Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

The Sodder Children Disappearances

On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1945, a fire destroyed the Sodder home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, United States. At the time, it was occupied by George Sodder, his wife Jennie, and nine of their ten children. During the fire, George, Jennie, and four of the nine children escaped. The bodies of the other five children have never been found. The Sodders believed for the rest of their lives that the five missing children survived.

The Sodders never rebuilt the house, instead converting the site into a memorial garden to their lost children. In the 1950s, as they came to doubt that the children had perished, they put up a billboard at the site along State Route 16 with pictures of the five, offering a reward for information that would bring closure to the case. It remained up until shortly after Jennie Sodder's death in 1989.

In support of their belief that the children survived, the Sodders have pointed to a number of unusual circumstances before and during the fire. George disputed the fire department's finding that the blaze was electrical in origin, noting that he had recently had the house rewired and inspected. He and his wife suspected arson, leading to theories that the children had been taken by the Sicilian Mafia, perhaps in retaliation for George's outspoken criticism of Benito Mussolini and the Fascist government of his native Italy.

State and federal efforts to investigate the case further in the early 1950s yielded no new information. The family did, however, later receive what may have been a picture of one of the boys as an adult during the 1960s. Their one surviving daughter, along with their grandchildren, has continued to publicize the case in the 21st century in the media and online.

Background

George Sodder was born with the name Giorgio Soddu in Tula, Sardinia, Italy in 1895. He immigrated to the United States thirteen years later with an older brother, who went back home as soon as both he and George had cleared customs at Ellis Island. For the rest of his life George Sodder, as he came to be known, would not talk much about why he had left his homeland.

Sodder eventually found work on the railroads in Pennsylvania, carrying water and other supplies to workers. After a few years he took more permanent work in Smithers, West Virginia, as a driver. After a few more years, he started his own trucking company, at first hauling fill dirt to construction sites and later hauling coal that was mined in the region. Jennie Cipriani, a storekeeper's daughter there, who had also come to the U.S. from Italy in her childhood, became his wife.

The couple settled outside nearby Fayetteville, which had a large population of Italian immigrants, in a two-story timber frame house two miles (3.2 km) north of town. In 1923, they had the first of their ten children. George's business prospered and they became "one of the most respected middle-class families around" in the words of one local official. However, he had strong opinions about many subjects, and was not shy about expressing them, sometimes alienating people. In particular, his strident opposition to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had led to some strong arguments with other members of the immigrant community.

The last of the Sodder children, Sylvia, was born in 1943. By then, their second oldest son, Joe, had left home to serve in the military during World War II. The following year, Mussolini was deposed and executed. However, George Sodder's criticism of the late dictator had left some hard feelings. In October 1945, a visiting life insurance salesman, after being rebuffed, warned George that his house "[would go] up in smoke ... and your children are going to be destroyed." He attributed this all to "the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini." Another visitor to the house, ostensibly seeking work, took the occasion to go around to the back and warned George that a pair of fuse boxes would "cause a fire someday." George was puzzled by the observation, since he had just had the house rewired when an electric stove was installed, and the local electric company had said afterwards it was safe. In the weeks before Christmas that year, his older sons had also noticed a strange car parked along the main highway through town, its occupants watching the younger Sodder children as they returned from school.