Daniels native who survived 1959 house fire speaks at Shady Spring Senior Center

BEAVER, WV (WVNS) — On an April day in 1959, Pamela Thomas Elliot, who is now retired from a successful nursing career, was five years old and taking a nap upstairs in her Daniels home when her life changed.

“Grandmother was just downstairs. She was outside the door at the bottom of the stairway at the porch swing,” Elliot recalled on Thursday, September 12, 2024, as she prepared to deliver a message to an audience at Shady Spring Senior Center. “She heard some noise. She came in the house. The stairwell was blazing. She could not get up the stairwell.”

According to Elliot, a high school boy who had skipped school that day pulled his car over, ran into the house and rescued her.

She said she could remember the teenaged boy using his coat to pat out flames and carrying her to his car, past a thorny rose bush.

As the boy drove, Elliot recalled, she was lying in the front seat, her head on his leg.

She can still recall the speedometer of the car showed 80 mph.

The boy took her to Beckley ARH Hospital, where she stayed for the next three months.

Elliot said she had third-degree burns throughout her body.

She had to learn to walk again, and she underwent multiple surgeries throughout her childhood and teen years.

Elliot delivered a message to seniors on Thursday, encouraging them to seek Christ when terrible things happen in their lives, and reassuring them of God’s love.

She said she did become angry with God as a young woman, at age 17.

Elliot had wanted to enter a medical program, and she was invited back for a second interview, only to have a doctor tell her that her appearance may make patients uneasy.

It was a shock, she said, because she had grown up in Daniels without the community remarking on her appearance.

“That was redirection of my life, and it was the very first time in my life that anybody had ever said anything ugly to me like that,” said Elliot. “This community of Daniels, West Virginia, protected me.”

Elliot went on to have an impressive and diverse nursing career, working in the operating room and in neurological health, and, she said, she eventually made her peace with God.

When she was 35 years old, she met with the young man who had saved her life.

She said he still lives in Raleigh County.

“We chatted a few minutes and then he looked right at me and he said, ‘I have to tell you, I never wanted to meet you. I can close my eyes and see you as you were that day,'” said Elliot. “All those questions then began to just flurry in my mind about what he, as a young man, went through. I just said, ‘I am so sorry but all of my life I have wanted to meet you and thank you for what you did. You saved my life, and I hope you have a better vision now.'”

During her speech, Elliot encouraged those in her home county to keep faith in God through their trials and to view their lives through the lenses of love and faith.

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