Due to the graphic nature of the story, listener discretion is advised this episode includes discussions of kidnapping, abuse and bodily incineration that some people may find offensive. We advise extreme caution for children under 13.

Everyone mourns differently. Our reactions to losing someone can be as unique and mysterious as we are, bereavement can push us to do things that we previously couldn't have imagined.

Sometimes it makes us see the world differently. In other instances, we become desperate for justice or answers.

There may be no more potent example of this than with the Sadr family, who on Christmas Eve 1945 lost half of their children in a house fire after the blaze.

They couldn't find any remains. And as time went on, the sardars grief slowly transformed. What began as a tragic loss turned into an investigation to find out where the children had gone. What had started as a simple house fire mutated into a twofold mystery.

First, where the Sadr children really dead, and if not, where were they?

Welcome to Unexplained Mysteries, a Spotify original from podcast, I'm your host, Molly, and I'm your host, Richard.

In life, there's so much we don't know, but in this show we don't take we don't know for an answer.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, we investigate the greatest mysteries of history and life on Earth. You can find episodes of unexplained mysteries and all other Spotify originals from Park Cast for free on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is our final episode in a special three part series about the mysterious fate of the Five Sodor children. On Christmas Eve 1945, a house fire killed five sons and daughters of the Sodor family or did it for more than half a century.

Family members have investigated the many strange occurrences around the fire.

While they never conclusively discovered what happened to the missing children, numerous theories arose as to what their fates could have been.

Last time we detailed the family's decades long mission to find their sons and daughters, George crisscrossed the country following purported clues. But by the time he died in 1969, his family was no closer to an answer.

This episode will investigate a few possibilities around what really happened to the children. While it's conceivable that they simply burned up in the house fire, there are a series of tantalizing clues hinting at other fates. We'll explore human trafficking, the mafia, spontaneous human combustion and a basement full of gasoline.

We have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. In 19 08, 13 year old George Sodor emigrated from Italy to the United States of America. He arrived on a steamship with his older brother, whose name we don't know, but we'll call him Rafaelle. Strangely, when the two reached Ellis Island, Rafaelle immediately turned around and went home for reasons that are also unclear to us.

Additionally, we're not sure why George even left Italy at such a young age for the rest of his life. He was notoriously silent about his reasons for moving.

Given his background, it's possible that this was because of the Mafia code of omerta.

Omerta was a strict code of silence which applied to Mafia members and those who dealt with them. The fact that George never talked about his past suggests he might have been bound by a similar restriction.

The Mafia were very active in Sicily in the late eighteen hundreds and early 19 hundreds, and it's possible that George ran across them when he was a boy.

If so, that encounter might have led him to fleeing to the United States. It could also have been why Rafael felt like he had to return to their home country.

Whatever secrets his childhood held, George spent the 1920s, 30s and 40s raising his family in Fayetteville, West Virginia, but apparently he couldn't escape his past.

George frequently argued with the other members of the town's Italian American community, usually about dictator Benito Mussolini.

George despised the man, and this put him in conflict with other immigrants who supported the fascist prime minister.

It's possible that one of George's friends or neighbors belonged to the American mafia. After all, by the 1920s, many Italian mobsters had immigrated to the United States. So when Jorge debated Italian politics with the locals, he could have made a very dangerous enemy without realizing it.

In 1945, maybe the organization felt like they'd had enough of Georges A.. Mussolini statements and retaliated by taking his children.

Well, it's true that the Mafia didn't usually perform kidnappings. It wasn't totally unheard of.

One of the most famous examples was the 1973 abduction of oil fortune heir John Paul Getty, the third in the 1970s.

The Getty family was as famous for their oil wealth as they were for their infighting.

The patriarch, J. Paul Getty, was a notoriously difficult man, frugal to the point of pathology. He had payphones installed in his English manor home so his staff wouldn't add to his phone bill.

