"TOWN OF THE LIVING DEAD"

THE HAWK’S NEST TUNNEL TRAGEDY

The small community of Gauley Bridge, West Virginia looks like a picture postcard of small-town America. An old rusty railroad bridge stretches out over the water where the New River merges with the Gauley. Houses dot the steep hills and line the banks of the river. A few stores can be found along the town’s main street. A renovated old train station serves as the town hall. The speed limit is just 25 miles an hour through town. Children ride bicycles and play in the yards. People smile and say hello to one another as they pass on the sidewalks. A farmer’s market in the middle of town sells fresh vegetables in the summer and pumpkins and bales of straw in the fall.

But on May 20, 1931, a local newspaper attempted to tell the secret that lies under the sunny surface of this little town – but publication of the story was stopped by a local judge. It’s a dark secret that has become a terrible memory of death, an almost forgotten horror of one of the worst industrial disasters in American history: the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Tragedy. The disaster occurred during the years of the Great Depression, when times were hard and a man would do just about anything to feed his family. Taking advantage of this fact, powerful and wealthy men started a dangerous project that would claim the lives of an unknown number of men and cause the community of Gauley Bridge to become known as the “Town of the Living Dead.”

A haunting image of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel as a worker emerges from the mist caused by the drilling of the stone – the same fine mist of silica that was destroying the lungs of the men breathing it.

The Hawk’s Nest Disaster resulted from the construction of a tunnel through the mountain near Gauley Bridge. The three-mile-long passage was designed to divert water to an electrical power station by Union Carbide, the sponsor of the plan. However, the subcontractors on the job failed to follow standard safety precautions during the drilling operations, which ended with at least 764 dead workers. None of the companies involved were charged with criminal negligence.

Union Carbide (the company that would later be involved in the chemical explosion in Bhopal, India, in 1984) was formed in West Virginia by the merger of several companies in 1917. By the late 1920s, the company created the New Kanawha Power Co. in order to produce power that would be used in the production of ferro-metals, like aluminum, at a site below Gauley Bridge. The proposal required the damming of the New River just below Hawk’s Nest, a spectacular overlook on the river, and the construction of a three-mile tunnel through Gauley Mountain. This tunnel would carry the rushing water to electric generators downstream.

New Kanawha Power contracted with Rinehart & Dennis Co. of Charlottesville, Virginia, to build the tunnel and the dam. Tunneling began on March 31, 1930 and progressed at breakneck speed until it was completed in December 1931. No one knows for sure why the tunnel had to be completed at such a fast pace, but it was believed that uncertainly about the Federal Power Commission’s control over the New River was one of the reasons. If the project could be hurried through, the government would have little say over what could, or couldn’t, be done during the project. Management drove the workers hard to make sure that the tunnel was completed on time.

Finding workers in Depression-era Appalachia, where numerous coal mines had closed, was an easy task. Word spread through the region, and through the rural south, that jobs were available at Gauley Bridge. Men walked, drove and hopped freight trains to be first in line for the promised work. Rinehart & Dennis hired mostly black workers from outside West Virginia for the project. Reportedly, 75 percent of the 1,494 men who worked inside the tunnel as drillers and mockers – who removed rock debris – and their assistants were African-American. There were another 1,488 workers, also mostly black, who held jobs that involved tasks inside and outside the tunnel. The reasoning behind this is grim in hindsight – in the early 1930s, black workers were seen as expendable.

A group of workers on the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel. Like the man in the front of the photo, the majority were African-American, laboring under unsafe conditions because they were considered largely “expendable.”

Workers labored on the tunnel project for ten hours a day, always under the watchful eyes of bosses who used guns and clubs to force ill or unwilling men to start each day’s work. Black workers were paid in company scrip instead of cash, always at lower rates than white workers. When they were dropped from the payroll, they were evicted from company housing, which consisted of overcrowded, segregated boxcars, and run out of town by the Fayette County Sheriff.

