The Midnight Call

It was 12:30 AM on December 25, 1945.

Jennie Sodder jolted awake as the telephone rang, cutting through the silence of the two-story house in Fayetteville, West Virginia. The ringing was steady, persistent, as though the caller knew someone would eventually have to answer.

Jennie opened her eyes in the darkness. Beside her, George still snored peacefully after a long day’s work. She shuffled down the cold wooden stairs in her thick flannel nightgown, hand reaching for the heavy receiver.

“Hello?” she said, her voice thick with sleep.

On the other end was a strange woman’s voice — high-pitched, slightly slurred, asking for a name Jennie had never heard in her life. But what sent chills down her spine wasn’t the unfamiliar voice, but the sounds behind the woman: loud laughter, the clinking of glasses, faint jazz music, as if a wild party was happening somewhere.

A party. At midnight. On Christmas.

“You’ve got the wrong number,” Jennie said, her voice colder than she intended.

The woman laughed — a strange laugh, high and drawn out, as if there was something funny that only she knew. Then the line went dead.

Jennie stood still in the dark hallway, receiver still clutched in her hand. Her heart beat slightly faster than normal, though she didn’t understand why. It was just a wrong number. That’s all.

But when she turned around, she noticed something wasn’t right.

The living room lights were still on — warm yellow light spilling through the open doorway. The window curtains remained open, revealing black panes looking out into the snowy night. The front door was unlocked — she could see the latch still drawn back.

The children usually did these things before bed. It was the house rule: close the door, lock it tight, draw the curtains, turn off the lights. But tonight they’d forgotten.

Or had someone not wanted them to do it?

Jennie shook her head, pushing away the odd thought. She closed the door, twisted the lock tight, pulled the curtains shut, and turned off each light one by one. Outside, snow fell gently on the roof, blanketing the front yard in white. Everything was quiet. Everything was normal.

Jennie returned to bed, closed her eyes, and tried to forget the strange call.

A loud crash woke her at 1:00 AM.

THUMP.

As if something heavy — very heavy — had fallen onto the roof from above, then rolled with a thunderous rumble toward the edge. The entire house shook.

George jerked awake. “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” Jennie whispered, her heart pounding in her chest.

They lay still in the darkness, listening. No more sounds. Only the wind through the tree branches outside, the quiet falling of snow.

“Probably snow falling off the roof,” George said, his voice not entirely convinced.

They lay back down. But sleep wouldn’t come.

Thirty minutes later, the smell of smoke crept into the bedroom.

The Fire

“George! George, wake up! The house is on fire!”

George Sodder, 50 years old, bolted upright as if electrocuted. The thick smell of smoke choked their throats. Orange-red light shone through the bedroom door crack.

He rushed to open the door — black smoke poured in like a tidal wave. Fire had consumed the entire downstairs. The living room blazed. The dining room was a sea of flames. The kitchen was lost in black smoke.

The fire was spreading faster than seemed possible — as if it had been waiting all night to ignite all at once.

“The children! Get the children!” Jennie screamed, her voice filled with panic.

They ran into the dark hallway. “John! George! Marion! Wake up! The house is on fire!”

John, 23, and George Jr., 16, burst from their bedroom. Both boys’ hair was already singed from the terrible heat rising from the first floor. They didn’t think — just jumped straight out the second-story window, landing in the snow below with a crash.

Marion, 19, ran out from her downstairs bedroom, face pale, coughing violently. “Mom! Dad!”

Jennie rushed downstairs, plunging through the thick black smoke, lifting 3-year-old Sylvia from the crib in their bedroom. The baby screamed, clinging tightly to her mother’s neck.

They ran outside. The icy night air of Christmas attacked their lungs. The snow was freezing under their bare feet. But they were alive.

George counted his children. Marion. John. George Jr. Sylvia.

Wait.

His heart seemed to stop.

“Where’s Maurice?” he shouted. “Martha? Louis? Jennie? Betty?”

Five children were still on the second floor.

Maurice, 14. A tall boy with a bright smile who loved playing basketball after school.

Martha, 12. A sweet girl who helped her mother cook, dreaming of becoming a nurse.

Louis, 9. A mischievous child with curly hair, always curious about everything.

Jennie, 8. The little girl named after her mother, who sang Italian songs her grandmother taught her.

