The Disappearance of the Sodder Children: A Christmas Mystery That Haunts History
Terror Bites: Bite Sized True Crime
Audio Cowboy
5 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Christmas Eve 1945, a devastating house fire tore through the Sodder family home in Fayetteville, West Virginia. While George and Jennie Sodder and four of their children escaped, five Sodder children vanished without a trace. But here’s the terrifying twist—no human remains were ever found in the ashes.
Was it an accident? Arson? A kidnapping? A cover-up? For decades, theories have swirled—some believe the children were taken by the Mafia, others suspect a government conspiracy, and then there’s the eerie mysterious photograph that arrived decades later, suggesting at least one child may have survived.
In this episode of Terror Bites - Bite-Sized True Crime, we unravel one of the most chilling unsolved disappearances in American history—a case filled with bizarre warnings, missing evidence, and sinister secrets.
Could the Sodder children still be out there? Or was this a crime that will never be solved?
Hit play now and prepare for one of the most mind-bending mysteries in true crime history.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Terrorbytes, the True Crime Podcast, where the stories are dark, the laughs are twisted, and the terror, well, it's real. |
| 0:19.0 | I'm your host, and this where we dive dive into the most bizarre, chilling and downright weird |
| 0:24.8 | true crime stories you've never heard. |
| 0:27.3 | Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss a single second of the madness. |
| 0:32.6 | It's Christmas Eve, 1945. |
| 0:36.5 | The Sotter family, mom, dad and their nine kids are tucked in, cozy and safe in their home in |
| 0:44.5 | West Virginia. |
| 0:45.9 | It's a night like any other, until it's not. |
| 0:49.4 | The children are asleep upstairs, the Christmas tree lights twinkling. The fire crackling in the living room. |
| 0:56.8 | And then, boom. The house goes up in flames. The fire department arrives. But here's the thing. |
| 1:04.8 | There's no sign of the five children that were supposed to be upstairs. No bodies, no bones, |
| 1:16.6 | just ashes. But wait. The fire? It was weird. It was small, almost like a deliberate burn. The walls weren't even damaged. It was like someone set the fire, waited for it to burn out, and then, poof, no kids, not a single |
| 1:31.7 | trace. Now, here's where things take a strange turn. The firemen show up, and there's absolutely |
| 1:39.1 | nothing left of the kids. But here's the kicker. No bones, not a single bone fragment. |
| 1:47.7 | If you've ever seen a fire, you know that when it's hot enough to reduce a house to cinders, |
| 1:52.6 | it definitely burns bones. |
| 1:55.3 | So, where the hell were they? |
| 1:57.8 | Did they just vanish? |
| 2:00.7 | Well, the Soda family wasn't about to sit around |
| 2:03.5 | sipping hot cocoa while their kids disappeared. They started investigating on their own, |
| 2:10.0 | and guess what they find? A new theory, that their kids had been kidnapped and taken far away, |
| 2:16.5 | and the fire was just a cover up. |
... |
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