At first, this video is going to seem like a fairly ordinary story about an extremely unlucky house fire. But as you keep on watching and hearing more details about what happened in the context surrounding everything, you'll soon begin to realize that this story is anything but ordinary. And by the end of this video, you'll understand why this case is often considered as one of the most intriguing and unsettling disappearance cases in history.

Welcome back, guys. My name is Andy Chang, and this is The Hidden Stories. On the night of Christmas Eve, 1945, a couple named George and Jenny Salter were asleep, along with their nine children at their home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, when at around 1 p.m., a fire suddenly started in one of the rooms in their house. When Jenny woke up to the heavy and thick smell of smoke in the air so quickly ran down stairs to investigate and was horrified to find that most of their house was now completely engulfed in flames.

Realizing that the fire was already way too large and was spreading way too fast to be put out, Jenny immediately sprinted back up the stairs, yelling for everyone to wake up and to get outside as fast as they could. When her husband, George, realized what was going on, he leapt out of bed and began quickly waking up to four of their kids who were sleeping on the same floor as them.

Luckily, since the fire had reached their rooms, yet these kids were all safe and mostly uninjured. But when George and Jenny then went to go wake up their last five kids who were sleeping upstairs in the attic, they were shocked to realize that the entire staircase leading up to the attic was now on fire, preventing them from going upstairs.

By this point, the couple was panicking, frantically screaming for their children. But to their horror, they heard no response as they began desperately trying to find a way to reach their children. The excruciating heat of the fire burned their skin and feces. And they soon realized that it was futile. They had to get themselves in the four children that they did have with them outside first, or they would all die such.

George and Jenny quickly rushed outside with these four children, bringing them to safety. Then while Jenny ran over to a neighbor's house to call the fire department, since their phone was for some reason not working toward sprinted back inside their house to rescue their five remaining children. But since the fire had already spread so far by this point that he couldn't even get upstairs, he had no choice but to come back out and try to find another way in.

After badly cutting his hands, trying to break into a first floor window, George immediately ran over to grab a ladder that he always kept resting against the side of the house, hoping he could use that to reach the attic instead. But to his surprise, even though he could have sworn it was there just the day before, the letter was nowhere to be seen, with no time to just stand there and wonder what had happened to it.

George then frantically dashed over to his trucks, thinking that he might be able to drive one next to the house and then use it to climb into the attic window. But to his incredible frustration, despite both of his trucks working perfectly fine just earlier that day, for some reason, neither of them would start. And when George, then, as a desperate last resort, ran over to go grab the barrels of water that he kept next to the house to try and extinguish some of the fire, he found that he couldn't do that either, since the water was now frozen solid with every plan that he'd come up with to save his remaining five children just refusing

to go his way. George had no choice but to just sit there and wait and hope that the firefighters would be there soon. But to his horror, when Jenny finally returned, she frantically told him that although she had gone to two different neighbors houses for some strange reason, their phones couldn't connect to the fire department either, just like the phones inside their own house as such, they now had to wait as their neighbor drove down to the fire department in person and informed them about the situation that way.

But by the time the neighbor had arrived there, it was already far too late, around 45 minutes after the fire first started. George, Jenny and the four children who had managed to escape with them watched in devastation as their entire house burned to the ground, leaving zero scent of life behind. Incredibly, although the fire department was located just 2.5 miles away from their home.

Firefighters somehow didn't actually arrive to the scene until seven entire hours after the fire began at around 8 a.m. the next morning. Apparently, this was because of a whole bunch of different reasons, including the fact that it had been Christmas Eve and the fact that the fire department was losing manpower due to World War Two. But regardless, by the time these firefighters arrived, the fire was already completely gone, and all they could do was just help look through the ashes that were left in the place where George and Jenny's house once stood.

Although they couldn't find any bones or other human remains in these ashes, the fire chief, a guy named after Morris, concluded that the sort of family's remaining five children had died in the fire and that the fire had simply been hot enough to burn their bodies completely, leaving no traces behind. Such death certificates were soon issued for the children 14 year old Morris, 12 year old Martha, ten year old Lewis, eight year old Jenny and six year old Betty.