Betty, 5. The youngest still awake, allowed to stay up tonight to play with her new Christmas toys.

They’d been allowed to stay up late to play with their gifts. Marion, the oldest sister, had bought them at the five-and-dime where she worked. The children were so happy that Jennie hadn’t had the heart to send them to bed.

“I’ll go up and get them down!” Maurice had promised. “We’ll just play a little longer.”

And now they were somewhere inside the burning house.

Helpless

George Sodder was not a man who gave up easily. He was an Italian immigrant who’d built this life with his bare hands. He was strong as an ox, had chopped wood from dawn to dusk to feed his ten children.

But tonight, for the first time in his life, he felt completely helpless.

He ran to where he usually kept the ladder — the ladder was gone.

“Where’s the ladder?” he shouted, voice filled with panic. “It’s always here! Who took the ladder?”

John and George Jr. ran around the yard, searching through the darkness and falling snow. There was no ladder anywhere.

“Dad! Use the truck!” John yelled.

George ran to his two coal trucks — the vehicles he used every day in his business. Yesterday they’d run perfectly. Yesterday he’d driven them all day.

He jumped into the first one, turned the key.

Nothing.

He turned it again. Again. Again.

Nothing.

He jumped down, ran to the second truck. Turned the key.

Nothing.

“This can’t be! They were running fine!” he roared, punching the steering wheel hard. His hand began to bleed.

“Dad, let me call the fire department!” Marion shouted.

She ran to the neighbor’s house — the nearest home 200 yards away. She picked up the phone, dialed.

The line was dead. No signal.

“Mrs. Dovie! Do you have a car? Please drive to the fire station!” Marion sobbed.

But Dovie didn’t have a car. Her husband had driven off somewhere.

George, desperate, ran to a first-floor window. He punched his bare fist through the glass. The glass shattered, blood streaming from his arm. He tried to climb in, but the fire was too large, the smoke too thick. The heat felt like it was melting his skin.

“Maurice! Martha! Louis! Jennie! Betty!” he screamed in desperation. “It’s Dad! Jump down! Jump out the window!”

No answer. Only the roar of flames.

George fell into the snow, crying and screaming. Jennie held her husband, both trembling in the cold and despair.

The entire family stood in the yard, helpless as they watched the house burn. The fire consumed everything — wood, fabric, paper, possessions, memories. The newly bought Christmas gifts. The family photographs. The children’s toys. Everything.

And five children somewhere inside.

Forty-five minutes. The house burned for exactly 45 minutes before collapsing completely into rubble.

The fire department was only 2.5 miles from the Sodder home — less than 10 minutes’ drive.

But it took them seven hours to arrive.

When they arrived, daylight had come. Christmas had arrived. And the house had vanished.

Nothing Found

Fire Chief F.J. Morris stepped out of the truck with a grim expression. He was Jennie’s brother — the uncle of the missing children.

“I’m sorry,” he said to George, his voice choked. “We got here late. I… I didn’t know how to drive the fire truck. I had to wait for someone else.”

George said nothing. He just stared at the pile of ashes — where the house he’d built with his own hands once stood.

Chief Morris and the fire crew began sifting through the rubble. They used rakes, shovels, screens to sift through every pile of ash. Searching for traces of five children.

One hour passed. Two hours. Three hours.

By 10:00 AM, Chief Morris stood up, wiping sweat from his forehead despite the freezing weather.

“George,” he said, his voice trembling. “We haven’t found anything.”

“What do you mean?” George asked.

“No bones. No… anything.”

Jennie stepped closer. “How can there be no bones?” she asked, her voice full of doubt. “Five children… how could they leave no trace?”

Chief Morris shook his head. “The fire must have completely incinerated them. The temperature was very high. Everything was destroyed.”

But it didn’t make sense.

A few weeks later, Jennie spoke to a man who worked at a nearby crematorium. She asked him, “If a human body is burned, is there anything left?”

The man looked at her with compassionate eyes. “There are always bones,” he said. “We burn bodies at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours. And bones remain intact. They never completely disappear.”

Jennie’s heart pounded. “So if a house only burned for 45 minutes…”

“Then it’s impossible to incinerate bones,” he said. “Impossible.”