   

Neither Rinehart & Dennis, nor the Union Carbide engineers overseeing the projects, followed even minimal safety precautions during the drilling operations. Workers tunneled from 250 to 300 feet per week through 99 percent silica. Experts knew that miners who inhaled silica dust stood a good chance of contracting silicosis, a deadly lung ailment. But the company ordered that the workers use a dry drilling technique that would create more dust because this method was faster and cheaper. The high-velocity drills that bored cavities in the rock for the insertion of dynamite charges did not spray water on the stone, which was a standard technique to reduce dust. Air ventilation was inadequate. No measurement was taken of dust levels in the tunnel. Ventilators and masks were not issued to tunnel workers, but they were supplied to company executives during inspection tours of the project.

Not surprisingly, few workers stayed on the job for long. Sixty percent of the African-American migrant workers worked less than two months on the project. However, this was long enough to pay a deadly price for signing on at Hawk’s Nest.

The men emerged from the hole in the mountain each day with their dark skin covered by clouds of white dust. They looked like phantoms as they came out of the cloud-filled tunnel, blinking and coughing from the dust that filled their eyes and lungs. They began dying two months after they first entered the tunnel. Their deaths were painful. As the silica they inhaled created fibrous nodules in their lungs, their lungs grew stiff and the men found it harder and harder to breath. Eventually, they strangled to death, writhing and choking until they drew their last punishing gasp. It was reported that a man named Cecil Jones struggled so hard for breath that he kicked the wooden slats out of the baseboard of his bed before he died. Silicosis could not be cured, but doctors knew what it was. Rather than diagnose it, a company physician told tunnel workers that they had a new disease called “tunnelitis” and gave them worthless pills.

 

On May 20, 1931, the local newspaper, the Fayette Tribune, tried to break the story of the sick and dying tunnel workers and their unsafe working conditions, but a gag order issued by a local judge stopped publication. But even without the story, local residents knew something was wrong. Gauley Bridge was being dubbed with a nickname – “town of the living dead.” A Congressional report from February 4, 1936, described the scene: "The men got down so they had no flesh left on them at all. As they express it down there, the men got so they were all hide, bone and leaders, which means he is just skin and tendons and looks like a living skeleton."

 

A problem arose as the black workers died. There was no “colored” burial ground in the area. Handley White, local funeral parlor owner in Summersville, located a field on his mother's farm and was given a contract to open a burial ground on the Martha White farm in Summersville. Handley was paid $50 per body with the promise of "plenty of business." Lieber Cutlp, a local resident and friend of White’s son, later recalled the days of the burials. White contacted him and asked if he wanted to make some extra money with his flatbed truck. Cutlp, anxious to make any extra money he could, quickly agreed. The dead workers were stacked in rows and strapped on the back of the flatbed truck, he remembered. More of the dead workers were arranged in an upright sitting position as if they were alive for their ride to their final resting place. For years rumors spread about workers buried in mass graves on the Martha White farm, but White family members deny this accusation.

Between July and December 1932, local attorneys filed dozens of lawsuits on behalf of workers who had suffered acute silicosis. The disease had wreaked havoc on the workers, ravaging their lungs and making them susceptible to secondary infections, such as tuberculosis. Silicosis had been recognized as an industrial disease in America since the early 1900s. The United States Bureau of Mines had published warnings in the 1920s about the dangers from it while using high-speed drills. Acute silicosis, from which death could occur within months of exposure, however, was not a recognized disease in 1930. West Virginia did not classify silicosis as an industrial disease at all and the state rejected worker’s compensation claims from men who claimed that they had contracted it at Hawk’s Nest.

When faced with more than 250 suits that sought more than $4 million in damages by the middle of 1933, Rinehart & Dennis settled out of court, agreeing to pay $130,000, half of which went to attorneys’ fees. In accepting these settlements, the plaintiff’s attorneys agreed not to file any further suits and to surrender all case records to the defendants. The contractor brokered two additional settlements based on subsequent suits and paid out $200,000 in awards and attorney fees. The average plaintiff received $400, while the defendant took possession of the damning evidence, including x-rays and medical records. Reports circulated that Rinehart & Dennis and Union Carbide bribed witnesses and tampered with juries during the trials prior to the settlements. Few records of the sick workers remains today, most were apparently purposely destroyed.

How many workers actually died in the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel? The real number will never be known. This is partly because Union Carbide wiped out the historical record and partly because most of the tunnel workers were dismissed at the end of 1931 and scattered throughout the South. Many of the men did not become sick until later, so their deaths never became a part of the official numbers.

