The Disappearance of the Sodder Children

On Christmas Eve, 1945, in the small town of Fayetteville, West Virginia, the Sodder family was settling in for the night. George and Jennie Sodder had ten children, and nine of them were home that Christmas Eve. The family had enjoyed a festive dinner, and some of the younger children had begged permission to stay up late to play with their new Christmas toys. Jennie reluctantly agreed but insisted they turn off the lights and make sure the doors were locked before going to bed.

At approximately 12:30 AM on December 25, 1945, Jennie was awakened by the telephone ringing. She groggily made her way downstairs to answer it. A woman with an unfamiliar voice asked for someone Jennie didn't know. In the background, Jennie could hear what sounded like glasses clinking and people laughing. The woman laughed strangely when Jennie said she had the wrong number and hung up.

As Jennie returned to bed, she noticed the lights were still on and the curtains were not drawn—unusual, since she had instructed the children to do these things before bed. She also discovered that the door was unlocked. She secured the house and went back to sleep, dismissing the odd call.

At 1:00 AM, Jennie was jolted awake by the sound of something hitting the roof with a loud thump, followed by a rolling noise. After several minutes of silence, she drifted back to sleep.

At 1:30 AM, smoke began filling the house. Jennie woke up and shouted for her husband. George rushed through the house, waking their oldest sons John (23) and George Jr. (16), and daughter Marion (17). Their daughter Sylvia (2) was asleep in her parents' room. But the other five children—Maurice (14), Martha (12), Louis (9), Jennie (8), and Betty (5)—were nowhere to be found. They had been sleeping in the attic bedroom.

George and his sons tried to enter the room where the five missing children slept, but the stairway was engulfed in flames. They ran outside, planning to use a ladder to reach the children, but the ladder that was always kept against the house was mysteriously missing. George then tried to start his coal trucks to drive them to the wall and climb up, but despite having been in perfect working order just hours before, none would start.

In desperation, George broke the trucks' windows and attempted to reach his water buckets to fight the fire himself, but they had inexplicably disappeared as well. The family stood helplessly watching their house burn to the ground, believing the five children were still inside.

The Fayetteville Fire Department, hampered by the wartime shortage of men and equipment, didn't arrive until 8:00 AM, nearly seven hours after the fire began. By then, the house had been reduced to ashes.

Fire Chief F.J. Morris conducted a brief search of the ruins and declared that no human remains were found. The official conclusion: the fire had been hot enough to completely cremate the bodies. Yet when the Sodders consulted a crematorium expert, they were told that bones remain after human cremation, especially children's bones, which are denser. The fire had only burned for about 45 minutes—nowhere near the time needed for complete cremation.

In the following days, strange facts began to emerge:

On the evening before the fire, at around 9:00 PM, a man had come to the house asking about hauling work. He walked to the back of the house, pointing to the fuse boxes, and said, "This is going to cause a fire someday."

Weeks before the fire, another stranger had attempted to sell the family life insurance and became angry when George declined, ominously warning, "Your house will go up in smoke and your children will be destroyed."

A bus driver reported seeing "fireballs" being thrown onto the roof of the house.

A woman at a diner 50 miles away claimed to have served the children breakfast the morning after the fire.

The most disturbing evidence came in 1968, when Jennie Sodder received an envelope with no return address, postmarked from Kentucky. Inside was a photo of a young man who resembled Louis, one of the missing boys. On the back was written: "Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil Boys. A90132 or 35."

The Sodders hired a private investigator who traveled to Kentucky but disappeared himself after telling the family he had information about the case.

George and Jennie Sodder never stopped searching for their children. They erected a billboard near the site of their former home with pictures of the five missing children and offered a $5,000 reward for information. The billboard remained until Jennie's death in 1989.

To this day, the fate of the five Sodder children remains one of America's most perplexing mysteries. The evidence suggests they didn't die in the fire at all but were abducted as part of a carefully orchestrated plan—the strange phone call serving as a check to see if the family was home, the missing ladder, the disabled trucks, the vanished water buckets, all pointing to premeditation.

Were they kidnapped? Were they victims of a local mob dispute? Had they been sold or taken to another country? The surviving Sodder family members went to their graves never knowing what happened to their loved ones on that terrible Christmas morning in 1945.