Burning On The Inside - the Summer Mississippi Mills Burned

Imagine waking up at two in the morning to the sound of fists pounding on your front door. You stumble out of bed, pull back the curtain — and the entire sky is orange. Sixty feet of flame, roaring out of your barn, so close you can feel the heat through the glass.That's what happened to Marilyn and Earl Snedden on the night of July 3rd, 2002. A pair of truck drivers had spotted the glow from the highway and raced to their door.And that was only the beginning.Over the next eleven weeks, sixteen fires would burn across the farm country surrounding Almonte, Ontario — a quiet community of about forty-two hundred people, roughly fifty kilometres west of Ottawa. Known, if it was known for anything, as the birthplace of James Naismith, the man who invented basketball.The fires caused over a million dollars in damage. They killed livestock. They exhausted a volunteer fire department already running on fumes. And they terrorized an entire community of farmers who began sleeping in their overalls with shotguns by the bed.Residents started calling the arsonist "The Ghost," because no one could see him. No one could catch him. He struck at will — evening, night, sometimes broad daylight — and vanished.When the truth finally came out, it was worse than anyone had imagined. Because the Ghost wasn't a stranger. He was one of the most respected men in town. A man who had spent thirty years of his life fighting fires.This is the story of Gilmour "Gib" Drummond. And this is the summer he burned it all down.Send us Fan Mailwww.canadiancrimecast.com