Just after midnight on Christmas Eve in 1945, Jennie Sodder awoke to the smell of smoke. She quickly discovered that the Fayetteville, West Virginia, home she shared with her husband, George, and nine of their children, was ablaze. When the fire department arrived seven hours later, the two-story framed house had burned to the ground — and five Sodder children were missing.
The ultimate fate of the five young children is still unknown, but their family never saw them again, and their remains were never found in the ashes of their ruined home.
The siblings’ older brothers, John, 23, and George Jr., 16, and their father had gone to bed early that Christmas Eve, tired from a long day working at George’s coal trucking business. The younger children, however, were allowed to stay up late to play with the toys their older sister, Mary Ann “Marion” Sodder, 17, had bought them for Christmas. Their mother took the youngest child, 3-year-old Sylvia, to bed with her at around 10:30 p.m., telling Maurice and Louis to attend to the cows and chickens.
Joe Sodder, 21, had been discharged from the Army the day before the fire and was the only one of the 10 Sodder children not home.
At about 1 a.m., Jennie bolted out of bed when she smelled smoke and saw flames in her husband’s office, blocking her from reaching the phone. She told Marion, who had fallen asleep on the couch to take Sylvia outside while she and George frantically tried to save the rest of the children. George Jr. and John, who said he woke his siblings — but later updated his account, saying that he had only shouted at them — ran downstairs. Fire engulfed the staircase to the attic where the children slept, preventing their father from going upstairs. The fact that no one heard them crying out was one of the reasons the Sodders later believed they might not have been in their bedroom at all.
At the time, however, George desperately tried other ways to get to his children. He was unsuccessful for two peculiar reason ls. First, a ladder that normally stood by the house wasn’t there. He and his sons then tried to move his trucks against the house, hoping to reach the upper floor by standing on top of them, but they couldn’t get them started.
Although authorities determined that the children — Maurice, 14; Martha, 12; Louis, 10; Jennie Irene, 8; and Betty, 5 — had died in the fire, their family disputed the finding and never gave up searching for them.
Even if Jennie had been able to reach the family’s telephone, she couldn’t have placed a call: The line had been cut. George Bragg, a local writer and researcher, told NPR in a 2005 interview that a man later admitted that he had cut them — and during the fire was in an outbuilding on the Sodders’ property stealing a block and tackle (used to remove car engines). While there is speculation that he set the fire as a diversion, it’s also possible he took advantage of the family’s distraction to take the equipment. Still, neither the thief nor anyone else was ever charged with arson in the catastrophic fire.
The phone was working just after midnight, Jennie later said. Its ringing was the first of three separate strange events, including the smoke, that had awakened her. The caller asked to speak to someone Jennie didn’t know. After she replied that they must have the wrong number, the caller responded with what Jennie described as a strange laugh.
Half an hour later, Jennie heard “something like a rubber ball” hit the roof. “It rolled and hit the ground with a thump,” she said.
At the time, it didn’t worry her, and she fell back asleep again. But a passing bus driver (or passenger ) described having seen “balls of fire” being thrown on the tar and wood roof, where it was determined the fire had started. Sylvia later found a rubber object in the yard, the family claimed, that George identified as a type of hand grenade.
Death certificates for the children were issued on Dec. 30, five days after the fire. The cause of death for each was listed as “fire or suffocation.” Although George and Jennie Sodder later insisted otherwise, a journalist who covered the story for NPR said four people had reported seeing remains — including one of Jennie’s brothers. If so, they weren’t collected or included in official records.
George Sodder himself may have unintentionally destroyed evidence that his children had died. On Dec. 29, he brought in a bulldozer to fill the basement with dirt in order to create a memorial for them. At the time, the grieving family did not doubt the officials’ determination that the five children did not survive. Only later would John reportedly admit that he hadn’t actually seen or heard his five siblings respond when he warned them to escape as he and George Jr. fled.
In the “burial, cremation, or removal” section of the children’s death certificates, “burial” is selected with the date of Dec. 27. The Sodders’ address is listed as the “cemetery.” though no actual body's could be found.
The Sodder children we're never seen again and now nearly a century after the tragedy that destroyed their family the mystery remains, what really happened to the Sodder Family?
Because of so many odd events surrounding the fire and the Sodder children's disappearance's, the case immediately captured the public eye and is still one of the greatest mysteries of the early 20th century.
After only 45 minutes the five bedroom home had burned to nothing but ash leaving only the foundation.
The true fate of the family will likely never be solved and decades from now people will still find this mystery as perplexing as we do now
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