Later, a quarter also concluded that bad electrical wiring inside the house was likely what had caused the fire in the first place. Although initially, George and Jenny believed this conclusion being too traumatized, mourning the loss of their children to think otherwise. After a couple of weeks had gone by, they seemed again to realize that something just didn't quite add up.

They begin to suspect that this fire had not actually been an accident and in fact had been deliberately started by someone who was specifically targeting their family. Not only that, they begin to suspect that whoever this person was, he or she had set the fire as a distraction to divert everyone's attention away from their true goal, which George and Jenny believed was to kidnap the of children and tours in Jenny size.

That was why not a single trace of the children's bodies had ever been found in the ashes. It was because their five missing children had never been in the fire in the first place. They had been taken away alive. The more they began to reflect on the strange events that had occurred right before and during the fire, as well as the strange events from the weeks and months leading up to the fire, the more they became convinced that this was 100% what had happened.

And although the people around them were obviously skeptical at first, thinking that this poor couple was just coping and desperately trying to convince themselves that their kids were still alive. When George and Jenny finally shared the full side of their story, everyone finally began to understand why they believed what they believed. Now, before I continue with the story, this show is sponsored by Betterhelp.

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Let therapy be your map with betterhelp. You can visit better hope dot com slash hidden stories for 10% off on your first month. That's better help h e lp dotcom slash hidden stories. Now let's get back to the story. In October 1945, a couple of months before the night of the fire, Georgia Jenny were at home when they suddenly received a visit from a life insurance salesman.

Although the salesman fits in fairly polite at first, when George told them that they weren't interested in buying anything, the guy suddenly became furious and yelled at him, quote, Your house will go up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed. For all the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini. Now for context, although George lived in the US at the time, he was born and raised in Italy where Mussolini was a dictator.

However, since George hated Mussolini, when he immigrated to the U.S. and started a family with Jenny, he would often express his deeply negative opinions about the Italian leader to their neighbors. And since George and Jenny lived in an area with an especially large Italian immigrant population, many of these neighbors who greatly admired Mussolini came to greatly dislike George.

In the eyes of George and Jenny, that life insurance salesman had clearly been one of the locals that he had angered. But although it was a very frightening experience, they didn't take the salesman's threats too seriously. It seemed like he had just been venting his anger and wasn't intent on actually doing anything. When a few months went by without them hearing from the salesman again.

George and Jenny had pretty much forgotten about the encounter entirely. It wasn't until sometime after the fire that they finally made the connection and realized just how similar the salesman's threats had been to what actually ended up happening. And when they began thinking about it some more, they realized that that wasn't the only time that someone had brought up the topic of a fire starting at their home.

Not too long after the visit from the salesman towards anywhere once again at home, when they received another visitor, a stranger who was seeking work opportunities. But when the man went to the back of their house to examine the Fuze box there, he strangely warned George that his Fuze boxes would, quote, cause a fire someday. Although this confused George, since he had recently rewired the entire house to install an electric stove and everything should have been in perfect condition, he figured that the man was just trying to make up a problem so that he could earn a few extra dollars.

However, not wanting to take any chances, George later re contacted the electric company to ask them to come take a look again. But when they did, they assured him that everything was still completely safe. And again, it wasn't until sometime after the fire that George finally realized just how strange of a coincidence it was that the coroner had stated that the cause of the fire was faulty wiring.

Exactly. The thing that that random stranger had been warning him about after the night of the fire. George and Jenny's older sons also remembered noticing a suspicious looking car parked along the main highway through town in the weeks right before the fire, with the people inside closely watching the younger sort of children as they were returning home from school.

However, although the suspicious car and the two fire related visits to their home were already very disturbing and extremely convincing that things really weren't as simple as it seemed. Perhaps the most convincing reasons for why George and Jenny were so certain that this had just been an ordinary fire were the eerily strange things that had happened on the very night of the fire itself, both before and during the fire.