Understandably, he didn't get along very well with his grandson, John Paul Getty, the third who went by Paul, a Bohemian teenager who had been kicked out of his Italian prep school for clarity from hereon, will refer to J.

Paul Getty as Getty and his grandson will be Paul.

Paul kept a low profile to avoid his grandfather's vitriol, but that all changed when he suddenly disappeared in Rome. Soon after, his worried family received a series of letters and a phone call from the kidnappers.

They said they were members of the Mafia and they demanded a ransom of 17 million dollars for Paul's safe return.

But Getty said that he had 14 grandchildren besides John, and if he gave them a cent, it would only encourage similar opportunists to go after them. For that reason, Ghedi refused to pay.

In response, the Mafia cut off Paul's ear and mailed it to a newspaper along with their demands.

Eventually, the family paid the Mafia three million dollars, though Getty himself only paid two point two million, the maximum amount that he could write off as a loss for tax purposes. And by the end of 1973, Paul was back within the family fold.

So much the worse for wear.

This wasn't the only time the Mafia used kidnapping as a tactic in Rome. In 1975, the criminal organization kidnapped Johnny Bulgari, a famous Italian jeweler who was 40 years old at the time. His affluent family quickly paid two million dollars for his return, and he emerged relatively unscathed by the ordeal.

However, the senators were decidedly not wealthy, so it seems unlikely that the mob would have kidnapped their children for money.

What's more, George and Jenny never received a ransom note that said, it is possible that the criminal society could have murdered the Sadr children in retaliation for something George did.

The Mafia's arcane codes supposedly protect women and young children, but they don't always abide by these values. Take, for example, the case of Giuseppe Dematteo.

In 1993, Santino de Matteo, a former member of the Sicilian Mafia, was preparing to testify against them in court. In a bid to silence him, the mob kidnapped his 12 year old son, Giuseppe.

They held the boy for more than two years, torturing him. But even as Santino tried to get his son back, he refused to withdraw his testimony. Finally, the criminal organization killed Giuseppe.

From this example, it's clear that the Mafia probably wouldn't have held back if they felt that George Sodor had something to atone for. However, there's no hard evidence they were involved with the sardars. If they had been, it's likely that they would have taken credit in order to send a message.

And that's why these mafia related theories don't fully match up with the circumstances of the Sadr family tragedy, especially considering George's opinions about Mussolini.

After all, the Mafia hated the fascist dictator and with good reason.

Mussolini initiated a major battle against the society through the 1920s and 30s.

So it's unlikely that the mob would have kidnapped or murdered George's children in retaliation for his political opinions, they shared them.

However, none of this precludes the possibility of foul play. A non mafia group could have set a fire in order to arrange a kidnapping, especially if the kids were abducted by child traffickers. Coming up, we'll discuss whether the Sadr children were kidnapped and then smuggled across state lines for nefarious purposes.

Now back to the story. Given George Sardars mysterious past in Italy, some people believe he may have run afoul of the Mafia and the mob might have kidnapped his children during the fateful Christmas Eve fire, but there's no hard evidence connecting the sardars to organized crime. So this seems unlikely.

However, it's still possible that someone else kidnapped the missing children. Some believe that the sardars were victims of child trafficking. Well, there's no hard proof that this happened either. The idea is compelling.

Back in episode two, we detailed a possible sighting from a week after the fire. A woman who worked at a Charleston, West Virginia, hotel reported that she saw four kids there with two women and two men.

When she tried to talk to the boys and girls, the men glared at her and then began speaking in Italian. They made it clear that the children were not to be spoken to.

Unfortunately, this surly behavior could have been more than simple rudeness. The men may have shut down the conversation to cover up the crime being committed before the witnesses very eyes.

In short, it's possible that the woman at the hotel inadvertently spoke to some human traffickers. Today, trafficking is still a serious problem across the United States, according to the nonprofit Deliver Fund, a child is taken every two and a half hours while data from the 1940s isn't easy to find. We can discuss current trends to see how the Sadr tragedy might have fit the pattern of child trafficking.