It was also discovered at trial that the field at the Martha White farm was not the only burial ground for black workers. Apparently, Rinehart & Dennis had hired another local undertaker to dispose of the bodies of unclaimed workers and he had buried them in a field near Gauley Bridge. The location of this burial ground remained a mystery until 1972, when the West Virginia highway department stumbled onto 45 of these graves. Martin Cherniack, a medical doctor with a master’s degree in public health, attempted to reconstruct the epidemiology of the Hawk’s Nest tragedy. After painstaking historical research, his “conservative estimate” was that 746 men who worked in the tunnel had died from acute silicosis, which translated into a mortality rate of 63 percent. African-American workers made up 76 percent of the deaths.

The tragedy forced recognition of acute silicosis as an industrial hazard and a brief and ineffective congressional hearing in 1936, helped focus national attention on the condition. By 1937, all states had adopted laws recognizing the disease in some form – although West Virginia’s statute was worthless since it was written solely in the interest of corporations.

The Hawk’s Nest tragedy remains a haunting incident in American history today. Dismissed as a product of “mountain gossip” in the 1930s, it has come to be recognized as one of the nation’s worst industrial disasters and a chilling reminder of the fact that no man is ever expendable.

The Witness that Testified from Beyond the Grave!

TESTIMONY FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

The True Story of the Greenbrier Ghost

On this date, January 23, 1897, the body of a young woman named Zona Heaster Shue was discovered in her home in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. It seemed to be a rather ordinary case of perhaps domestic discord gone wrong, but in the end, the case turned out to be anything but ordinary. In fact, it went on to become one of the most unusual stories in the history of crime and the supernatural. It remains a one-of-a-kind event: the only case in which the word of a ghost helped to solve a crime and convict a murderer!

Zona Heaster Shue, who would achieve fame in death as the “Greenbrier Ghost”

Zona Heaster was born in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, around 1873. Little is known about her life, growing up in the Richlands region of the county but in October 1896, she met a man named Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue. He was a drifter who came to Greenbrier County to work as a blacksmith and to start a new life for himself. He began working in the shop of James Crookshanks, which was located just off of the old Midland Trail. A blacksmith could find plenty of work along this rough, unpaved trail, and throughout the county, and Shue became well-known for his work.

Zona became acquainted with Shue a short time after he arrived in town. The two of them were attracted to each other and soon were married, despite the animosity felt towards Shue by Zona’s mother, Mary Jane Robinson Heaster. She had taken an instant dislike to him and often told her daughter that she felt there was something the otherwise amiable man was hiding.

The Shues lived together as man and wife for several months and then, on January 23, 1897, Zona’s body was discovered inside of their house by a young boy that Shue had sent there on a contrived errand.  He asked him to run to the house from the blacksmith shop and see if there was anything that Zona needed from the store. The boy, Andy Jones, found Zona lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. She was stretched out, with her feet together. One hand was on her abdomen and the other was lying next to her. Her head was turned slightly to one side and her eyes were wide open and staring. Even to this small boy, Zona Shue was obviously dead. Andy, not surprisingly, ran home to tell his mother. The local doctor and coroner, Dr. George W. Knapp, was summoned to the house, although he didn’t arrive for nearly an hour.

The Trout farm, where Zona’s body was discovered by the young boy from the blacksmith’s shop. 

By that time, Shue had carried his wife’s body upstairs and had laid her out on the bed. Contrary to local custom, he dressed the corpse himself. Normally, it was the proper thing for ladies of the community to wash and dress a body in preparation for burial. However, Shue took it upon himself to dress Zona in her best clothing. A high-necked, stiff-collared dress covered her neck and a veil was placed over her face.

While Dr. Knapp examined her and tried to determine a cause of death, Shue stayed by his wife’s side, cradling her head and sobbing. Because of Shue’s obvious grief, Knapp gave the body only a cursory examination, although he did notice some bruising on her neck. When he tried to look closer, Shue reacted so violently that the physician ended the examination and he left. Initially, he listed her cause of death as “everlasting faint” and then as “childbirth.” It is unknown whether Zona was pregnant or not, but for two weeks prior to her death, Knapp had treated her for “female trouble.”

