Stause says she had "forgotten" about the traumatic childhood incident until the Palisades Fire forced her evacuation.
The Selling Sunset star and realtor says that when she was given notice to evacuate her Hollywood Hills home amid the ongoing wildfires in the area, rather than springing to action, she was "frozen in fear."
"When we did need to evacuate, there was a fire kind of like right in our backyard. It was just immediately like, 'You gotta go,'" she explained on Wednesday's episode of Sherri. "I think I kind of got frozen in fear. I kind of had forgotten, when I was 12, I did watch my house burn down."
Stause tried to downplay the gravity of the traumatic memory, calling it, "something you don't think about. It happened so long ago."
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"But it came back!" host Sherri Shepherd insisted, validating Stause's "freeze" reaction to the fire. Stause explained that their partner, the Australian singer G Flip, "was like doing all these things, came back in, and I'm still standing in the same place they left me... They are so amazing. They basically were like, 'Okay,' and just started running me through the things."
Stause is best known for her role on the Netflix reality series Selling Sunset, which follows a group of realtors at the high-powered Los Angeles real estate company The Oppenheim Group. But she was a known entity in Hollywood before Selling Sunset, having appeared for seven years on All My Children as Amanda Dillon, and for three years on Days of Our Lives as Jordan Ridgeway, a role for which she received an Emmy nomination.
The realtor/actress reflected to Shepherd that "you don't know how you're gonna react. I think I would've liked to have thought I'm good in an emergency case. But this kinda showed me, I really needed a little kick in the butt, and G was there to keep me focused and so it was just nice to have them."
There are currently three major wildfires burning disparate corners of Los Angeles County: the Palisades Fire, which spans over 23,000 acres, the Eaton Fire, which spans more than 14,000 acres and sparked in Altadena; the Palisades Fire, and the Hurst Fire, which spans just under 1,000 acres and originated in Sylmar. The death toll is currently at 25, and more than 12,000 structures across the county have been reduced to cinders.