The Sodder Children: Five Kids Who Vanished in a Christmas Eve Fire

On Christmas Eve 1945, in the small town of Fayetteville, West Virginia, a fire consumed the Sodder family home while they slept. George and Jennie Sodder escaped with four of their nine children. The other five — Maurice (14), Martha (12), Louis (10), Jennie (8), and Betty (5) — were presumed dead in the blaze.

But here's what makes this case extraordinary: no remains were ever found. Not a single bone. Not a tooth. Not a fragment. In a house fire that burned for less than an hour.

The Sodder parents would spend the rest of their lives insisting their children hadn't died that night. They believed five of their kids had been taken — stolen in the chaos of a fire that may have been deliberately set. And the evidence, when you look at it closely, is deeply unsettling.

A Night Full of Wrong Details

The fire broke out around 1:00 a.m. on December 25. Jennie Sodder was awakened by a phone call — a woman's voice she didn't recognize, asking for someone who didn't live there. She noticed the curtains hadn't been drawn and the lights were still on downstairs, which was unusual. Then she heard a loud bang on the roof. She went back to sleep.

Shortly after, she woke again to the smell of smoke. The house was burning.

George rushed to get the children from upstairs, but the staircase was already engulfed in flames. He ran outside to grab a ladder he kept against the house — it was gone. He tried to start his two coal trucks to drive one close enough to climb onto the roof. Neither would start, despite both working perfectly the day before.

He tried the rain barrel for water. It was frozen solid.

By the time the fire department arrived — which took an inexplicably long seven hours, despite the station being just two miles away — the house had been reduced to a heap of ash barely five feet high.

Where Were the Bodies?

The fire chief declared the five children dead and attributed the blaze to faulty wiring. But the Sodders were immediately suspicious. George had recently rewired the entire house, and it had passed inspection. The lights had still been on when Jennie woke, which meant the electrical system was functioning after the fire supposedly started.

More critically: where were the children?

A house fire hot enough to completely consume five human bodies — bones and all — would need to reach temperatures far beyond what a residential timber fire typically produces. Cremation requires sustained heat of 1,400 to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit over several hours. The Sodder home burned for roughly 45 minutes.

When the family hired a private investigator to excavate the site, nothing was found. No bone fragments. No teeth. No remains of any kind.

George Sodder later consulted a cremation expert, who confirmed what common sense suggested: a 45-minute house fire could not have completely destroyed five human bodies. Something should have been left behind.

The Threats Before the Fire

The fire didn't happen in a vacuum. In the months leading up to Christmas Eve, the Sodder family experienced a series of disturbing incidents.

George Sodder, an Italian immigrant, had been outspoken in his criticism of Benito Mussolini. This had earned him enemies in the local Italian community. In October 1945, a life insurance salesman who'd been turned away threatened George directly: "Your house is going up in smoke, and your children are going to be destroyed. This is what happens to people who make dirty remarks about Mussolini."

Another stranger visited the property and pointed to the fuse boxes, warning they would "cause a fire someday" — despite the house having just been rewired and inspected.

In the weeks before Christmas, George's older sons noticed an unfamiliar car parked along the highway near their home. The occupants appeared to be watching the younger Sodder children as they walked home from school.

Evidence That Kept Piling Up

In the years following the fire, a series of discoveries kept the case from fading into history.

A woman who ran a tourist stop in Charleston, about 50 miles from Fayetteville, came forward to say that on Christmas morning 1945, she'd seen the five Sodder children in a car with Florida license plates. The children appeared distressed, and when she tried to speak to them, the adults with them — a dark-skinned man and a woman — quickly drove away.

A private investigator hired by the family found a hard rubber object buried at the house site, which was identified as the remains of a napalm-type incendiary device called a "pineapple bomb." This suggested the fire had been deliberately set.

The ladder that George kept against the house was later found at the bottom of an embankment, 75 feet away. Someone had moved it before the fire.

Both coal trucks had been tampered with — mechanics later found that ignition components had been disconnected.

And the telephone lines to the house had been cut. Not burned. Cut.

The Photograph

Perhaps the most haunting piece of evidence arrived in 1968, more than two decades after the fire. Jennie Sodder received an envelope with a photograph inside. It showed a young man in his mid-twenties. On the back was written: "Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil boys. A90132 or 35."

The handwriting was analyzed but never conclusively linked to anyone. The photograph appeared to be a genuine portrait of a young man who bore a resemblance to the Sodder family. The letter had been postmarked from Kentucky.

The family hired another private investigator to travel to the Kentucky return address. He arrived, began making inquiries — and then disappeared. He never contacted the Sodder family again, and they never learned what he found.

The Billboard

George and Jennie Sodder never accepted the official finding that their children had died. In the 1950s, they erected a large billboard along State Route 16, near the site of their former home, displaying photographs of the five missing children and offering a reward for information.

That billboard stood for nearly four decades. They never rebuilt on the property, instead turning it into a memorial garden. George died in 1969, still searching. Jennie continued the vigil until her death in 1989.

The billboard came down shortly after Jennie passed. But the case never closed.

What No One Can Explain

The official story asks you to believe that a 45-minute house fire completely vaporized five children, leaving behind not a single trace of bone or tooth — something that modern crematoriums, with sustained extreme heat over hours, sometimes fail to fully accomplish.

It asks you to accept that the threats, the cut phone lines, the tampered trucks, the missing ladder, the incendiary device, and the strange car watching the children were all coincidences.

It asks you to dismiss the eyewitness who saw five children matching the Sodder kids in a car headed south on Christmas morning.

It asks you to ignore a photograph that arrived 23 years later, apparently showing one of the missing boys as a grown man.

The Sodder family's surviving daughter, Sylvia, continued to publicize the case into the 21st century. She maintained what her parents always believed: that someone took those five children on Christmas Eve 1945, under cover of a fire that was meant to destroy the evidence.

Eighty years have passed. No remains have ever been found. No definitive proof of death exists. The case remains officially open.

Five children went to bed on Christmas Eve. By morning, they were gone — not dead, as far as anyone can prove, but simply gone. And to this day, no explanation satisfies everyone who has studied this case. The question the Sodder family asked for decades still hangs in the air over that quiet stretch of West Virginia highway: Where are the children?