Dr. Knapp sent someone out to notify Zona’s parents but word of the young woman’s death quickly spread through the community. By late afternoon, two young men who were friends of Zona’s, volunteered to ride out an area called Meadow Bluff and tell the Heaster family what had happened. The Heasters lived in an isolated area, about 15 miles away, where a small scattering of homes and farms were nestled against the side of Little Sewell Mountain. When she was informed of the news of her daughter’s death Mary Heaster’s face grew dark. She reportedly said, “The devil has killed her!”

On Saturday, January 24, Zona’s body was taken by carriage to her parents’ home. A handful of neighbors presided over the funeral entourage and they brought Trout Shue along with them to the mountain farm. He showed extraordinary devotion toward the body, keeping a vigil at the head of the open coffin as the wagon traveled over the rutted and bumpy roads. The body was displayed in the Heaster’s house for the wake, an event that lasted all day Sunday. It gave neighbors and friends an opportunity to pay their last respects to the dead, visit with one another, give solace to the bereaved, and bring food for the family. A few local ladies sat up with the body throughout the night and until the time of the burial on Monday.

Those who came to pay their respects during the wake pointed out the bizarre behavior of Trout Shue. His grief swung back and forth between overwhelming sadness and manic energy. He allowed no one to get too close to the coffin, especially while he was placing a pillow on one side of her head and a rolled-up cloth on the other. He explained that these items were to help Zona “rest easier.” In addition, he tied a large scarf around her neck and explained tearfully that it “had been Zona’s favorite.” When it came time to move the corpse to the cemetery, though, several people noticed that there seemed to be a strange looseness to Zona’s head. Needless to say, people started to talk and speculation began about how Zona had really met her untimely demise.

Mary Jane Heaster, Zona’s mother and the first person convinced that the young woman had been murdered.

Mary Jane Heaster did not need to speculate about whether or not Trout Shue had some part in her daughter’s death; she was convinced that he had. She had disliked the man from the start and had never wanted Zona to marry him. She was sure that he had murdered her, but there was no way that she could prove it.

After the wake, Mary Jane took the sheet from inside the coffin and tried to return it to Shue, but he refused it. Folding it back up to put it away, she noticed that it had a peculiar odor, so she washed it out. She came to believe that what happened next was some sort of strange omen. Mary Jane dropped the sheet into the wash basin and when she did, the water inside turned red. Strangely, a few moments later, the sheet turned pink and the color in the water disappeared. Mary Jane then boiled the sheet and hung it outside for several days but the stain could not be removed. She interpreted the eerie “bloodstains” as a sign that Zona had been murdered.

After this strange incident, she began to pray. Every night for the next four weeks, Mary Jane prayed fervently that her daughter would return to her and reveal the truth about how she had died. According to her story, a few weeks later, her prayers were answered.

Over the course of four dark nights, the spirit of Zona Shue appeared at her mother’s bedside. She would come as a bright light at first and then an apparition would take form, chilling the air in the entire room. She woke her mother and explained over and over again how her husband had murdered her. Trout Shue had been abusive and cruel, and had attacked her in a fit of rage because he thought she had not cooked any meat for supper. He had savagely broken her neck and to show this, the ghost turned her head completely around until it was facing backwards.

Mary Jane had been right. Shue had killed her daughter and the word of her spirit proved it!

A short time later, Mary Jane went to the local prosecutor, John Alfred Preston, to try and convince him to re-open the investigation into Zona’s death. She offered the visitations from her daughter’s spirit as evidence that a miscarriage of justice was taking place. By all accounts, Preston was both polite and sympathetic to Mrs. Heaster. The two spoke together for “several hours” and at the end of the meeting, Preston agreed to dispatch deputies to speak with Dr. Knapp and a few others involved in the case. While it seems unlikely that he was willing to take another look at the case because of the statement of a ghost, the investigation did get re-opened. Local newspapers reported that Mrs. Heaster was not the only one in the community who was suspicious about Zona’s death. There were also “certain citizens” who had started to ask questions, as well as the growing “rumors in the community.”

Preston himself went to see Dr. Knapp and the physician admitted that his examination of the dead woman had been cursory and incomplete. The two of them agreed that an autopsy was needed to answer the questions about Zona’s death once and for all. If Trout Shue was innocent of any wrongdoing, this would clear his name. 

