It's past midnight and I'm reading about a house fire again.

Christmas Eve, 1945. Fayetteville, West Virginia. George and Jennie Sodder had nine children. Five of them, Maurice (14), Martha (12), Louis (9), Jennie (8), and Betty (5), went upstairs after a long day of holiday chaos. The older kids were still up. The parents dozed off on the couch.

Jennie woke up to the phone ringing at 1 AM. A woman asked for someone who didn't live there, laughed, and hung up. Then she noticed the lights were still on, the curtains were open, and a ladder that was normally propped against the house had been moved 75 feet away, wedged against an embankment.

Then the fire started.

George broke a window trying to get upstairs. He cut his arm badly enough that he couldn't climb. He tried to reposition a truck he'd been using for work, to drive it under a window and climb on top of it. It wouldn't start. Two of his other trucks, parked nearby, wouldn't start either. He'd driven one of them the day before.

He got four of his children out. The other five never came out of that house.

And this is where it stops being a tragedy and becomes something I can't stop pulling at. As Smithsonian Magazine lays out, the official explanation was that the fire consumed the children so completely that no remains were found. No bones. No teeth. Nothing.

But house fires don't do that. They don't erase five bodies so thoroughly that not a single tooth survives. The Sodder home burned for about 45 minutes. Crematoriums operate at temperatures between 1,400 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit for two to three hours and still leave behind bone fragments. The Sodder fire was a wooden house burning quickly and inefficiently.

George Sodder sifted through the rubble himself. He found two small vertebrae that a medical examiner later identified as belonging to a child around 14 years old. The samples were then lost before any further testing could be done.

Lost.

Before the fire there had been threats. A man showed up at the house weeks earlier, supposedly an insurance salesman, and told George that his house would burn and his children would be destroyed. Someone cut the power lines to the house a few months prior. A different man, also before the fire, told one of the older Sodder children that their house was going to go up in smoke.

In the years after, the Sodders received a photograph in the mail. It showed a young man in his twenties, and on the back, written in handwriting nobody recognized, was a message: "Louis Sodder. I love brother Frankie. Ilil Boys. A90132 or 35." They had no way to verify it. They put it on a billboard anyway.

Jennie kept the billboard up until she died in 1989. She never believed her children died in that fire. She stopped celebrating Christmas.

The questions I keep coming back to are the small ones. Who moves a ladder 75 feet from a house at 1 in the morning? Who calls and laughs? Why would three trucks fail to start on the same night? Why would someone bother threatening a family about a fire that was supposedly accidental?

And what happened to those five kids?

I don't have an answer. But I keep the lights on when I read about it.