For 78 years, the small town of Fayetteville, West Virginia, has been haunted by a mysterious and horrible tragedy.
Jennie and George Sodder had ten children by 1945. Some stories state that the oldest child had moved out, yet others say they were still living at the family home that year.
The Sodders lived just a couple of miles outside the small West Virginia town of Fayetteville, where they owned a trucking company.
Christmas Eve was a fairly normal evening, by most accounts. The family spent some time together, and then Jennie and George went to bed around 9:00 pm, with their 3-year-old. The older children stayed up for a bit and would go to bed a little later.
Jennie woke up at 12:30 a.m. to a strange phone call. It was a wrong number, but she had heard giggling in the background, almost as if it was a prank call. She hung up the phone, checked on her other kids, who had all fallen asleep by now, and then went back to bed.
Shortly after, she woke again to the sound of what she thought was a rock hitting the window. It was a little windy that night, and Jennie figured it was the wind causing the noise. She fell back asleep.
A half-hour later, she woke up to smoke pouring into her bedroom.
Jennie and George began rounding up their children to get them out of the home, but soon realized they only had four kids. They tried to get back in and get the other but were unable to.
The fire would leave the house in total ruins and ash, and searches afterward turned up no sign of the other 5 children at all.
Did they succumb to the fire? Or, were they not in the house when the fire began?
George Sodder was born in Italy and immigrated to the United States when he was just 13 years old.
After marrying Jennie, they would go on to have 10 children by 1945. They lived in a nice two-story home just a couple of miles outside of Fayetteville, West Virginia.
Fayetteville, West Virginia is a small town and was certain to have been a small town back in 1945. It sits just off the banks of the New River, and the area is now home to the famous New River Gorge Bridge.
On Christmas Eve, 1945, Jennie and Goerge were home with nine of their 10 children. The tenth child was an adult and said to be living outside of the home at that time. The remaining nine children ranged in age from 3 to 20.
That evening, the family spent some time together before some of them decided to head off to bed. Jennie, George, and their three-year-old retreated to their bedroom and fell asleep. Some of the older children stayed up in the living room, with plans of going to bed shortly.
At 12:30 a.m., Jennie woke up to the phone ringing. She answered it, and it was the wrong number. While telling the caller they had the wrong number, she heard giggling in the background, leaving her to wonder if it was a prank call. She shrugged it off, and after checking on the other kids- who were now sleeping- she went back to bed.
A little while later Jennie heard a noise that woke her up once again. It sounded like a rock hitting the window. She didn’t hear it again and figured it was the wind.
She woke up for the third and final time a half hour later, this time to smoke filling her bedroom. She woke her husband and they hurriedly tried to get their kids out and put the fire out. The kids weren’t all in their rooms, however, so finding them was a challenge.
Eventually, George couldn’t get in the home anymore due to the severity of the fire, and at this time it was just him and Jennie, and four of their children. The other five were unaccounted for.
George decided that he would use a ladder on the back side of the house to climb up to the bedrooms in the back, the rooms he believed his five missing children were. But the ladder was mysteriously missing, and George didn’t see it anywhere around.
He then decided to drive one of these two large coal trucks up to the house to reach the second floor, but neither truck would state. Each truck worked fine the day before.
Attempts to reach the fire department via telephone were unsuccessful. At this time, a switchboard operator was trying to connect the Sodders to the fire department, but the calls weren’t going through.
A neighbor who had noticed the fire drove the two miles down to the station himself to try and find someone. He did, however, it would take the department several hours to get there, and by that time the house had completely burned to the ground. The controversy of why it took the fire department so long would be discussed for decades.
A search through the rubble later turned up no signs of the five Sodder children. No remains whatsoever.
The State Fire Marshall determined that the five Sodder children likely died in the fire, and that’s where the investigation ended.
The community held a funeral service at the site of the home, and in preparation for that, the basement was filled in with dirt. Many community members came to the service.
George and Jennie believed that since searches turned up no sign of their missing children- any of them- they must have been taken from the home before the fire began.