A few days later, an exhumation was ordered and an inquest jury was assembled. The autopsy was performed in the Nickell School House, which was just a short distance away from the Soule Methodist Church graveyard, where Zona had been buried. The schoolchildren were dismissed on the day of February 22, 1897, and Zona Shue’s grave was opened. It was reported in the local newspaper that Trout Shue “vigorously complained” about the exhumation but it was made clear to him that he would be forced to attend the inquest if did not attend willingly. He replied, “They will not be able to prove I did it.” This was a rather odd and careless statement for a man who claimed to be innocent.

The autopsy lasted for three hours under the uncertain light of kerosene lanterns. The body of the dead woman was “in a near state of perfect preservation,” thanks to the cold temperatures of February, making the work of the doctors much easier to complete. A jury of five men had been assembled to watch the proceedings and they huddled together in the cold building with officers of the court, Trout Shue, Andy Jones (the boy who had found the body) and other witnesses and spectators.

The autopsy was carried out by the standard methods, which meant that an examination of the vital organs came first. After that, the doctors would normally cut an incision along the back of the skull so that the brain could be removed but this step was not taken in the case of Zona Shue because the doctors quickly found what they were looking for. One of the doctors turned to Trout Shue, “We have found your wife’s neck to have been broken.”

Shue’s head dropped and an expression of despair crossed his face. He whispered, “They cannot prove that I did it”

The autopsy findings were quite damning to Shue. A report on March 9 stated, “The discovery was made that the neck was broken and the windpipe mashed. On the throat were the marks of fingers indicating that she had been choken [sic]. The neck was dislocated between the first and second vertebrae. The ligaments were torn and ruptured. The windpipe had been crushed at a point in front of the neck.”

The findings were made public at once, upsetting many in the community. Shue was arrested and charged with murder. He was locked up in the small stone jail on Washington Street in Lewisburg and in spite of the fact that the evidence against him was circumstantial, at best, he was indicted by a grand jury and was formally arraigned for murder. He immediately entered a plea of “not guilty.”

While he awaited trial, information about Shue’s unsavory past began to surface. Zona had been his third wife. His first marriage, to Allie Estelline Cutlip, had produced one child but had ended in divorce in 1889 while Shue was in prison for horse stealing. His wife alleged in the divorce decree that Shue had been violent and had frequently beaten her. In 1894, Shue had married again, this time to Lucy Ann Tritt. Lucy died just eight months later under circumstances that were described as “mysterious.” Shue claimed that Lucy fell and hit her head on a rock, but few believed him. Before any action could be taken against him, he packed up and left the area. In the fall of 1896, he moved to Greenbrier County.

In jail, Shue remained in good spirits, and reported that his grieving for Zona had ended. In fact, he announced that he had a lifelong goal of having seven wives. Since Zona had only been his third, and he was still a young man, he had a good chance of realizing such a worthwhile ambition. He repeatedly told reporters that his guilt in the matter could not be proved.

The trial began on June 22, 1897 and numerous people from the community testified against Shue. The highlight of the trial, of course, came with the appearance of Mary Jane Heaster. Preston put her on the stand as both the mother of the dead woman and also as the first person to notice the unusual circumstances of Zona’s death. He wanted to make sure that she appeared both sane and reliable. For this reason, he skirted the issue of the ghost because it was bound to make her appear irrational and also because it was inadmissible evidence. The teller of the story, in this case Zona Shue, could obviously not be cross-examined by the defense and so her testimony would be hearsay under the law.

Unfortunately for Shue, his attorney decided to ask Mrs. Heaster about her ghostly sighting. It seemed obvious that he was doing it to try and make Mary Jane look ridiculous to the jury. He characterized her “visions” as a mother’s ravings and worked hard to admit that she might have been mistaken about what she allegedly saw. He continued to badger her for quite some time, but Mary Jane never wavered in her descriptions of Zona’s ghost – nor about what the specter had told hr about Shue’s guilt. When the defense counsel realized that the testimony was not going the way that he wanted, he dismissed her.

By that time, though, the damage was done. Because the defense and not the prosecution had introduced the testimony about the spirit, the judge had a hard time telling the jury to exclude it. It was apparent that most of the people in the community believed that Mary Jane had seen her daughter’s ghost. Despite Shue’s eloquent testimony in his own defense, the jury quickly found him guilty. Ten of them even voted that he be hanged, which spoke volumes about Mrs. Heaster’s believability as a witness. Without a unanimous verdict of death, though, Shue was sentenced to life in prison.

