Meghan Markle Reveals Her Son Archie’s Room Caught On Fire While She Was Out Of The Country

Meghan Markle shared a shocking story on the debut episode of her new podcast Archetypes. She told the show’s first guest Serena Williams that while she and her husband Prince Harry were visiting South Africa, their firstborn son Archie’s bedroom caught fire when he was just four months old.

Markle said she had just finished a tour in Nyanga township in South Africa when she got the news that there had been a fire in their Southern California home. “We’d just landed an hour, two hours before. We raced back, and our mazing nanny Lauren, who we’d had all the way from Canada to here, was in floods of tears,” Markle told Williams.

According to Markle, the fire occurred when a heater in their nursery went ablaze, but luckily their nanny had just decided to take Archie out of the room for a snack. She was about to put him to bed for a nap when the fire broke out.

“There was no smoke detector, someone happened to smell smoke in the hallway, went in, fire extinguised. He (Archie) was supposed to be sleeping in there,” Markle recalled. It must have been truly chilling to experience, and then Markle said they had to “Go out and give another official engagement,” immediately following the traumatizing experience.

This story wasn’t necessarily planned to be revealed, as the general topic of conversation was about double-standards against women in the workplace, but clearly Markle and Williams are close enough that the Duchess of Sussex felt comfortable opening up.

You can listen to the first episode of Archetypes for free on Spotify.