Thin Air

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Story 1.

What happened to the Sodder Children?

During the dying days of 1945, the small town of Fayetteville in West Virginia played host to a horrendous tragedy.

A huge blaze tore through a local household, seemingly claiming the lives of five young children in the process.

But the failure of authorities to locate their remains, coupled with a series of bizarre occurrences in the aftermath of the incident, ultimately posed the question, what happened to the Sodder children?

Growing tired from shoveling and sifting through the smouldering ruins, Forrest Judson Morris finally stopped what he was doing and decided it was time for a break.

Unbuttoning the heavy overcoat and removing his helmet, he made his way out of the smouldering debris in search of something to drink.

The house had already been completely destroyed by the time that he and Fayetteville's other volunteer firefighters had arrived on the scene.

It had taken far too long for the men to assemble, and it was unfortunate that the crew's driver had been the last one to arrive, wasting further precious minutes.

Whilst unloading their equipment the night before, they had looked on as the police officers had unsuccessfully attempted to restrain the head of the family nearby.

George Sodder's arm was bleeding profusely from where he had smashed a window in a failed effort to save his children from inside the fiery inferno.

His face was plastered with grime and soot, save for the stark tear tracks beneath his eyes, and his voice was completely lost from hours of anguished and unanswered cries.

Of the nine young children who had been asleep in their beds at the time the fire broke out, only four were accounted for.

Unsure of how he was meant to proceed in a situation like this, Morris had put a call into the regional fire marshal, who had told him to search the ruins for evidence of how the blaze had started and to recover the remains of the children who had died.

In terms of identifying where and why the inferno had broken out, Morris had next to nothing to go on.

A sobbing Jennifer Sodder had informed the police that she had heard something thrown up onto the roof of the address that had subsequently rolled down along the roofing tiles, with the fire starting near the phone box in her husband's study.

The problem was, other than piles of ash and charred timber, the blaze had left little behind to inspect.

Conscious that the fire department's reputation was already in tatters due to the time it had taken them to arrive, Morris was acutely aware that he had to come up with something and decided to report faulty wiring in and around the phone box as the most likely cause.

But the lack of forensic evidence was only one of the problems that the Fayetteville fire chief had to solve, as the remains he had managed to recover were barely enough to make up one human being, let alone the five who were missing.

There were a few bone fragments, along with what might have been the remnants of internal organs, but nowhere near what they should have been.

For the best part of an hour, Morris debated in his head what the best course of action was.

The children were dead, there was no other logical conclusion, and to show what he had found to the family would only cause them unnecessary suffering.

Gathering the meagre remains into an undamaged biscuit tin, he buried them a short distance away, resolving to tell the family that the intensity of the blaze had totally destroyed the children's bodies.

It was little more than a small mercy, but the least he could do given such tragic circumstances.

Giorgio Sodu had been just 14 years old when he had walked through the arrivals gate at Tellis Island, possessing little more than the clothes he was wearing.

Upon seeing America for the first time, his older brother had elected to return to their home in Europe, but for Giorgio, this was indeed the land of opportunity.

Westernizing his name to George Soda, the young migrant immediately set about making a life for himself in his new homeland, working his way up through a series of building companies to the point where he was finally able to set up his own haulage firm.

In time, he met a shopkeeper's daughter named Jennifer Cipriani, who had similarly migrated to the United States as a child from her native Italy, and their subsequent marriage would go on to produce 10 children.

Though many people would ask through the years what it was that had caused him to leave his Sardinian birthplace behind, George refused to discuss the reasons for the move, or indeed offer any detail regarding his childhood.

It was only during the rise of the fascist movement during the mid-1920s that he finally began to share his opinions with friends and neighbours.

Sodder was an ardent opponent of Italy's governing fascist regime and in particular an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Benito Mussolini.

He did not hold back what he thought should become of the corrupt government, and his passionate outpouring soon made him deeply unpopular with some quarters of the Italian migrant population.