Law enforcement and advocacy groups currently consider West Virginia to be a hotbed of trafficking. That's because the states surrounding it have high rates of the crime given its location. West Virginia is a nexus for abductors moving children from one place to another.

For example, in Ohio, currently one of the worst states for human trafficking, crimes run the gamut from child labor to sex work, and victims can come from a variety of backgrounds.

Authorities say that kidnappers use one particular tool to keep their hostages under their thumbs control. They almost always manipulate the children to the point where they feel powerless to escape, even if they have the physical means to do so.

Case in point, assuming the children at the hotel were the sardars, they would have been able to explain who they were or ask for help if they'd had a few minutes alone with the clerk. Instead, they weren't allowed to talk to her.

Isolation is a common tactic among traffickers, and it's effective because it literally prevents the victim from getting help. It also reinforces a feeling that no one will assist them. So the kids may feel it's pointless to even try.

On top of all this, trafficking victims are usually taught not to trust law enforcement. This means that anyone who might want to help a kidnapped child could be seen as implicitly untrustworthy.

And if the kidnapped kids believe they can't get assistance, they're less likely to reach out for it. A victim might learn to be suspicious of all adults or even come to believe that the only people they can trust are their abductors.

The men and women at the hotel spoke Italian, just like George and Jenny. Perhaps this shared Italian heritage made the children feel more comfortable with their alleged kidnappers.

This wouldn't be the first time a kidnapped child was manipulated into cooperating with their abusers in one famous case from Missouri, a man named Michael Devlin abducted an 11 year old boy named Shawn Hornbeck. Devlin held Shawn hostage for four years beginning in 2002.

The whole time, Shawn was only 50 miles away from his family.

Devlin convince Shawn that he would murder him if he ever tried to escape. So even though Shawn wasn't physically restrained and had to endure years of abuse, he stayed in Devlin's apartment out of fear.

Surprisingly, the teen had some degree of freedom. Reportedly, he was allowed to roam around the neighborhood and even befriended other local kids. Devlin went so far as to tell his landlord that Hornbeck was his son.

Naturally, people later wondered why Shawn didn't leave on his own. It's possible that the boy was a victim of Stockholm syndrome. When a person is taken hostage and has their life threatened instead of continuing to try and escape their captor. They may begin to identify with their captor and in some cases even form an emotional attachment to them. They may think they don't want to be rescued.

In fact, it was only when Devlin kidnapped a different young boy that the FBI finally found Shawn. The authorities used eyewitness testimony from the second abduction to track Devlin down. Local news called the surprise discovery of two boys, the Missouri Miracle. Subsequently, Michael Devlin was sentenced to 72 life terms for his crimes.

Like Shawn Hornbeck. If the missing Sodor children had been kidnapped, they might have developed Stockholm syndrome. This would explain why they never asked for help, even when numerous witnesses allegedly spotted them after the fire.

But there are a few logistical problems with this scenario, specifically the fact that five children went missing. It would have been incredibly difficult for a trafficker to abduct them as a group.

First, they would have had to get all five children out of their beds without being seen or heard. That alone would have been difficult. But the house was also on fire and the other family members were wide awake, scrambling to locate their missing sons and daughters.

Even if the kidnappers got the kids out of the house, they'd have to load them into a car and leave town without any of their victims escaping.

It just doesn't seem possible.

But if the children weren't abducted, what happened to them? The crux of the mystery lies in the fact that the sardars never found any remains from the missing five children. George and Jenny maintained that the fire didn't burn hot enough or long enough to incinerate the bodies so their sons and daughters couldn't have died that night. But they didn't account for an obscure phenomenon called spontaneous human combustion.

Typically, a fire needs an ignition source, something that will spark the flame in the first place, but there have been rare cases of human beings suddenly bursting into flames and then disintegrating without any apparent cause.

