The Mysterious Disappearance Of The Sodder Children
Public DomainThe Sodder children vanished after their house burned down on Dec. 25, 1945, though alleged sightings of them have been reported ever since.
On Christmas Day in 1945, the Sodder family home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, went up in flames. When the smoke cleared, George and Jennie Sodder were devastated to discover that five of their 10 children had apparently been unable to escape the blaze. But as the years passed, the couple became convinced that their missing children hadn’t died in the fire at all.
Though there was no sign of the missing Sodder children, Maurice (14), Martha (12), Louis (nine), Jennie (eight), and Betty (five), investigators also didn’t find any of their remains in the house. And as a crematorium worker told Jennie, bones take around two hours to burn into ashes. The Sodder home was only on fire for 45 minutes before the flames went out.
What’s more, a number of odd incidents had bookended the children’s disappearance. Before the fire, an insurance salesman had told George Sodder that his home would go up in smoke because he’d criticized Benito Mussolini, angering Italian Americans in town. And during the blaze, George had found his ladder missing and both his trucks unable to start.
Public DomainA memorial pleading for information about the missing Sodder children decades after they vanished in 1945.
Were the missing Sodder children victims of a Christmas murder? Or did something more complicated happen that night on Dec. 25, 1945? To date, the answer depends on who you ask. George and Jennie spent the rest of their lives believing that their five children had been kidnapped in retaliation.
Indeed, sightings of the Sodder children were reported after the fire. Some locals believe that they saw the children watching the blaze from a passing car, and a woman who owned a truck stop 50 miles away claimed that she saw the children with Italian-speaking adults on the day after Christmas.
In 1968, Jennie even received a photo of a man who claimed to be Louis, but efforts to find him went nowhere. George died that year, and Jennie passed away in 1989. Since then, this Christmas mystery has endured.