During October of 1945, there were a series of unsettling incidents at the Soda residence.

A visiting life insurance salesman became enraged when asked to move on from the premises, angrily declaring that the family would pay for George's previous comments about Mussolini.

In another incident, a jobbing tradesman whose services the Sodders refused to employ alleged that George's wiring was so shoddy that the whole house would eventually burn down.

In the run-up to the festive season, the family became aware of a strange car that would park up and watch the younger children going to and from school.

Then, at 12.30am on Christmas Eve, the house phone rang unexpectedly.

When Jenny answered, A female voice she did not recognise laughed down the line, before the mysterious caller hung up.

Half an hour hour later, Jenny heard what she thought sounded like objects clattering on the roof above her, before the fire broke out shortly afterwards.

As George desperately battled to stop the Inferno and save his family, he found that every method at his disposal had been somehow compromised.

A nearby water barrel was completely frozen over, its contents unusable.

His ladder had somehow disappeared from the backyard, and when he tried to start both of his trucks to back them up to the front of the house to climb upon, he found neither would start.

It was a mere 45 minutes before the sodder house suddenly collapsed in on itself, its internal structure completely decimated by the intensity of the searing blaze.

In the aftermath of the incident, it soon became apparent that although their baby and three of their eldest offspring had successfully made their way outside, none of the five younger sodder children were anywhere to be seen.

As they had stood watching Chief Morris sifting through the wreckage of their home the following morning, George and Jenny had already accepted that 14-year-old Maurice, 12-year-old Martha, 9-year-old Louis, 8-year-old Jenny, and 5-year-old Betty were dead.

All they could do now was wait for their remains to be recovered, so that they could bury their children in the traditional manner.

The The couple found themselves accepting Morris' assertion that the blaze had burned with such intensity that the bodies had been completely destroyed.

Four days later, George bulldozed over the debris in order to lay the foundations of a memorial garden to their lost children.

But it was not long before the grieving parents began to question certain elements of the official version of events.

In the days that followed, George found that their missing ladder had apparently been hidden by someone at the bottom of an embankment embankment a short distance away.

It was also discovered that the phone line into the address had been deliberately cut, rather than melted by the fire, presumably by whoever had used and then concealed the missing ladder.

Jenny read a newspaper article about a house fire, in which the skeletal remains of the victims had been found huddled together in the ruins.

She also discovered that several items of furniture and household appliances had been recovered relatively undamaged from the wreckage, further undermining the fire chief's argument that all the evidence had been utterly destroyed.

George went on to hire a number of private investigators, who uncovered further worrying information.

The insurance salesman that had threatened the family had been a member of the coroner's jury, who had deemed the incident accidental and not malicious.

Witnesses emerged, stating that they had seen shadowy figures throwing objects at the house on the night of the fire, with others claiming to have seen the missing children being taken away from the scene by strangers.

The family became convinced that their children were the victims of some sort of sinister abduction, and paid for an advertising billboard alongside a nearby freeway, displaying pictures of the missing children and a cash reward for information of their whereabouts.

This attracted a number of inquiries over the years, none of which generated any positive leads, but then in 1968, the family received a mystifying item of correspondence.

A letter arrived addressed to Jenny, postmarked from Kentucky but with no forwarding address.

Inside was a photo of a handsome man in his mid-20s.

On the reverse, the name Louis Sodder was written along with, I Love Brother Frankie, iLil Boys, A90132 or 35.

Believing this to be an attempt by Louis to reconnect with the family, George added the new photo to the billboard and paid for more private investigators to travel to Kentucky.

Sadly, George Sodder passed away the following year after this new development produced no further viable leads.

His death caused Jenny to retreat from public life, refusing to engage with society ever again until her death in 1989.

To this day, no definitive trace of the missing five Sodder children has ever been found.

When trying to explore and rationalise the events that took place on that tragic Christmas Eve back in 1945, it is important to distinguish between the evidence which can be supported by fact and that which exists purely as opinion or supposition.