One of the earliest reported instances occurred in 1885 in the town of Seneca, Illinois. Eerily, it was also on a Christmas Eve.

That night, farmers Patrick and Matilda Rooney were getting ready for bed after an evening of socializing both of them and spent a number of hours drinking whiskey and talking with their adult son and a man who worked on their farm. When they said good night to the farmhand hand, he had no idea that he would never see the Rooney's alive again.

The next day, their farmhand walked from his room on the second floor down towards the kitchen, as he always did in the mornings. But as soon as he entered the hall, he noticed the house was filled with smoke, coughing and choking.

He ran to alert the neighbors and soon the authorities arrived. They didn't know if the Sunnis had managed to escape or if they were trapped in the house, but they knew someone had to go in.

According to one account, the first person to venture to check was a doctor from a nearby town. He crept into the bedroom and immediately discovered Patrick Rooney's body.

The man was lying dead on the floor next to his bed. There was no sign of his wife, but the doctor saw that the door to the kitchen was half open. He went through it and looked around for Matilda, but he didn't see her.

Instead, he found a hole burned through the floorboards.

He approached it and looked through the gap, went all the way to the ground underneath the house and held a pile of ashes. The doctor poked through them and found a few human bones, including a skull. It was all that was left of Matilda Rooney.

However, nothing else in the house had gone up in flames, the doctor even spotted a candle on the table beside the hole.

It had been used before but wasn't fully burnt.

Mysteriously, Patrick's corpse also didn't seem burnt at all. And yet he had died, likely from smoke inhalation. He was all very strange.

Over the next few days, the coroner and police performed investigations. Ultimately, they settled on a theory of spontaneous human combustion. Both of the brownies were heavy drinkers, and the authorities concluded that this had somehow contributed to Mrs. Rooney suddenly going up in flames.

The specifics of how that could have happened were still mysterious. But according to the theory, the fire had burned inside of her, which prevented anything else from igniting.

Perhaps this scenario also explains why the Sartaj children disappeared without leaving behind any remains. In a morbid twist, maybe their collective spontaneous combustion caused the house fire in the first place. However, there are a few problems with this possibility, for one, none of the Sadr kids were heavy drinkers or drinkers at all. Plus, there's no reason to think that spontaneous combustion could have burned away all their remains. Even Mattilda Rooney left behind a skull and some other bones.

But the biggest problem with this explanation is that most contemporary experts agree that spontaneous human combustion just doesn't exist in cases like that of Mrs. Rooney.

It's far more likely that her clothes caught fire, maybe while she turned on the stove or lit a cigarette.

And there's no reason to think the same. Fate befell the Sadr children in their beds. Far from any open flames. Instead, there are other signs that point to a much simpler and more definitive solution to this mystery. They center around the Sadr house itself and the flammable materials in the basement.

Coming up, we'll discuss the possibility that an unfortunate conventional house fire incinerated the children's bodies.

Now back to the story of an alleged sighting in a Charleston hotel hinted that the Sadr children may have been abducted on Christmas Eve 1945. However, it's unlikely that all five kids were kidnapped by someone on the same night at the same time.

Instead, there was a much more likely culprit for their disappearance.

The fire at their home, according to reports, the blaze burned hot and intense, so much so that it devoured the entire house in under an hour. This might have been due in part to the gasoline in the basement.

George Sodor was a working man.

He ran his own hauling business, sometimes did his own repairs, and at least before the fire knew where his various tools and implements were located around his property.

He stored a lot of his tools in the basement, including motors and multiple 55 gallon drums of gasoline. The Times West Virginian wrote that the space was effectively a makeshift garage.

Undoubtedly, this arrangement made the fire on Christmas Eve far worse than it would have been otherwise. A Fayetteville firefighter named Steve Crookshank said as much when the Times West Virginian interviewed him about the sardars.

