Days of Our Lives Preview: A Horrifying Mystery Unravels as the Hortons Face the End of an Era

We’ve known this has been on its way since Days of Our Lives first released their season trailer back in the fall. In some ways, though, you could forgive us for putting it to the back of our minds — the sight of the Horton house going up in flames is a harrowing one. But now, it seems, the time is finally here. The Horton family home which has seen so much history come and go through the decades will be destroyed in a fiery conflagration.

Rest assured that everyone in the home will be safe. We know already from spoilers for next week that Doug (yes, though Bill Hayes has sadly passed away, it will be some time before Days of Our Lives says farewell to his character), Julie, Chad and the kids will all be welcomed in by Maggie. But as for the house itself, that looks like a lost cause.

Susan Seaforth Hayes shares just how bad things are looking with Soap Opera Digest. The camera, she notes, “pans across everybody looking at the destruction of everything. It looks quite hopeless. There are ashes, smoke and filth… It’s a sad heap.”

And for longtime viewers, this is truly devastating after all the history that’s been encased in those walls. What’s going to happen to the Horton legacy? The Christmas ornaments that they hang every year on the tree? The very furniture?

“Everybody has come and gone and had experiences there,” Julie’s portrayer notes. “This was the [home of the family’s] matriarch and the patriarch. And then there’s Tom’s chair. What will happen to Dr. Tom’s chair?”

It doesn’t take long, though, for the fire to turn from tragedy to something far more sinister. Because shortly after the blaze, Chad, according to Digest, will receive a creepy phone call with someone on the other end of it telling him, “Maybe next time, you’ll listen.”

What does Julie know about any of this? “Not a clue,” Seaforth Hayes shrugs. But we’ve certainly got a few suspects of our own. Because while Doug and Julie have opened their arms to Chad and welcomed him in as an honorary Horton, we can’t forget that he is still a DiMera. And that comes with its share of misery and more than a few enemies — as Chad just railed to Johnny about!

But there is one person in particular who’s already leaped to the top of our suspect list… And you can probably guess who that is: Clyde! Because Chad’s now putting the screws to Abigail’s murderer with Everett’s help at The Spectator. We know he has the means for retaliation and he has absolutely no problem causing death and destruction.

Still, so long as there’s life, there’s hope. “Julie’s take on it after is determination to not lose the sense of the house,” Seaforth Hayes tells Digest, “to not lose what was there emotionally. And she’s driving the reconstruction of the house a lot. That has been lovely to play.”

And hopefully, whoever is responsible for the horror is found and stopped before anything like this can happen again. In the end, a house is just a collection of wood and stone. It takes the people in it to make it a home. But if this danger isn’t stopped before it wreaks havoc again, next time, the family may not be so lucky.