When law enforcement agencies refused to conduct a professional investigation into the matter, the Sodder family went on to uncover huge amounts of information themselves, much of which was never fully explored or verified to any significant extent.

In reality, there are only two real possible explanations for what took place.

These are that the children did indeed tragically perish in the blaze, or that the family were victims of a much deeper criminal conspiracy.

This means that the most important evidence which needs to be probed and evaluated is that of Fire Chief Morris, a body of evidence which sadly falls down before it even reaches the first hurdle.

When Jenny Sodder first started to doubt the idea that all trace of her children had been completely burned away by the fire, she started to experiment by burning piles of animal bones, none of which could ever be fully destroyed.

She then contacted a local crematorium, who told her that it was not possible to burn human bones to ash unless a fire generating heat in excess of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit was sustained for a two-hour period, far longer than the solder house fire had lasted.

Later on in their investigations, George paid for a further search of the scene.

which did unearth a number of damaged bone fragments.

These were analysed by a state pathologist, who confirmed that they were indeed human vertebrae, but had come from a human male aged between 17 and 22 years old.

Not only did this further point to the fact that nobody had died as a result of the fire, as it was well outside the age range of the five missing children, but it also completely undermined the report filed by Chief Morris.

George eventually became aware of the rumours that Morris had indeed located human remains, refusing to disclose their existence to the family, and instead choosing to bury them.

When questioned about this by the police, the fire chief admitted to doing so and led the family to where he had buried the biscuit tin the morning after the incident.

When the contents of the tin were analysed, it was concluded that they were animal remains and not those of a human being.

The hapless Morris was again confronted with the new evidence.

and this time claimed he had buried a beef liver he obtained from a local butcher in an attempt to give the family some degree of closure should they inquire about the matter at some future point.

Further evidence came to light when the driver of a bus which had been passing the address on the night of the fire claimed to have seen men throwing burning objects up onto the roof of the Sodder house.

Another search of the scene uncovered a spherical object, made of thick green rubber, which bore more than a passing resemblance to a hand grenade.

Given Chief Morris's clear aversion to telling the truth and Jenny Sodder's insistence that the fire had started up on the roof of the house, it is clear that the blaze was no accident.

The stolen ladders, severed phone line and sabotaged lorries parked nearby indicate that one or more perpetrators ensured the house was damaged to the point where it could not be saved, which in turn brings us back to the issue of the missing children.

Working on the principle that their remains should have been relatively easy to recover, but never have been, there is significant weight to the argument that they were somehow removed from from the scene without the knowledge of their parents.

But what could be the motive for such a carefully orchestrated and sinister criminal conspiracy?

And what was the fate of the missing juvenile victims?

As a result of the family's billboard appeal, numerous witnesses came forward claiming to have seen the five children travelling away from Fayetteville in the company of strangers.

A woman at a diner en route to Charleston claimed to have seen them travelling in a car with Florida license plates.

A hotel owner in Charleston itself would later come forward, claiming the children had stayed there overnight in the company of two men and two women of Italian extraction, who became aggressive when challenged.

The only motive ever considered by George Sodder was that he was being punished by Italian fascists for his opposition to the now deposed government.

Were these innocent American children supposedly removed from the country and taken to Italy either too young to remember their past or too scared to risk the lives of their family by trying to make contact with them.

Another theory is that the Sicilian Mafia abducted the youngsters in order to extort money from George, an attempt that went badly wrong for all those involved.

There are also some who claim that there is a far more sinister story at the heart of the incident, and that the family started the fire themselves in an effort to cover their tracks after somehow killing their own children.

Right up until his death, George Sodder followed every possible lead into their disappearance, however tenuous the information.

He visited a convent in St.

Louis after an anonymous tip that Martha was being held there against her will.

A woman in Houston claimed that a man she had met in a bar claimed to be Louis Sodder after one drink too many.

Not one of these leads ever produced any evidence regarding the fate of the Sodder children.

