All-time most descriptive fire reporting - blaze at a lunatic asylum

Some wildly descriptive reporting from the ever-excellent Montreal Daily Witness from the May, 1890 fire that killed 86 (81 of them women) at a what now the Louis Hyppolite Lafontaine insane asylum  (then called Longue Pointe, later renamed St. Jean de Dieu in the independent borough of Gamelin, since renamed again).
   The asylum has had some, let's say, mysterious moments and some have even suggested that the Catholic authorities who ran the place were directly responsible for setting the fire.
 Anyway, here's snippets for that paper's coverage.
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"We led some of the poor creatures to the stairs and told them to go down. It was useless. They acted like a flock of sheep. They persisted in running back into the burning room back to the rest. I understand that these women were those considered incurable or nearly so, anyway they would not go out and they would all go back. The stairs were all zigzag and the poor creatures could not tell where they were going."
-Those poor creatures stood there - it seemed for an age; but it could only have been a minute or two, their hair singed off. We could see the flesh and skin peeling off them in the terrible heat, as the blaze ran along the floor and burned them up. yet, there they stood, most of them trying to protect their faces with their hands, until they sank down, human beings being fairly roasted before our eyes.
-...the agonized faces were seen at the windows, the frenzied hands were vainly endeavoring to pull them from their sockets that the women might leap to a speedier but no less certain death; it was here that ladders were placed in the endeavor to reach some, only to find that bars could keep out rescuers as well as keep in the ill-fated beings; it was here that the faces at the bars became invisible through smoke and flame, that the cries and groans gradually became fainter and finally died out in the roar of the flames and the cries of horror and anguish of the onlookers; it was here that the most horrible scenes were enacted.
   More:
   Hopelessness and helplessness, despair and docility were the prevailing characteristics. The idiots seemed to predominate, and their chatterings and meaningless laughings, and the helpless uncontrollable motions of some, when contrasted with the death-like stillness of others, could only call a prayer from the spectator, powerless to hel in any other way. Others there were who restlessly and aimlessly walked to and fro, some muttering to themselves, many carrying crucifixes or images clasped to their breasts, others with glazed eye and stolid, unmeaning face, a it eh muscles were all that lived. Through the mud, in and out of the mires, they plunged, turning to the right and left, backward and forward, with just sense enough not to run against anything directly before their eyes...
-Some spoke knowingly of strange things which had happened within the burning wall,s and asked what else could be expected and one with a huge "Life of Christ" and another volume equally large under his arm, almost weighing him down, in stumbling schoolboy Latin addressed two priests, informing them that the fire was a dispensation from providence on account fo their sins. The priests listened for a few moments and quietly turned their backs and walked away, and the insane man with face sternly set walked up and down as if possessed with some deeply settled conviction.
-Another carried a board on which were what he called mechanical drawings, and with cunning leer looked now and again upon the burning pile, "They'll let me out now, I guess," he said. "Where are they going to put me now? I'll sleep in town, don't you think?" and then he showed the drawings of his perpetual motion machine, of his round car rail, which could be turned around when the top was worn, thus giving one rail the wearing surface of eight - but his patent fastening he would not show.
  -About 130 survivors were brought to a cow shed in the rear. "A stout German, smiling and laughing in idiocy was brought along in a night shirt. A dozen women were piled in one cart, one of them shrieked all the way from the garden to the shed when halfway she attempted to jump out and run.
-Some were crooning away some chattering while others - deprived of speech as well as sense - were making peculiar noises of fright, or rocking backwards and forward. And here, too, the quiet imbeciles sat or lay, a sickening sight. One of the imbeciles jumped to his feet and made a stump speech on health: how thankful he was that he was well when all the world were sick and din't know what to do for themselves. And acrobat, dressed in short trousers evidently thought himself in a circus: First he would bow to this side and whisper a few words, then to that side: turning suddenly he would point abruptly and whisper some more sweet nothings.
   The cows and sheep in the shed were mooing and bleating and her and there one of the patients would try to imitate the noises.  One of the imbeciles took off his chain and crucifix and offered it to the reporter. Many wished to shake hands but a short, "ca va bien" made them pass on contented.
  Some hitting each other with straw and covering each other up.
   Here again was one who had been a brakeman: he was incessantly calling out, "Montreal, Quebec, Virginia, Minneapolis" with reckless disregard for locality.
   Another shouted out, "The doctors give me medicine yes but what good When you come to figure it out there is no doctors nowadays."
  Here was one who had been a shoemaker, it was said. He pegged away at his knee with a resolute will.