Crookshank maintained that the fuel in the basement would have made the fire especially deadly.

As the flames raged, each floor of the house fell into the basement. And, of course, once the frame gave way, the roof caved in as well, leaving a pile of smoldering rubble soaked in gasoline.

Numerous reports say that the blaze only lasted for 30 to 45 minutes. But journalist Stacy Horn, who did a story on the Sutter case for NPR, discovered that the embers must have burned for far longer than that. Cruickshank's supports that idea. He told the Times West Virginian that the fire would have smoldered for hours after the house collapsed, even if it didn't necessarily produce visible flames.

This, in turn, would cremate anything that had been in the house as it fell. If the five missing children succumbed to smoke inhalation instead of kidnapping, then their bodies would have tumbled into the basement along with the rest of the house.

Adelina Lencioni say writing for the Times West Virginian went even further than that, she pointed to a moment well after the home burned down, that might have made that cremation process even more intense.

Within a week of the fire, George Sodor and his two surviving sons filled the basement with dirt. They said they did this because they wanted to make a garden on what remained of the house as foundation. This would allow them to grieve and then eventually to move on.

But according to Lynch, NASA and Crookshank in the Times, West Virginian, this probably turned the smoldering debris into an oven. This is because dirt isn't airtight. A small amount of oxygen can still reach the embers enough to keep them lit. In fact, covering a fire with soil can actually make it burn longer.

Because of this, it's possible that any remains that survived the collapse burned up completely under the sod.

This means that the memorial garden George built also served as his children's final resting place.

Even mundane house fires change people's lives, and in the case of the Sadr family, their fire was anything but mundane. Five of their children disappeared, half of their entire family. The loss of a child, much less five of them, can be accompanied by guilt, anger, overwhelming despair, the loss of faith or a feeling of meaninglessness. In other words, some of the hardest emotions people can experience for George and Jenny.

It had to have been overwhelming. They needed to mourn for a very long time before they could move on. And that's exactly what they and their surviving children did, at least initially.

But something interrupted the grieving process.

Much of what we know about mourning in popular culture comes from a 1969 study from a psychologist named Elizabeth Kubler Ross. She studied people who were terminally ill and monitored their emotional journey. Based on this data, Kubler Ross described a model called the Five Stages of Grief. You may have heard of it.

The five stages could start with denial, where one refuses to accept their circumstances. Then it might progress to anger. After that, you might begin bargaining where you try and extract meaning from the experience. From there, it could lead to depression and then finally, acceptance. Accept Kubler Ross didn't present these five stages as inevitable or sequential. Instead, some people may only experience some of them, and in any order, the process is unique to each individual.

As for George and Jenny Sodor, it's possible that they got stuck in the stage of denial.

As we discussed in the last episode, two years after the fire, George and Jenny Sodor saw a little girl's face in a magazine. They thought it looked exactly like their missing child Betty. The photo was taken at a school in New York to Jennie and George.

This hint suggested that their daughter was still alive and by extension, there are other children. Might be, too. George subsequently traveled to New York. He went to that school and asked about the identity of the little girl in the photograph, but the school turned him away.

George didn't have identification and the institution wasn't about to allow a stranger onto campus, regardless of his good intentions. So he returned home empty handed, but filled with a new sense of purpose. He believed in his heart that the school was trying to hide the fact that his children were still out there somewhere alive.

George and Jenny shared this belief, and it drove them to spend the rest of their lives searching for their missing children, hiring private investigators, erecting a billboard on their former property, traveling around the country in search of answers.

Those answers never came. But the sardars did get clues, tips and alleged sightings. The question becomes, how valid was that evidence? Perhaps random strangers really spotted the Sadr children. But it's also possible that George and Jenny just heard what they wanted to hear and saw what they wanted to see.

They aren't alone. For decades, researchers have known that people can hallucinate as part of their grief. Sometimes people in mourning can see or even hear the departed person. In other words, grief can make us see ghosts. This happens more often than you'd think.