Their disappearance remains a mystery to this very day.

The sadness and tragedy associated with the loss of these youngsters is eclipsed only by the complete absence of any tangible evidence or hypothesis surrounding their disappearance.

And however unlikely the scenario is that unknown offenders managed to successfully spirit them away from inside a burning building without the knowledge of their parents, with the absence of their bodies, it is difficult to draw any other logical conclusion.

Ultimately, Whether they were the victims of the carelessness and incompetence of Chief Morris and his investigation, or the machinations of the Italian mafia is irrelevant.

These were innocent and helpless children, who had never done anything to deserve the terrifying turn of events that would forever separate them from their parents and siblings.

All we can hope is that with the lengthy passage of time that has elapsed since the tragedy occurred, advances in both genealogy and social media may one day provide the information needed to solve their disappearance.

The story of Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny, and Betty is far from over,

and only by keeping their memory alive can this mystery ever hope to be resolved.

Story 2

Into Thin Air

The nature of missing persons' cases can vary greatly, both in terms of their individual circumstances and their eventual outcomes.

But few such disappearances match the complexity and mystery of those we will be examining in this episode.

Instances where those those who went missing have vanished in front of multiple witnesses, seemingly into thin air.

When a missing person's case is initiated, Investigators act quickly in gaining a full understanding of the subject's background.

Individuals associated with the missing person are interviewed using a predefined set of questions aimed at uncovering potential underlying factors which might explain their withdrawal from society, focusing on commonly observed patterns.

These include details about the subjects relationships, their finances and health, with a view to understanding a viable goal or motive for their absence to which the police can then cater an appropriate response.

When none of these factors factors are clearly apparent, it should prompt a more urgent investigation, raising the likelihood of an unforeseen third party's potential involvement and suggesting a higher probability of foul play.

But amidst a landscape of voluntary disappearances, accidents and crimes, There is a small number of instances where the circumstances offer no viable explanation whatsoever.

Cases in which background checks, witness interviews and local inquiries provide nothing that can assist the investigators, suggesting that the only explanation for what has taken place may be something beyond our understanding.

In 1809,

the political landscape of the European mainland was in chaos.

as the major powers attempted to counter the ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The French Emperor had defeated his rivals time and time again on the battlefield and had recently claimed the throne of Spain to add to his burgeoning empire.

Having repeatedly failed to organise a military coalition capable of blunting the ongoing advances of the French Empire, Britain again turned to Austria.

As part of their efforts, A young envoy named Benjamin Bathurst was dispatched to Vienna to plead directly with the Austrian Emperor Emperor for his nation to intervene.

Bathurst's mission itself would prove successful, with Francis I declaring war on Bonaparte several months later during April of that year.

The efforts of Austria's army itself, though, would be far less successful, with the Emperor's forces being defeated once again by their French opponents in short order.

Nevertheless, his duties having been completed, Bathurst was duly recalled to London, setting off with his valet for Hamburg in order to gain passage on a ship back to England.

On the evening of November the 25th, a coach carrying the two men stopped to rest its horses at a tavern named the White Swan, situated just outside the town of Purleyburg.

Over the next few hours, the Englishman took dinner whilst going over some correspondence, before being informed that the horses had now been fed and watered, and were ready to continue the journey.

Rising from his table, Bathurst had then proceeded to make his way outside to the courtyard, followed closely behind by his valet.

The diplomat was observed to approach the horses, confirming they were all in order, before moving around them to the far side of the coach.

But upon opening and then entering the carriage a few seconds later, his valet had been confused to find that Bathurst was nowhere to be seen.

With the coach standing unattended, directly in the centre of the tavern's courtyard, there was no obvious place for the missing man to have been hiding.

Bathurst had only been out of his servant's eyeline for a matter of seconds, with no one else in the immediate vicinity.

It was as if he had walked around the waiting horses to the far side of the carriage and then simply ceased to exist, all in the space of a heartbeat.

