Disappearance of the Sodder Children

The year was 1945 on the night before Christmas in Fayetteville West Virginia. George and Jenny solder along with nine of their children were asleep when a fire started in the house at around 1:00 a.m.
George, Jenny, and four of their children escaped: Sylvia, Mary, John, and George Jr.
The children that remained in the house were Maurice, Martha, Lewis, Jenny, and Betty. The five of them shared two bedrooms between them both rooms upstairs. George broke back into the house to save the rest of the children but the staircase was on fire. When he went outside to retrieve his ladder it was missing from its normal spot and both of his coal trucks which, he wanted to use to park outside and climb on top of were strangely not starting.
Marion, one of the children who escaped the fire ran to the neighbor's house to call the fire department but the operator didn't respond, and when a different neighbor attempted to call she also got no response from the operator. that same neighbor actually drove to town and found the fire chief fj Morris in person, but even though the fire department was only located 2.5 miles away from the home, the firefighters bizarrely didn't reach the Sodder house until 8:00 a.m. seven hours after the fire began and by the time they arrived the house was literally ash.
Authority scavenge the ashes of the fire looking for the remains of the five missing solder children but nothing was found and they were presumed dead due to the fire. The fire chief FG Morris suggested that the fire may have been so hot that it completely cremated the children's bodies including their bones.
While that theory sounds reasonable it is not entirely accurate because when flesh has burned away, bones are still typically left behind likely in fragmented form. Additionally, there was no smell of burning flesh reported during or after the fire. The cause of the fire was deemed to be bad wiring in the house and in the week after, the Fayetteville coroner's office issued death certificates for the five solder children, the basement of the house still remained and George would later use a bulldozer to cover it up with five feet of dirt to create a memorial to his children. Soon after the fire, George and Jenny began to suspect their children were not dead but instead kidnapped. Believing the fire was deliberately set as a diversion and not the result of faulty wiring. In fact, George had actually had the wiring in his house checked earlier that fall by the power company which had deemed the wiring in safe working order.
In the days leading up to the fire, two of the surviving Sodder sons witnessed a man watching the younger solder children come home from school on Highway 21.
Another suspicious occurrence happened that night on the night of the fire at around 12:30 a.m. the phone rang and Jenny got out of bed to answer. This would result in an important observation then he noticed the lights were still on downstairs now she started to fall back asleep, she heard a loud bang on the roof. Followed by the sound of something rolling and an hour later she woke to the smell of smoke entering her room downstairs.
The detail that is interesting is the fact that the lights were still on, if the fire had been caused by faulty wiring as had been suggested; than that meant there wouldn't have been power to the house meaning that the lights shouldn't have been working. Yet Jenny saw that they were on about an hour before the smoke and later the Sodder’s would claim that they saw the lights on while the fire was occurring as well.
Additionally, a witness to the fire claimed that they saw a man removing a block-and-tackle, typically used for removing engines from cars, perhaps explaining why both of George's trucks weren't working that night.
after the fire when the family visited the memorial George had set up, Sylvia found a hard rubber object in the yard. An object that Jenny believed may have caused the loud bang that occured that night but even more interesting was the fact that after further inspection from George, he believed the object was a napalm “pineapple bomb” similar to those used in the war at the time.
With all these strange occurrences and not believing that the fire could have burned her children's bones to ash. Jenny began the experiment by burning different types of animal bones all of which left remains. She spoke to a crematorium employee who told her that bones were left behind even after bodies burned at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours and the solder home only burned for about 45 minutes. Also noteworthy is that remains of household appliances were found in the rubble, meaning not everything was ash. They have also been reported sightings of the children, one occurred that night, while the fire was still burning, a woman claimed to see the children in a car that drove by while the fire was still raging. 50 miles west of Fayetteville a woman who operated a tourist stop told police that she saw the children in the morning after the fire, “ I served them breakfast, there was a car with Florida license plates at the tourist court, too.”
In 1947, two years after the fire, George and Jenny attempted to involve the FBI, who offered to help but in a curious turn of events, the Fayetteville police and fire department both denied their offer. George and Jenny turned to a private investigator named C.C. Tinsley, who did help but ended up disappearing and was never heard from again.
After the Smithsonian revealed their findings, West Virginia Governor, Okey L Patterson called a hearing in the state capitol building in Charleston, West Virginia, where he officially declared the Sodder case to be closed, telling George and Jennie that their surge was hopeless.
This led to George and Jenny setting up a billboard on route 16 advertising their missing children where it remained for nearly 40 years.