In a 2002 study by German psychiatrist Christopher Betka, we learn of a woman who'd lost her daughter to a heroin overdose. The mother often heard her daughter's voice crying out for her and also saw and smelled her.

The psychiatrist treated the woman's symptoms as grief, hallucinations. She'd had hallucinations before after the death of her own mother. This time she received psychotherapy and was prescribed securitising and antipsychotic drug. But the visions continued for three months and her anguish remained.

Often these kinds of grief induced images are benevolent, a way to connect with a loved one who's gone.

In other words, a way of remembering other times, as in the German woman's case, they caused considerable distress.

In either case, these sorts of hallucinations can be taboo in the Western world. This is why most people who experience them keep the visions to themselves. They may also worry about what they've seen, fretting perhaps that they could be going crazy.

So even though this phenomenon is common, it doesn't get discussed very often. And if someone experiences a brief hallucination, they might not have the context to understand it.

In George and Jenny Sardars case, it's possible that they experienced a similar grief induced delusion, then thought it was evidence of life instead of death. They told themselves that this experience or feeling was proof that their children were still out there somewhere.

The years they spent searching for leads may have allowed George and Jenny to push away the sadness of their incalculable loss.

In this process, the sardars found many small hints that suggested their children hadn't perished in the house fire. But the sardars also actively ignored the many clues that indicated a different fate for their kids, like the basement full of gasoline or the fire that burned down the entire house, or the bulldozing of the smoldering wreckage.

This is a common psychological phenomenon known as confirmation bias. It's the tendency to focus on evidence that proves a specific theory and ignores any other clues that don't.

George and Jenny Sardars seem to do this. They believe their children were still alive. They followed every clue that bolstered this theory, even though it led to an unsatisfying conclusion, one where they still didn't have their children back.

At the same time, in an act of denial, they willfully ignored any information that pointed to their children being gone forever. But who could blame them? The pain of their loss must have been insurmountable. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that they clung so hard to hope, however tenuous it may have been.

Out of all the explanations discussed today, this is the most realistic, it's far less likely that someone successfully kidnapped five children during a terrible house fire than that those kids perished in that blaze.

Just like how it's implausible that the Mafia would go after the children of an Italian immigrant who spoke poorly of Mussolini. The criminal organization, after all, detested the dictator.

So this leaves us with a story that isn't about a kidnapping. Rather, it's an object lesson about the ravages of grief. George, Jenny and their surviving children didn't escape their house fire unscathed, far from it. Instead, they spent the rest of their lives dealing with invisible scars that wouldn't heal.

They built a billboard asking for their children back on the very plot of land where those children died. They spent thousands of dollars on a wild goose chase. It was easier to pretend than it was to let go. It was easier to hope than it was to mourn. Thanks again for tuning into unexplained mysteries, we will be back on Tuesday with a new episode for more information on the Sadr Fire. Amongst the many sources we used, we found the Smithsonian magazine article, The Children Who Went Up in Smoke by Karen Abbott.

Extremely helpful to our research.

You can find all episodes of Unexplained Mysteries and all other Spotify originals from Park Cast for free on Spotify. See you next time. And remember, never take we don't know for an answer.

Unexplained Mysteries is a Spotify original from podcast. It is executive produced by Max and Ron Cutler, Sound Design by Dick Schroder with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden and Travis Clark. This episode of Unexplained Mysteries was written by Nicholas Juat with writing assistants by Angela Jorgensen and Obiageli Hoddy Megu, fact checking by Claire Cronin and research by Brad Klein and Brian Peteris. Unexplained Mysteries stars Molly Brandenberg and Richard Rossner.

Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this special three part series. Remember, you can investigate more of history's most mystifying events every Tuesday and Thursday by subscribing to unexplained mysteries. Listen free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And from all of us here at podcast, Happy Holidays.