The sentence did not satisfy everyone in Greenbrier County. On July 11, 1897, a citizen’s group of anywhere from 15 to 30 men assembled eight miles west of Lewisburg to form a lynching party. They had purchased a new rope and were well armed when they started towards the jail. If not for a man named George M. Harrah, who alerted the sheriff, Shue would have surely been lynched. Harrah contacted Deputy Sheriff Dwyer at the jail. It was said that when Shue was informed of this threat against his life, he became “greatly agitated” and was unable to tie his own shoes. Dwyer hid him in the woods a mile or so from town and until deputies were able to disband the mob and return them to their homes.

Shue was moved to the West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville on July 14, where he lived for the next three years. He died on March 13, 1900 from one of the epidemics that swept through the prison that spring. At that time, the prison commonly buried unclaimed remains in the nearby Tom’s Run Cemetery, for which no records were kept until the 1930s. Thanks to this, no trace of Trout Shue can be found today.

Mary Jane Robinson Heaster lived to tell her tale to all who would listen. She died in September 1916 without ever recanting her story about her daughter’s ghost.

And as for Zona, her ghost was never seen again, but she has left a haunting, historical mark on Greenbrier County. It is one that is still being felt today. In fact, a roadside marker along Route 60 still commemorates the case. It reads:

Interred in nearby cemetery is Zona Heaster Shue. Her death in 1897 was presumed natural until her spirit appeared to her mother to describe how she was killed by her husband Edward. Autopsy on the exhumed body verified the apparition’s account. Edward, found guilty of murder, was sentenced to the state prison. Only known case in which testimony from ghost helped convict a murderer.

The story of the Greenbrier Ghost – along with dozens of other crime and ghost stories – appears in my book, DEAD MEN DO TELL TALES. It’s the first book in a series of titles that are available in autographed print copies from the website, or as Kindle editions from Amazon.com 

A Christmas Mystery

The Vanishing of the Sodder Children

The holidays are supposed to be a time of happiness and celebration but instead, one of the most hauntings mysteries to ever occur in West Virginia – and perhaps even in America – began during the predawn hours of Christmas Day 1945. That day would mark a vanishing, perhaps even a mass murder, which has never been solved. On that cold Christmas night, five children seemed to have been lost in a mysterious fire that destroyed their home. But were they? Their bodies were never found in the ruins and the children were later sighted in various places, creating a puzzling, complex mystery that is as strange as anything that could be found in detective fiction.

What happened to the Sodder children? Did they die in the fire, or were they kidnapped for unknown reasons? And if they were, why has no trace of them ever been found? The Sodders would continue their search for the missing children for nearly 50 years, going to their graves with the mystery still unsolved.

It was the holiday season in the West Virginia countryside near Fayetteville. A light snow was on the ground and all seemed right with the world. George Sodder, Sr., and his wife, Jennie, were the proud parents of 10 children and lived in a new home outside of town. George, a 50-year-old Italian immigrant had recently started a new coal-trucking firm from his home and it was already prospering. One of the Sodders’ sons was in the Army, but because World War II had ended several months earlier, he was out of danger. The rest of the children were celebrating the season at home with their parents.

The Sodder children opened their presents on Christmas Eve, including toys that had been purchased by 17-year-old Marian from the dime store where she worked in Fayetteville. George went to bed early that night and so did the two older boys, who worked for him in the coal-hauling business, John, age 23, and George Junior, age 16. The other children, Maurice, 14, Martha, 12, Louis, 10, Jennie, 8, and Betty, 5, all said they were too excited to sleep, but finally turned in around 10:00 p.m. Jennie took two-year-old Sylvia to bed with her soon after, looking forward to a good night’s sleep before the holiday festivities of the next day.

But Jennie was not going to get a good night’s sleep – not that night, not for the rest of her life.

In the account that follows, I have attempted to chronicle everything that I know that happened to the Sodders over the course of the next hours, days and even years – no matter how insignificant or strange that it seems. There was something very unusual at work in their lives and what it may have been, no one can – or is willing to -- say.

