Untold mysteries

The Sodder Children Disappearance

On the night before Christmas in 1945 in Fayetteville, West Virginia, George and Jennie Sodder were asleep with nine of their children when a fire started in the house around 1:00 in the morning. George, Jennie, and four of their children managed to escape. The remaining children: 14-year-old Maurice, 12-year-old Martha, 9-year-old Louis, 8-year-old Jennie, and 5-year-old Betty still remained in the house. Between the five of them, they shared two bedrooms located upstairs.

George broke back into the house to save the rest of the children but the staircase was on fire. When he went outside to retrieve his ladder, it was missing from its normal spot. Plus, both of his coal trucks, which he was going to use to stand on top of, were strangely not starting. Marion, one of the children who escaped the fire, ran to a neighbor's house to phone the fire department but the operator didn't pick up. When another neighbor called, the operator failed to pick up the phone again. That same neighbor actually drove to town and found the fire chief in person, FJ Morris, and told him about the fire. However, even though the fire station was located a mere 2.5 miles away from the house, the firefighters didn't reach the Sodder home until 8 a.m., seven hours after the fire began. When they got there, the house was literally burnt to ash.

Authorities sifted through the ash to try and find the remains of the missing 5 children but nothing was found and they were presumed dead due to the fire. Morris suggested that the fire was so hot that it literally cremated the children's bodies—including their bones. While that theory sounds reasonable, it's not entirely accurate because even when flesh is burned away, bones are typically left behind. Additionally, there was no smell of burning flesh reported during or after the fire.

The cause of the fire was deemed to be bad wiring and the five missing children were issued death certificates. Soon after the fire, George and Jennie began to suspect that their children were not dead but instead kidnapped and the fire was deliberately set as a diversion. In fact, George had the wiring checked earlier that fall by the power company which had deemed the wiring in safe working order. While the fire was in progress, a woman came forward and said she saw all of the five missing children peering from a passing car. Another woman who was staying at a Charleston hotel had seen the children's photos in a newspaper and said she had seen four of the five a week after the fire. "The children were accompanied by two women and two men, all of the Italian extraction," she said in a statement. "I tried to talk to the children in a friendly manner, but the men appeared hostile ... and wouldn't allow it."

From the 1950s until Jennie Sodder's death in the late 1980s, the Sodder family maintained a billboard on State Route 16, with pictures of the five vanished children and offering a reward for information. The last known surviving Sodder child, Sylvia, still doesn't believe her siblings perished in the fire. To this day, they have never been found.