Christmas is supposed to be a happy occasion, especially for families with young children. In 1945, Christmas turned into a hellscape for the Sodder family as their home was mysteriously engulfed in flames. When the smoke cleared, five of the Sodder’s ten children were nowhere to be found. Authorities seemed to chalk the incident up to a tragic accident, but the Sodder parents and, over the years, legions of conspiracy theorists, armchair detectives, and other skeptics believe that the missing kids suffered a different fate.
What happened to the Sodder children?
A Happy Family
In 1908, Giorgio Saudu traveled with his older brother to the United States as an immigrant. Leaving his childhood home in Tula, Sardinia, Italy, Saudu was only 13 years old. He eventually Americanized his name to George Sodder and worked as a laborer in Pennsylvania for a time, carrying supplies on the railroads. He eventually moved to Smithers, West Virginia, where he began work as a truck driver.
An ambitious man, Sodder was able to start his own trucking company, largely hauling freight, coal, and supplies for various contractors. One day, in a local music store, he met and was enchanted with the owner’s daughter, Jennie Cipriani. Jennie was also originally from Italy, and her family had immigrated when she was just three. The couple married and, over the next twenty years, had ten children: Sylvia, Marion, Martha Lee, Jenny, Betty, Maurice, Louis, John, George Jr., and Joe. The family settled in a five-bedroom home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, not far from Smithers, which had a large Italian immigrant community.
Interrupted Slumber
The Sodder family was enjoying their holiday season as Christmas 1945 rolled around. Nine of the children were living at home, while 21-year-old Joe had just been discharged from the Army and would be returning to Fayetteville soon. Two of the older boys, John and George Jr., headed to bed early, as they were tired from working with their father in his trucking business all day. George Sr. and his wife also elected to retire, but the younger children begged to be allowed to stay up late. Marion, 17, had purchased Christmas gifts for her younger siblings from her earnings at a local dime store, and they wanted to play with their new toys. Jennie assented, asking Maurice and Louis to make sure they closed up the barn and fed the cows before going to bed. She headed upstairs with the youngest Sodder child, Sylvia, who slept in a crib in her parents’ room.
Around midnight, Jennie awoke to the sound of the telephone ringing. She ran to her husband’s office, where the phone was located, to answer it, only to be met with a caller who gave a name she didn’t recognize, asking for someone who she had never heard of. Jennie noticed the children had left some lights on downstairs and went to switch them off. She was careful not to wake Marion, who was asleep on the couch. Jennie assumed the other children were asleep in their beds.
Just as she fell back asleep, Jennie woke again. She had heard a strange sound like a rock hitting a window or the roof. She briefly investigated but found nothing. She assumed it was the wind and went back to bed once again. Around 1 o’clock in the morning, Jennie was awoken once more. This time, her home was filled with smoke.
A Cataclysmic Christmas
Jennie jumped from her bed, waking George. Her first thought was to run for the phone and call for help, but when she saw the flames that were shooting from the direction of her husband’s office, she realized there was no way to reach the telephone. George and Jennie began yelling after their children, frantically ordering them to leave the house. Jennie handed Sylvia to Marion, who ran outside with her sister while Jennie and her husband tried to gather the other children.
The power went out, making it hard to see anything but flames. John and George Jr. responded to their parents’ pleas and raced down the stairs, barely making it out the front door before the staircase was engulfed in flames. With the stairway impassable and only four of his nine children in the home accounted for, George Sodder began looking for other ways to save his family.
George attempted to break a window to enter the house, which was no longer accessible through the front door. He bloodied his arm in the process but made no gains other than discovering that the entire first floor of his house had surrendered to flames and smoke. He searched for a ladder that he kept propped up around the house, hoping to reach one of the missing children’s bedroom windows, but could not locate it. His next effort was to pull one of his heavy equipment trucks up next to the house and climb on top of it to reach the kids. None of his vehicles would start, especially odd since he’d used them all to work the day before.
Meanwhile, Marion ran to a neighbor’s home to call the fire department. No operator answered the phone. Another neighbor who saw the fire called from a nearby tavern but also got no operator response. They drove into town to locate F.J. Morris, fire chief, who initiated a phone tree to gather the firefighters. By the time the firemen, a volunteer force, had gathered and arrived, it was already 8 o’clock in the morning, and the Sodder home lay in a pile of ashes.
By this time, it was assumed that the five missing children, Maurice, 14, Martha Lee, 12, Louis, 10, Jennie, 8, and Betty, 6, had perished. A search for their bodies commenced, but no sign of them was found. Chief Morris suggested that the fire had burned hot enough to completely cremate the bodies. A state police inspector cited the cause of the fire as faulty wiring, which was strange since George had recently had the local power company out for an inspection. A coroner’s jury determined that the children had died from suffocation or fire, and death certificates for the five were issued before the New Year. On December 29, George bulldozed what remained of the home, filling in the basement with the intent of creating a memorial garden for his children in the spring.
A Series of Strange Events
As the Sodders grieved and reflected on the events of that horrible holiday, they became convinced that their children were not dead. Doubt nagged at George and Jennie as they thought about the strange occurrences that had led up to the blaze. The attribution of the fire to faulty wiring bothered George after the recent inspection. Authorities had discovered that even if they had been able to reach the telephone, a call wouldn’t have gone through, as the phone line had been cut. In addition, the missing ladder was later found down an embankment several meters from the property, and the strange events that had woken Jennie leading up to the fire were a serious cause for suspicion of foul play.
Then, a rumor spread that Chief Morris had located a human heart in the remains and had reburied it in a box on-site. The Sodders located the box and took it directly to a local funeral home, where it was identified as beef liver. Morris offered no explanation to the family, but they later heard from others that the organ was not found in the fire but placed in the rubble by Morris in hopes that finding any sort of remains would pacify them. The Sodders reached out to a crematorium to determine if the fire could have indeed vanquished any trace of the children. The report read that a blaze of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1093.3 Celsius) would need to burn for two hours to remove the majority of a human body to ash, but that bones would still remain. The fire at the Sodders lasted only 30 to 40 minutes.
The Sodders began to have faith that their children were still alive. There are several theories about what could have happened to the children, but the prevailing idea is that they were kidnapped and that the fire was set as a distraction. Sightings of the children began to come in from across the United States, including one from Charleston, a town near Fayetteville. A hotel employee reported seeing children that looked like the Sodders with two women and two men, who spoke in Italian and acted “hostile,” refusing to allow anyone to speak to the children.
The Sodders hired a series of private investigators and, in 1952, erected a billboard with pictures of their children, offering a reward for any information leading to their return. The billboard remained up until Jennie’s death in 1989. George passed in 1969, having spent much of his life after the fire traveling the country to investigate leads about his missing children.
The youngest survivor of the Sodder fire, Sylvia, died in 2021, aged 79, still holding onto the family’s belief that her siblings had made it out of the blaze. To this day, no closure is in sight for the descendants of the Sodder family. Journalists and others who have investigated the blaze in the years since remain split on the children’s status after the fire. Even so, most admit that even if they believe the children died, there are a lot of strange events surrounding Christmas Eve at the Sodder home that simply cannot be explained.