There were reasons that George believed that. He had made plenty of enemies within the Italian-American community because of his very vocal opposition to the former Italian dictator Mussolini.
Did someone target the Sodder family for that reason?
George would even say that some of these people had threatened his family, and one even mentioned watching his ‘fuse box’ or his home might accidentally burn to the ground.
There became two main thoughts throughout the town.
The children either perished in the fire or were abducted.
The search after the fire was mediocre at best, and some even said it was nonexistent. The basement was filled in almost immediately after. Could the remains of the children have been missed?
In the weeks after the fire, a telephone repair man had come out to look at the telephone lines, believing the fire had destroyed them. He quickly determined that was not the case, the lines had been cut on purpose and were not damaged otherwise. A neighbor later admitted to doing that trying to cut the electricity to the house so he could rob them.
A while later, the fire chief came out and said he did find a human heart during the search. The chief claimed he put it in a box and buried it. He thought he had told the family, but George was furious. He demanded he show him where this box was.
The chief took George and dug up the box, which did indeed have a heart in it. The heart was sent to the lab for testing, and they determined it was not a human heart, but rather the heart of a cow.
The chief finally admitted that he buried it there on purpose to help give the Sodders some closure.
An inquest was also done by some members of the community, and it was these people that ruled the fire was caused by ‘faulty wiring’. George had recently had the home inspected and worked on, so he didn’t believe that.
One of these community members was also the one who had threatened George prior, telling him he better be careful or his home may end up burning to the ground.
Also making the faulty wiring seem unlikely, is that the power remained on to the home for quite a while after the house was engulfed in flames. George believed that if the cause was electrical, the power would have gone out much sooner.
Later on, a magazine published a picture that included a young woman who was the spitting image of one of the Sodder daughters who had gone missing. The photo depicted a group of young women from a New York City school. George drove up to the school several times demanding to see the girls, but he was never permitted to.
The sheer number of coincidences shouldn’t be ignored, however, which might point to something nefarious happening. Or, are there rational explanations?
The mysterious midnight phone call was traced, and authorities questioned the woman who had made it. They determined it was indeed a wrong number.
The missing ladder would later be found at the bottom of an embankment on the side of the home. No one knows how it ended up there.
While George believes someone might have also tampered with his trucks, it was also thought that in his haste to start the truck and rescue his children, he ultimately flooded the engine, causing them not to start.
In 1949, George hired a pathologist to sift through the ground where the fire was and see if he could find any remains of his children. This man did indeed find several vertebrae bones, all belonging to the same person. Because the bones were fused, he believed them to belong to someone 17 or 18 years old. The oldest Sodder child lost in the fire would have been 14 years old at the time, but he could have had advanced bone fusion for his age, meaning that was a possibility.
However, it was later determined that those bones came from a grave at a nearby cemetery, although no one is sure how or why they ended up at the Sodder homesite.
There would be other reported sightings throughout the years, although none were ever confirmed as legitimate. Once a hotel manager in Charleston, West Virginia reported that an Italian family came to stay one time, and when she asked the kids what their names were, the father- or the man she believed was the father- became very angry and started speaking to the children in Italian.
After they checked out, this manager believed these might have been the Sodder children and reported it to authorities.
A woman in St. Louis, Missouri also claimed that one of the girls was being held in a convent, however, this girl was not found.
Yet another report stated that a relative of Jennie’s had children that resembled the Sodder children so much, that some believed that they were indeed, the Sodder children. But again, this was proved to be false.
Every single lead that came in, George personally followed up on. This was a man who was heartbroken over his five missing children and carried that heartbreak until he died in 1969.
Jennie passed away in 1989 and also continued to search for her missing children.
So what do you think? Do you think the children likely perished in the fire, or do you believe it is more likely the fire was a distraction to abduct the kids?
Additional Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodder_children_disappearance
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-children-who-went-up-in-smoke-172429802/
https://www.wtrf.com/west-virginia/west-virginia-unsolved-mystery-the-sodden-five-a-series-of-unfortunate-events-or-a-conspiracy-to-traffic-children/
