they were going to try to rescue the 40% of the guests that were staying on that side of the hotel.
At this point for many of the guests, it was time to act. There wasn’t going to be any sitting out the fire, it had consumed most of the building. Some were tying wet sheets together to scale down to the street. Many more jumped, though one firefighter said that of the 15 or 20 people he saw jump, none walked away. They were either killed by the impact, or injured so badly they needed to be carried off in a stretcher.
But the firefighters held strong, dousing the hotel in water and climbing to higher floors through surrounding buildings. Until finally,the fire was extinguished at 6:04 am, 2 hours and 22 minutes from when the fire department got the first call.
What happened next, was firefighters needed to reenter the hotel to assess the damage, and more importantly, see if there were any survivors. As they climbed the stairs, each floor was worse than the one before, and starting at the 7th floor there was completely burnout, meaning just about every square inch of the floor had been burned.
Firefighters searched for people on these floors, but most of what they found were charred remains.
There was a group of 9 people, however, that were found alive on the top floor. They had somehow managed to stay in a section of the floor that wasn’t touched by the fire and had enough fresh air to breathe. They were the only people taken out of the building alive, however. In total, the remains of 90 people were brought out of the hotel by firefighters. Including those of the building’s developer, William Winecoff
Those who survived were sent to Grady hospital. Hospital staff remembered thinking each time a wave of people arrived that surely, this must be the last, only to be bombarded by another wave of patients. It seemed never ending.
Survivors also rushed to let their loved ones know they had survived, and many sent out telegrams which were the fastest form of communication they had access to. News of the fire had already spread over the radio, however, and the next day the area was flooded with family members, pacing the sidewalks asking law enforcement if they’d seen their loved one.
The hotel was not salvageable, and was torn down only to be rebuilt in 1951 as the Peachtree on Peachtree hotel. This time, it came equipped with fire escapes and emergency exit doors. The Winecoff fire had inspired a new wave of fire precautions, and within 6 months of the disaster there was a national convention in washington DC on Fire Safety.
To this day, the winecoff hotel fire remains the deadliest Hotel fire in US history, and one of the deadliest in the world. It seems the winecoff fell victim to the same kind of hubris the titanic did. Creators that were so insistent on their indestructibility they never even prepared for what would happen if disaster should strike.
Ultimately, the cause of the fire is still unknown. In the immediate aftermath, it was believed it was started by a lit cigarette that fell on a mattress on the third floor.
But as time passed and more information became known about the night of the fire, another theory arose.
See, when Alice pulled herself into the third floor to read her comic book, she could still hear the ruckus coming from the poker game happening on the third floor. She also mentioned that when she first smelled the smoke, it smelled funny, like burnt tires.
Many Investigators, as well as Sam Heys and Alan B Goodwin who wrote the book, think there is a good case to be made that the fire was set intentionally by someone in the poker room. For how fast the fire got started and how hot it burned, the cigarette on a mattress theory didn’t hold. It seemed like the fire had been started by an accelerant.
However, we’ll never know. If the fire that killed almost half the guests was started by an illegal gambling ring, it would have been a horribly bad look on the part of the hotel. The men who were gambling in room 320 were never questioned by police.
What we do know, is whether it was intentional or accidental, 119 people lost their lives that night in a completely preventable way. But the resulting safety precautions may have saved countless other lives. After the winecoff fire, hotels had to stay up to code, they couldn't’ just follow the safety code of whatever year they were built. That was a huge leap in fire safety in america, and the reason that the vintage hotel you like to stay in on vacation is safer.
So, as we jump into this holiday season, stay safe. And remember to look where the fire exits are.
This has been heart starts pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. Sound design and Mix by Peachtree Sound. Shout out to our new patrons:
Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Greyson Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out Heart Starts Pounding.com. Until next time, stay curious.