I'm a paranormal researcher here in West Virginia, and there's a case I've spent years studying. A case that haunts every investigator who touches it. This happened Christmas Eve 1945, to a family named the Rodgers. George and Janet Rodgers, Italian immigrants, had built a good life in Fayetteville with their ten kids. That night, nine of them were home. Their oldest boy was away in the Army. I need to tell you what happened because I believe those five children are still out there somewhere. Or they were, anyway. And their family deserved better than what they got from the authorities. So it's late Christmas Eve. The younger kids were allowed to stay up, playing with toys their older sister Mary had bought them from the dime store where she worked. Around ten o'clock, Janet told them they could stay a little longer if the two oldest boys still awake, 14-year-old Mark and 9-year-old Louie, remembered to put the cows in and feed the chickens before bed. George and the two oldest boys who'd been working all day were already asleep upstairs.
At 12:30 in the morning, the phone rang. Janet went downstairs to answer it. A woman's voice she didn't recognize asked for someone who didn't live there. In the background, Janet could hear laughter and glasses clinking, like a party. She told the caller she had the wrong number and hung up. Walking back to her room, she noticed all the downstairs lights were still on, the curtains still open, the front door unlocked. Mary had fallen asleep on the couch. Janet assumed the other kids had gone to bed. She turned out the lights, closed the curtains, locked the door. Half an hour later, 1 AM, Janet woke up to a loud bang on the roof. Then a rolling sound, like something heavy tumbling down the shingles. She listened for a minute, heard nothing else, went back to sleep. Another half hour passed. 1:30 AM. She woke up smelling smoke. The room George used as an office was on fire. Flames were coming from around the telephone line and fuse box. She woke George, he woke the older boys. They all started yelling up the stairs for the children sleeping in the attic bedrooms. But the stairway was already engulfed in flames. No one could get up there.
George, Janet, Mary, the two oldest boys Jack and Thomas Jr., and little two-year-old Sophie made it outside. But Mark, Margaret who was 12, Louie, 8-year-old Janet, and 5-year-old Bonnie were still up there. George tried everything. He broke a window, cut his arm badly trying to climb in. He went for the ladder he always kept against the house. It was gone. Just gone. He ran to his trucks, thinking he could drive one up to the house and climb on top to reach the windows. Neither truck would start. Both had worked perfectly the day before. Mary ran to a neighbor's house to call the fire department. No operator answered. A neighbor who saw the fire tried calling from a tavern. Same thing, no operator. The neighbor had to drive into town and track down the fire chief himself. The fire department was only two and a half miles away. They didn't arrive until 8 AM. By then, the house had burned to the ground in 45 minutes. When they searched the ashes, they found no bones. Nothing. The fire chief told the family the blaze had been hot enough to completely cremate the bodies. The coroner ruled it an accident, faulty wiring. Death certificates were issued before the new year.
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