Whatif... The Girl Who Fell Down a Well

During summer 1936, 11-year-old Ivan Danhof built a ladder. He used it to help the older men with some construction at the neighborhood church, where his father pastored. He fashioned the crude but functional item out of lumber scraps and rope. When work at church was done, he recalls, he brought the rugged thing home, leaned it against a big front-yard tree and all but forgot about it.

His sister Phyllis, 6, ate lunch in their kitchen with a neighbor, Louis. Unnoticed by the children, two workmen pulled up outside. There to maintain the water pipe that served the Drenthe, Mich., neighborhood’s Victorian-era residences, the men removed a 36-inchwide sidewalk manhole cover before returning to their pickup truck, possibly to retrieve some tools, Phyllis retrospectively guesses.

With tummies full, Phyllis and Louis burst from the house, bounding toward an afternoon of play. It was a warm, sunny day, Phyllis recalls.

Ivan emerged from the house behind the youngsters.

“She was running; then she disappeared,” says Ivan, who is now a medical doctor in Grand Prairie.

That’s when the 28-foot-deep well — which contained some 14 feet of water — swallowed the little girl.

“I scraped down the sides of the concrete walls of the well. I remember the greyness and the gurgling sound of the water as I sank. Then I floated back, got my head above the water, grabbed and shimmied up this skinny iron pipe. I looked up and there were the workmen staring down at me — I’ll never forget the looks of horror and bewilderment on their faces.”

Even at the top of the pipe, she was still six feet from the sidewalk above. Phyllis thought about her brother. The ladder. She yelled instructions to the men.

Ivan was already there. “I heard the screaming. I right away understood what had happened, and I went straight for the ladder.”

It all happened within seconds — the men were dangling Ivan’s ladder down the hole. It was the perfect length. Tiny Phyllis grabbed and rode it to safety.

By the time their parents (along with Louis, who had fetched his mother) came running, their daughter was back on solid ground — bruised and scratched, crying and shaking, Ivan says, but otherwise unharmed.

A panicked 6-year-old couldn’t have lasted long in that deep, dark, watery well, Phyllis knows now. When she retells the story, people remark how weird it is that the ladder just happened to be there.

“There’s a word for that,” Ivan says. “Providential.”

Phyllis knew her fall was terrifying. For years she burst into tears anytime anyone brought it up. She did not actively think about why she lived. In fact, only recently did she consciously realize she “almost didn’t make it past 6.”

Yet deep down she thinks she knew she’d been given a second chance. In the years following the plunge, Phyllis moved to Lake Highlands, married and raised four children. In her 40s, she went to school and obtained a bachelor's degree in urban studies. She lost her husband, when he was just 48, to a heart attack. She launched a career with the U.S. government investigating nonprofit and charity fraud. When she tired of busting people, she says, she became a foreign-service officer. She enjoyed missionary efforts and worked with orphaned Sudanese refugees in Egypt.

In her 70s she enrolled at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University.

She was ready to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a pastor. It was something she never expected to do, she says. Today she serves as associate pastor at Lake Highlands Presbyterian, where her main role involves building a program to assist church members who are homebound because of medical issues.

She recently led a workshop that required participants to share “significant life events,” so she offered her story about the well. “It really was the first time I recognized what a big deal it was,” she says. People asked her again and again to retell it, so she eventually wrote it down, as clearly as she could recall. Though it happened more than 75 years ago, Phyllis remembers the faces of those workmen peering down at her “so clearly [she] could sit here and sketch them for you,” she says.

She remembers the confusion in their expressions and the assuredness and intuition with which two children responded.

It’s safe to say that a number of people benefitted from Phyllis’s survival — Ivan, for one.

“She is a warm and generous person who has made marvelous contributions to society,” her big brother says. “We all love her very much. I am glad she made it out of there.”

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