Jennie was roused from her sleep the first time, shortly after midnight, by a ringing telephone in George’s home office downstairs. It was very unusual for anyone to call the office line at such a later hour, so Jennie got up and answered it. The caller was a woman, who apologized for dialing a wrong number. Jennie accepted her apology and returned to bed. Soon, she drifted back off to sleep.

But only a half hour passed before she was awakened again. This time, she heard a sound like a heavy object landing on the roof of the house. There was a loud thud and then it bumped and jostled its way from the highest pitch of the roof to the gutter. She waited for the sound to be repeated, but when it wasn’t, she went back to sleep. About 30 minutes later, she woke up again. She wasn’t sure what was wrong – and then she smelled smoke.

Leaving her bedroom to investigate, Jennie found that flames were already spreading through George’s office. She rushed back to the master bedroom where her husband was sleeping and they shouted upstairs to rouse John and George Junior, who shared a room in the attic. George also shouted toward the other bedrooms on the second floor and thought that he heard all of the children answer him. John and George Junior made it downstairs and out of the house with their parents, Marian and little Sylvia, but the other five children never came out.

Now frantic, George rushed back into the burning house and found that the only staircase was completely engulfed in flames. The blaze was swiftly spreading through the rest of the house. He yelled loudly up the stairs, but there was no reply. If the children were up there, he realized, they would have been screaming and crying by now, so he assumed that they had somehow made it out. He raced outside, but they were not there. Instantly, he made the decision to use a ladder and to get the children out of the upper windows. He ran around the house to retrieve the ladder that he kept there – but it was gone. The ladder was later found to have been thrown down an embankment 75 feet from the house, which is not where it had been left the evening before

George then seized on another idea. He would drive one of his coal trucks up to the house and stand on top of it to reach the windows. But both trucks – each of which had run perfectly a few hours before – refused to start.

 

Marian Sodder ran to a neighbor’s house to telephone the Fayetteville Fire Department, but the neighbor could not get an operator to assist her. Direct calls could not be made in the area at the time. All of them had to be operator-connected. At 1:00 a.m., another neighbor drove past the scene, saw the blaze and hurried down the road to use a telephone at a nearby tavern, but again, no operator responded. Finally, he drove into town and got Chief F.J. Morris on the line, informing him that the Sodder house was burning and children were inside.

But even after this call, the fire department did not arrive until 8:00 a.m. – seven hours after they learned of the blaze. The lapse was explained by the department’s lack of manpower during the war and by the chief’s inability to drive Fayetteville’s fire truck. Morris had to wait until he could track down a qualified driver and Fayetteville didn’t have a fire siren in 1945, so they had to rely on a “phone tree.” An operator would call one firefighter, then another and another. But with no operators seemingly on duty, the calls took hours to complete. By the time the firefighters arrived, the Sodder home had been reduced to a crumble of ruins over a smoking, ash-filled basement.

George and Jennie were heartbroken, assuming that their five missing children had died in the fire, but evidence soon emerged to point in other directions. A brief search of the ruins ended at 10:00 a.m. on Christmas Day, with Chief Morris telling the Sodders that no trace of the children could be found. He suggested that the fire was hot enough to completely cremate their remains and he instructed the family to leave the site as it was, pending a more thorough search. George waited for four days, then obtained a bulldozer and covered the basement with five feet of dirt, explaining that he planned to plant flowers and preserve the site as a memorial to the children. A coroner’s inquest stated that the fire was accidental and blamed it on faulty wiring. Death certificates were issued for the Sodder children on December 30.

But were they actually dead?

Today, we know that the fire, which leveled the Sodder home in about half an hour, never reached the temperature required for the total cremation of human remains. That would have taken two to three hours and would have required a temperature of 1,400 to 1,800 degrees. In fact, various household appliances found in the burned-out basement were still recognizable.

Stranger still, a telephone lineman summoned to the Sodder home site reported that the telephone line had not been burned through, but rather had been cut 14 feet off the ground and two feet from the nearest utility pole. Neighbors directed the police to a man whom they saw at the scene of the fire, stealing an automotive block and tackle. He pled guilty to the theft but denied any role in the fire, although he did admit to cutting the telephone wire, allegedly mistaking it for the power line. His identity and motives for cutting any of the lines at the scene remain a mystery. 

