Earlier that morning, a small fire had started in the basement of the three-floor building. Its cause was never determined, but Murphy has an idea about it.

"We didn't have dumpsters in those days, so the children would bring the trash down to the cellar and dump it on the floor for the janitors to put in the furnace," Murphy said.The janitors would take glowing coals from the school's furnace over to the convent to start the furnace there, and then to the rectory, and the church. The process kept them out of the school for more than an hour. Possibly, an ember fell from the bucket onto some of the paper that still lay on the cellar floor.

By 8:30 that morning, the school building was filled with smoke from the fire that had grown, unnoticed, in the basement.When the alarm sounded, the students, following the instructions of the school, filed out of the classrooms and toward their separate exits - the boys were to leave the school through their exit, to the playground, and the girls would exit the front of the building, onto the lawn.

In the confusion of the fire alarm and the smoke, which was getting heavier, panic spread in the girls' staircase. Murphy explained that the doors at that exit swung in; girls in the front of the line, who were at the doors, were being pushed against them by girls at behind them who wanted to get out of the burning building, effectively trapping everyone inside. In all, 21 girls ranging in age from 6 to 17 perished, either from smoke inhalation, being trampled to death by panicking students, or after the roof of the building collapsed as they lay injured inside the building while the nuns frantically searched for them.

"I remember the flames and the bodies pulled out onto the lawn," Murphy said, and added that during the fire and the tragedy that unfolded in front of him, he saw that the nuns were the last to leave the burning school.

Murphy, who will soon be 98 years old and still lives at home in Peabody, is the last of the survivors of that fire who is still alive.To this day, one image still stands out in his mind, of seven or eight small white caskets lined up at the altar at St. John the Baptist Church. "I don't know if that was something I saw, or if I'd heard it described and my imagination did the rest, but it's real to me," he said.

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