The interest was due in part to some of the fundamental questions that arose in its aftermath-primarily as part of an ensuing criminal trial-and to the surprising answers generated by those questions. “It just struck a chord,” he says.įairchild wasn’t alone-the Haunted Castle fire struck a chord with a lot of people. When the time came to look at colleges and figure out what he might want to study, he chose the fire protection engineering technology program at Delaware Technical Community College. The combination of the two really unnerved me.” “We’d had a home fire a year or two before, which I can still vividly picture in my head. “We were planning a big party, and most of the discussion was about the appropriateness of having a celebration,” he says. The blaze occurred the day before Fairchild’s tenth birthday, and he recalls the adults around him buzzing about the nearby fire and loss of life. Read the original NFPA investigation report on the Haunted Castle fire (PDF, 2.2 MB).
Just to the north of the bases was Jackson Township, home to Six Flags Adventure Park, where a fire in the Haunted Castle attraction killed eight teenagers on May 11, 1984. JACK FAIRCHILD GREW UP IN BROWN MILLS, New Jersey, located just south of the swath of acreage that includes Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base.