And what the man was really doing there was just the start of the unanswered questions…

A late-night bus driver disputed the coroner’s verdict of an accidental blaze at the Sodder house, reporting that he had seen unknown persons throwing “balls of fire” onto the Sodders’ roof. In March 1946, Sylvia Sodder found a green, hard-rubber object near the ruins, which some believed was some sort of firebomb. The Sodders later claimed that the house had burned from the roof downward, rather than from the ground floor up, but no evidence remained to prove their story. However, the idea of firebombs being thrown onto the roof might explain the strange noise that Jennie heard when she was awakened a short time before the fire started.

And then the sightings began.

First, the manager of a motel that was located halfway between Fayetteville and Charleston, West Virginia claimed that he saw the five Sodder children there on Christmas Day. A resident of Charleston later said that he saw four of the children – Martha, Louis, Jennie and Betty – with four unknown adults, about one week after the fire. The adults spoke Italian and were never identified. Suspecting that the children had been kidnapped, George and Jennie hired C.C. Tinsley, a private investigator from nearby Gauley Bridge, to look into the sightings and pursue the case.

Tinsley went to work, not only trying to run down information about the children, but also looking to see who might have hard feelings against the Sodders and if any possible enemies might have had something to do with the fire or with kidnapping the children. He discovered that the Sodders had been threatened in October 1945 by a Fayetteville resident who tried to sell them life insurance. When they told him that they weren’t interested in his sales pitch, he warned them that their house would “go up in smoke” and their children would be destroyed over “dirty remarks” that George had made about Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator, who had been lynched in April 1945. Interestingly, the same insurance salesman had been a member of the coroner’s jury that decided that the fire at the Sodder house was accidental.

In 1947, a church minister from Fayetteville told the Sodders a strange story. While Chief Miller had claimed that no remains were found at the fire scene in 1945, he privately claimed to have found “a heart” in the ashes, which he placed in an empty dynamite box and buried at the scene without reporting the discovery. Tinsley and George Junior persuaded Chief Miller to show them where he had buried the box. They dug it up, took it to a funeral home and asked the director to open the box and examine the contents. Inside was what looked like a decayed beef liver. It was untouched by the fire, meaning that it had been placed there after the blaze. But for what purpose? No one knows.

Later in 1947, George Sodder saw a newspaper photo of several New York schoolchildren and insisted that one of the girls was his daughter Betty. He drove to Manhattan in search of the child, but her parents refused to let him see her. Unable to come up with a plan to get another look at her, he drove home disappointed.

In 1949, Tinsley and the Sodders started a new search of the fire scene, discovering four human vertebrae. State authorities refused to examine the bones, so Tinsley sent them to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Experts there determined that the vertebrae belonged to a male between the ages of 19 and 22 – an age range that did not match any of the missing children. Published reports stated that Tinsley later traced the bones to a cemetery in Mount Hope, West Virginia, but no explanation was available concerning their theft from an unidentified grave or how they managed to end up at the Sodder fire scene.

With the Smithsonian report in hand, the family persuaded the FBI to take an interest in the case. In 1950, a file was opened on the Sodder children as a possible interstate kidnapping, but FBI agents only pursued the case for two years with no results. Around that same time, the West Virginia State Police also looked into the case, but with the same amount of success – or lack of it.

In 1965, the Sodders received a photograph of a young man in the mail. On the back of the photo, a handwritten note read: “Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. ilil Boys. A90132 or 35.” While George and Jennie were convinced that the photo was an older-looking likeness of their missing son, they could not interpret the cryptic message on the back or trace the sender of the photograph.

Even so, the family clung to hope. In 1952, they erected a billboard near Ansted, West Virginia, that displayed photographs of the missing children and offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to their whereabouts. It brought no useful tips, but created a lot of speculation. Rumors abounded, including stories of Italian fascists, mafia gunmen and orphanages that snatched children and sold them to childless couples.

The Sodders spent the rest of their lives searching for the missing children. George Sodder died in 1969, still hoping for a break in the case. Jennie lived another 20 years, and she never gave up either. The billboard in Ansted remained in place until her death, when it was finally taken down. Today, the youngest surviving family member, Sylvia Sodder Paxton, keeps the family’s haunting story alive with help from her daughter, pursuing leads on the internet or wherever information might come from.

To this day, though, the case remains open and unsolved.