Jennie and George looked at each other. The same thought in both their minds:

Their children didn’t die in the fire. Their children were taken.

Suspicious Clues

The more they investigated, the more George and Jennie discovered disturbing details.

The life insurance salesman. A few weeks before Christmas, a strange man came to the house trying to sell George life insurance. When George refused, the man looked at the children playing in the yard and said, “Your house is going to burn down. And your children are going to be destroyed.”

George threw him out, thinking it was just an empty threat. Now, those words echoed like a curse.

The missing ladder. After the fire, they found their ladder at the bottom of a hill, over 100 yards from the house. Someone had deliberately taken it and thrown it away.

The two trucks. The next morning, George tried both trucks again. They started immediately. Perfectly. As if nothing had happened the night before.

The telephone line. When the phone repairman came to inspect, they discovered the line had been cut — not burned, but cut.

The fireballs. A bus driver passing the Sodder house at 12:45 that night said he saw “balls of fire” being thrown onto the roof.

A few months later, when the snow melted, Sylvia found a small blue-black object, hard as rubber, resembling… a grenade.

George picked it up, trembling. This wasn’t an accident. This was a conspiracy.

The Sightings

Then the reports began arriving.

A woman watching the fire from a distance said she saw a car drive by, and five children who looked exactly like the Sodder children were looking out the windows.

A woman working at a truck stop between Fayetteville and Charleston said she had served breakfast to five children on the morning of December 25th. They were with a man and a woman. There was a car with Florida license plates in the lot.

A woman in Charleston, West Virginia said she’d seen five children at her hotel a few weeks after the fire, along with two men and two women who “appeared to be Italian.” When she tried to speak to the children, a man looked at her “with hostility” and spoke quickly in Italian. The whole group left the hotel early the next morning.

George and Jennie hired private investigators. They placed ads in newspapers. They offered a $5,000 reward — a fortune in 1946 — for any information about their children.

But nothing led anywhere. Every clue evaporated like smoke.

The Billboard

In 1952, seven years after the fire, George and Jennie made a decision.

They erected a massive billboard along Route 16, right at the site where their old house once stood.

On the billboard: five faces of the missing children, as large as human heads. Their eyes looked straight at everyone passing by. Under each face was a name and age:

Maurice, 14
Martha, 12
Louis, 9
Jennie, 8
Betty, 5

And the haunting question in bold letters:

“WHAT WAS THEIR FATE: KIDNAPPED, MURDERED OR ARE THEY STILL ALIVE?”

Below that: “$10,000 REWARD FOR INFORMATION”

That billboard stood by the road for 37 years, from 1952 to 1989. Everyone driving on Route 16 saw it. Millions of people. Every day.

Some stopped, stood staring at those young faces, reading the parents’ painful question. Some cried. Some prayed. Some just drove on, but those faces haunted them for weeks afterward.

The billboard became part of the landscape, part of local history, part of the collective conscience.

It was a plea. It was a prayer. It was love built from wood and paint and hope that never died.

The Photo from Kentucky

In 1967 — 22 years after the fire — Jennie received an envelope with no return address. The postmark was from Central City, Kentucky.

Her hands trembled as she opened it.

Inside was a black-and-white photo. A man about 30 years old. Dark hair, slightly curly. Deep brown eyes. A straight, handsome nose.

Jennie stared at the photo. Her heart seemed to stop.

It was Louis.

She knew immediately. A mother always knows.

She turned the photo over. There was handwriting, the letters slightly tilted, as if the writer had been in a hurry:

“Louis Sodder
I love brother Frankie
Ilil Boys
A90132 or 35”

“George! George, come look at this!” Jennie cried out.

George ran over, held the photo up to the light. He looked for a long time, a very long time.

“That’s our boy,” he whispered. “That’s Louis.”

If Louis were alive, he’d be exactly 31 years old. The exact age of the man in the photo.

But who was “Frankie”? What did “Ilil Boys” mean? And what were the numbers A90132 or 35?

They hired another private investigator, sent him to Kentucky with the photo and all the information they had. He promised to call within two weeks.

Two weeks passed. No call.

One month. Two months. Six months.

The investigator vanished. They never heard from him again. No emails. No phone calls. No letters. As if he’d disappeared off the face of the earth.