After the alarm had been raised, local army units were called for and a comprehensive search of the inn and its surroundings were conducted.

But despite these efforts, which included the dragging of a nearby river, the missing diplomat was never seen again, leaving no clue behind as to how or where he had disappeared to.

Late on November the 9th, 1878, Christian Ashmore and his family had just finished eating their supper together and were preparing to retire for the evening.

The Ashmores resided in a rural farmhouse, which was situated on the outskirts of Quincy, Illinois, located not far from a nearby natural spring.

As was common for that time of day, Christian asked his son Charles to go and draw some water for the family to wash with.

The 16-year-old boy had obediently reached for his hat and coat as it had been snowing heavily for most of the day, and then set off for the spring with a metal bucket.

Several minutes later, When Charles had still not returned, his younger sister Martha became sufficiently concerned to set off in search of him.

Donning her own overcoat, she had taken a lantern and then slowly walked the short distance to the spring, calling out his name as she did so.

A single line of footprints was clearly visible from the light of the lantern's glow, having apparently been made by Charles on his journey through the fresh snow.

But several meters short of the spring, these footprints had come to a sudden and unexpected end, as if the the person making them had simply been plucked from the face of the earth.

Calling for her father, Martha desperately cast her lantern around in search of her absent brother, or at least the metal pail he had been holding, but there was no sign of either.

When the rest of the family arrived, they had spread out further in search of the missing boy, but were unable to find any further footprints in the surrounding snow.

In addition to this, it was also discovered that the stream itself was completely frozen, making it impossible for Charles to have fallen in and drowned.

At their father's insistence, the Ashmores retreated back to their house, in the hope that Charles would reappear at some subsequent point during the evening.

But by the following morning, he had still not returned, prompting Christian to set off into town to seek help from the authorities.

With her husband gone, Mrs.

Ashmore stayed in the house in case Charles returned.

After a time, she walked back through the snow to the point where her son's footprints had terminated.

As she did so, she suddenly found herself stopping dead in her tracks.

clearly hearing her son's disembodied voice pleading with her for help.

Mrs.

Ashmore's head turned this way and that in search of the boy, but he was nowhere to be seen.

And yet his desperate cries for help could still be faintly heard, sometimes coming from one direction and then another,

as if he was travelling around her in an ever-increasing circle, moving slightly further away each time he called.

When Christian returned a short time later with the local constable, his wife related what had happened, but upon checking, neither man could hear Charles' voice.

No clue as to the ultimate fate of the missing boy would ever be uncovered, despite a number of search efforts.

But on several further occasions, members of his family swore they could hear him faintly crying out for help.

near to the spot from which he disappeared, until his plaintive cries finally ceased altogether some weeks later.

This left the Ashmore family completely shattered and bewildered by their loss.

The tragic case of young Charles Ashmore is even more haunting when heard in conjunction with a similar incident which had taken place just 24 years earlier.

One afternoon during July of 1854, A landowner named Orion Williamson had been seated on the front porch of his farmhouse with his wife in Selma, Alabama.

It was an oppressively hot summer's day, and as he had watched his workers moving about the fields in front of him, Williamson became concerned about his horses.

Worrying that the animals were being adversely affected by the heat, he had tried to attract the attention of his farm manager, who happened to be standing a few meters away.

But despite calling the man's name several times, Williamson had still not received a response and so chose to set off on foot into the fields to resolve the issue himself.

With his wife watching on, the farmer had bent down to pick up a small branch before continuing to walk towards his horses, waving the stick before him in an apparent effort to shoe them into some nearby shade.

By coincidence, The owner of the neighbouring property, Armour Wren, happened to be passing by a short distance away on his horse and cart, with his son James seated alongside him.

They had waved a greeting to their neighbour, but at the exact second that Williamson had stopped to wave back, he suddenly disappeared from sight, despite being stood on an open and flat area of ground.

With a cry of alarm, Mrs.

