Eddy hated going to church. It wasn’t Bishop Moore’s long sermons that bothered him so much. It wasn’t the painfully uncomfortable wooden pew they sat in all morning. It wasn’t even the banality of staring at the back of Mrs. Brockenbrough’s [1] ridiculous hats each week. It was the fact that whenever he sat during a service for any length of time, Eddy’s morbid imagination would, without fail, inevitably land on the terrifying event that had occurred in the very spot in which he sat. 
The night after Christmas, Boxing Day, 1811, a local favorite, Richmond Theater, was performing a rendition of The Bleeding Nun to a packed house that included the governor, and other prominent figures in the community. The play had done incredibly well during its run. Critics hailed it as a marvel. The production was just beginning the Final Act when the first signs of trouble appeared.
Center Stage, hidden from view of the audience, the candelabrum lighting the actors became entangled in ropes. Panicked crew members dashed back and forth behind the scenery, while the actors on stage did their best to ignore what was happening in the side stage. The worried stage hands desperately tried to straighten out the tanged ropes, which only made matters worse. Meanwhile, an unsuspecting audience continued to laugh, unaware of the true horror that was about to unfold in the standing room only audience. 
The first wild flames erupted in an instant as the ropes holding the chandelier took the flames like a wick. A moment later, the first tether had burned through and the chandelier began to swing back and forth. Men ran back and forth backstage, trying in vain to steady the burning chandelier, now a dangling ball of flames. But the true horror began when the fireball pendant collided with a rack of backdrops, freshly painted with turpentine-cut pigment. One by one the canvas backdrops caught fire like a flattened torches until finally the entire backstage area was engulfed in flames. 
 Plumes of black smoke and the rotten smell of burnt carbon clouded the ceiling above the orchestra pit. 
“The house is on fire!” A man stood and yelled from his seat just a moment before the audience erupted into hysteria. 
A stampede of people ran for the front doors- the closest and most obvious exit. Panic filled the aisles as theatergoers were pushed to the ground in the mêlée, women and children among them. Those in the balcony pushed their way to the stairwell only to have it collapse under their heavy weight. Smoke curled along the ceiling and entered the room like billowed waves of Death, clouding the vision of patrons now gasping for fresh air. Screams began to echo throughout the rafters, spilling outside into the clear winter night beyond. Horror spread through the streets as ill-prepared firefighters tried in vain to douse the ever-growing flames, aided by a haphazard bucket brigade of untrained Samaritans. 
The desperate cries of doomed theater-goers trapped inside was deafening. Theirs were cries of help; of anguish; of fear. Shouts for more water came from the firefighters, lost in the mix of mothers frantically calling out for their children lost in the crowd. It was this calamitous, heart-wrenching, foreordained scene that Eddy saw with such clarity he could have been there himself. 
He imagined standing on the south side of Broad Street, directly across from the blaze. From here, he could see the worst tragedy Richmond had ever known in vivid, horrific detail. He saw the grand building caving in on itself and orange flames dancing in every window like the Devil himself dancing with delight. Framed inside these glowing dormers were the ill-fated souls of the damned. They banged against the glass, begging, pleading for their lives. But this living nightmare wasn’t the worst of it for Eddy whose vivid imagination was haunted by the minutest details of that very real and tragic night.  
He could hear the ear-piercing screams and the heart-breaking cries of lost souls as the fire pricked at their ankles. He could feel the intense heat upon his face, the smell of charred wood, and burnt hair. His heart sank. How horrible it would have been to witness that scene- helpless as friends and loved ones died in the crumbling hell right before their very eyes.
Just thinking of it made Eddy sick to his stomach. He knew he should stop, and yet, sitting in this very hallowed spot, he could not. The imagery was just too real. For Eddy, sitting in Pew 80, he sometimes had to hold himself back from bursting into tears.
The infamous Richmond Theater Fire [2] happened only three weeks after Eliza Poe took her last breath. Eddy had come to realize it might even be a blessing, although a somber one, that his mother had died when she did. As the belle of the Richmond Theater, and an associate of the reparatory company performing that very night, an otherwise healthy Eliza Poe would likely have been present along with her three small children, as well as the theatre-loving Frances Allan [3]. 
All toll, 72 souls lost their lives in the great Richmond Theater Fire. Among the damned were many of Virginia’s elite, including the governor, the theater owner’s wife, noted authors, and dozens of citizens and small children. If not for two heroes, Dr. James McCaw, and a slave named Gilbert Hunt, many more would certainly have gone to their fiery deaths. Three years later, upon the ashes of this catastrophe was built a fitting tribute, Monumental Church. 
To attend church without thinking of that fateful night was impossible for Eddy, even if he didn’t have to pass by a massive epitaph honoring those who perished at the entrance. 
Eddy snapped out of his grim trance just as the liturgy was ending. The congregation filed down the aisles and dispersed onto Broad Street where they made their way to an adjacent social hall.