Fearing that publicizing the information might endanger Louis — if it really was Louis — George and Jennie decided to just add the photo to the billboard without stating the location or details.

Five faces became six. Five children and one adult who might be one of them.

Hope flickered again. Small, trembling, but still hope.

Decades of Waiting

George Sodder died on August 2, 1969, at age 74.

Twenty-four years after that fateful night, he died still believing his children were alive.

Before he passed, he held Jennie’s hand and whispered, “They’re still out there. I know they’re still out there.”

Jennie lived another 20 years.

She never left Fayetteville. Never moved away. Because if her children came home, they needed to know their mother was still there, still waiting.

She built a high fence around the land where the old house once stood. She turned it into a memorial garden — planting flowers, placing stones, tending to every corner.

From the day of the fire, she wore only black — the color of mourning. Every morning, she went to the garden, knelt before five small stones she’d placed, each carved with a name.

Maurice. Martha. Louis. Jennie. Betty.

She whispered to them. She told them about her day. About the weather. About the neighbors. About the grandchildren they’d never met.

“Mama’s still waiting for you,” she said every morning. “Mama will always wait.”

Jennie Sodder died on October 2, 1989, at age 84.

She passed in her sleep, peacefully, with the photo of her five missing children pressed tightly to her chest.

Shortly after, family members took down the billboard. Thirty-seven years of silent pleading ended. But the question remained unanswered.

The Legacy of Love

Today, a small white house stands where the Sodder family once lived. Life goes on. Cars speed past on Route 16. The billboard is gone. The faces no longer look out.

But Sylvia Sodder Paxton — the youngest child who escaped the fire — is still alive. She’s 83 years old, her hair white, but her eyes still bright with faith.

“I still think my five siblings are alive,” she told reporters in 2020. “I don’t have proof. Just a sister’s feeling. And I can’t give up.”

She continues sharing the story online, on podcasts, on television programs. She keeps the memory alive. Because as long as someone remembers, they’re not truly gone.

Miranda Weeks, George and Jennie’s granddaughter, says: “My grandparents fought for their children for the rest of their lives and never gave up. That’s the legacy they left — that love is stronger than death, hope is stronger than despair, and a parent’s heart never stops waiting.”

An Ending Without Closure

Tonight, if you drive through Fayetteville, West Virginia, you won’t see the billboard anymore.

But if you stop your car, step out, and stand quietly for a moment, you can still feel it — the whispers of five small souls, five children who vanished on that cold Christmas night in 1945.

Maybe they died in the fire, as authorities claimed.

Maybe they lived somewhere with different names, their memories erased by time and fear.

Maybe Louis sent that photo in 1967, trying to reach the family he dimly remembered from childhood — but couldn’t return for some reason we’ll never know.

The truth we’ll never know.

But what we do know for certain is:

George and Jennie Sodder’s love will live forever — in the memories of those who remain, in the hearts of those who read this story, on the billboard that stood for 37 years through rain and sun, and somewhere between heaven and earth, where five small children have finally found peace.

Because love doesn’t disappear when people disappear.

It only waits — quietly — until someone listens.

And the story of the Sodder family is still being told, still being remembered, still being loved — 79 years after that fateful Christmas night.

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Dedicated to George and Jennie Sodder — parents who never stopped searching.

Dedicated to Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty — wherever you are, you are never forgotten.

Dedicated to Sylvia Sodder Paxton — keeper of the flame of hope until the very end.

And dedicated to all parents who have lost children — your love is the light that shines even in the deepest darkness.

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Epilogue: If They’re Still Alive

If Maurice were still alive today, he’d be 93 years old.

If Martha were still alive, she’d be 91 years old.

If Louis were still alive, he’d be 88 years old.

If Jennie were still alive, she’d be 87 years old.

If Betty were still alive, she’d be 84 years old.

Perhaps one of them is reading this story right now. Perhaps they remember — dimly, like a distant dream — a Christmas night, a burning house, and a family they lost.

If you are one of them, please know: Your family never gave up. They loved you until their last breath. And they’re waiting for you somewhere beyond the sky.

But if not — if they passed long ago — then please know:

They were loved. They were remembered. And they were never, ever forgotten.

That’s what George and Jennie Sodder wanted most.

And that’s exactly what they achieved.

The End