Williamson had immediately run from the porch to try and locate her husband, who she assumed had fallen to the ground due to the intense heat.

But when she reached the spot where he was last seen, closely followed by Wren and his son, as well as other members of the Williamson household, Orion was nowhere to be found.

To all those who had been watching, it was as if the farmer had suddenly blinked completely out of existence right before their very eyes.

With word of the mystery quickly spreading into the nearby town, several hundred residents hurried to the Williamson farm to form search parties.

They would spend the next week tirelessly combing the grounds of the property and those that bordered it for any sign of the missing man.

He was never seen again, and the search concluded with apologies and words of comfort for the grieving Mrs.

Williamson.

as they had nothing more tangible to offer.

As the months passed, passed, workers on the farm noticed that a perfectly circular patch of land at the spot where their employer had vanished had now become completely barren.

Nothing grew there, even after multiple efforts to seed and water it.

More worrying still, Mrs.

Williamson would later claim that whenever she or her children approached this area, they would hear Orion's voice, crying out from somewhere nearby.

He would plead for them to guide him back to the farm, saying he was lost and did not know where he was.

Over time, as life eventually returned to this small patch of barren earth, the missing man's voice simultaneously faded away, leaving nothing more than his memory and unanswered questions as to how he disappeared.

When examining these three cases, the most popular theory put forwards by modern-day commentators is that the three missing men were somehow pulled into another dimension.

That for reasons still unknown to modern science, the unseen barriers between this world and other parallel regions had somehow inexplicably broken down.

The victims of these strange disappearances had either inadvertently fell or passed through these breaches between two separate universes and had not been able to find their way back.

As these invisible borders had then resealed themselves, the desperate pleas of those who had gone slowly faded away.

The barren area of land left at the scene of Orion Williamson's vanishing seems to suggest that some unknown natural phenomenon had contributed to his disappearance.

Such a terrifying prospect could perhaps explain many other unsolved mysteries of a similar nature.

In In the case of Benjamin Bathurst, there may of course be a far more rational explanation.

The diplomat vanished during his era's equivalent of the Cold War, at a time when numerous spies and agents were actively engaged against various nations.

Human remains and discarded valuables that may have belonged to Bathurst have since been located in the vicinity of his disappearance.

But due to the amount of time that has elapsed since he went missing, it has never been possible to definitively attribute them to him or to confirm that any crime took place whatsoever.

On the other hand, the other two cases we have mentioned have since been identified as potential fiction or hoaxes by those who have more closely scrutinised them.

Both were subject to analysis by the author Ambrose Bierce.

with accusations that he had fabricated them himself in order to later comment upon them in public.

The case of Orion Williamson has fallen under particular scrutiny, as it has been presented elsewhere in a virtually identical format.

For instance, there is a story set in Sumner County, Tennessee at the turn of the 20th century, featuring a farm owner by the name of David Lang who disappeared in exactly the same circumstances.

The events related in the Charles Ashmore case are also very similar to the story of Oliver Lurch, who disappeared during a snowstorm after having been asked to fetch some water from the family well.

However, the Charles Ashmore version predates its Lurch counterpart by at least half a century, and it has been said that the latter is in fact an adaption of the former.

Ambrose Bierce would later go on to disappear in unexplained circumstances during the throes of the Mexican Revolution, which perhaps seems to be more than a touch of a coincidence, given his very public interest into this mysterious and recurring phenomenon.

As with so many other theories, it remains to be seen if definitive proof of parallel dimensions or universes will ever be found.

The vast majority of disappearances ultimately have a rational, albeit unfortunate and often tragic explanation.

These incidents are typically influenced by either the deliberate actions of the missing person or misinterpretation by witnesses involved, leading to a different narrative regarding the event.

But if the stories we have examined have demonstrated anything,

it is that foremost in each and every such case are the loved ones who have been left behind, with the ultimate goal of those searching for the people who have vanished being to reunite both parties,

or at least to unearth the exact details which forever separated them.

Bedtime stories.