The Sodder Children: The Five Who Vanished in the Fire That Left No Bones
On Christmas Eve of 1945, in the hills of Fayette County, West Virginia, a house caught fire in the night and burned to the ground. A husband and wife and four of their children escaped into the freezing dark. Five other children did not come out. That much is an ordinary tragedy, of the kind that has visited countless families across the years. But the fire of the Sodder home was not ordinary, because when the ashes cooled and the family searched the ruins for the remains of their five lost children, they found nothing. No bones. No teeth. No trace of five human beings who were supposed to have burned to death in that house. And from that terrible absence grew a conviction that would consume the rest of the parents' lives: that their children had not died in the fire at all, but had been taken — and that someone had burned the house to hide it. More than eighty years later, no one knows what became of the five Sodder children, and the question has never been answered. The Fire o...