Since George and Jenny's oldest daughter, Mary Ann, decided to give her five youngest siblings their Christmas presents earlier that year. That night, these five siblings eagerly asked their mom, Jenny, whether they could stay up a bit later to play with their new toys since it was Christmas. Jenny agreed, but she made the children promise that they would remember to put the house in, feed the chickens and also turn all the lights off and lock the front door before they went to sleep.

Then Jenny went off to bed herself, having no idea that that would be the last time she would ever see any of those children again. Sometime after Jenny had fallen asleep, she was suddenly jolted awake by the sound of a phone ringing, since by that point it was already past midnight and their house will normally never receive calls at that hour.

Jenny was very confused when she went to answer the phone. A woman with an unfamiliar voice came to the speaker with the sounds of laughter clinking glasses and talking in the background. Since this woman was asking to speak with someone whose name Jenny had never heard before, she became even more confused. And when Jenny told the woman that she didn't know who she was referring to, the woman suddenly left nervously and told her that she must have gotten the wrong number before hanging up.

But very soon he was about to go back to sleep. She suddenly saw some lei peering out from beneath the door to her bedroom when she opened the door and went downstairs to go tell her five younger kids that it was way too late and that they needed to go to bed immediately. She was surprised to see that none of them were actually anywhere to be seen and that the house was dead quiet to her annoyance and frustration.

Jenny realized that the kids had probably gone upstairs to the attic to sleep already, but I just forgot to turn off the lights and lock the front door like she had told them to. As such, not wanting to have to wake them up again. She just quietly set off all the lights and locked the front door herself. Then she went back upstairs to sleep again.

But right as Jenny was about to drift off, she was suddenly jolted awake yet again, this time by a loud noise ringing out from a buffer. It kind of sounded like some sort of rug had hit the roof and was rolling down the side of it. However, since the sound disappeared very quickly and then it sewed up again, Jenny figured that it was nothing and just went back to bed very shortly after that, though, the fire somehow started and she was told to the wake a third time by the smell of smoke.

Now, when the corner had first told George and Jenny that the fire had been caused by faulty wiring, they thought it was possible, so they didn't question it. But a couple of weeks after the fire, when one of their kids suddenly came across a hard, dark green rubber object in the ruins of their home that looked like some sort of firebomb, they quickly sort of putting two and two together.

The strange sound that Jenny had heard that night had probably been someone throwing the firebomb onto the roof, which made sense since the fire had abruptly started soon after that. And when a local bus driver also came out and said that he had seen some people throwing what looked like, quote, balls of fire at the saw at his home on the night of the fire, Jordan Jenny became even more certain that this had been a targeted attack.

In the weeks and months after the fire. The sheer amount of evidence supporting this just seemed to keep on growing. First, immediately after the fire, there were several reported sightings of the missing older children, including a local claiming to have seen them in the back of a car driving away while the fire had still been ongoing, as well as a woman from a neighboring town claiming that she had seen the children eating breakfast at a hotel with some unfriendly looking Italian men.

Next, one of George and Jenny's neighbors claimed that shortly before the fire they had seen a strange man with a block and tackle near the Souders property. Since blocking tactics are often used for removing engines from cars. That could have explained why both of Georgia's trucks had suddenly stopped working that night. Then a telephone repairman who was hired to fix the burnt phone lines under their home told Jordan Jenny that his phone lines actually had been burnt.

They had been caught by someone. That was why neither their phones nor other neighbors phones had been able to call the fire department that night. And then after that, which is louder, the one that had been missing from the side of the house was discovered at the bottom of a hill around 75 feet away. Since George hadn't been there recently, it became clear that someone had intentionally misplaced it to make sure that George couldn't use it during the fire.

With all this mounting evidence, Jordan Jenny soon began trying to find someone to help them investigate the kidnaping of their children. With so many strange coincidences and unexplained events relating to the fire, no one could say that something wasn't fishy. Jenny had even gone out of her way to burn small parcels of animal bones and to talk to the employees at the local crematorium to prove that there was pretty much zero chance that such a small house fire could have completely burned her children's bodies to nothing.

Not to mention not a single person at the scene of the fire had ever reported smelling, burning flesh. But when George and Jenny sent a letter about their case to the FBI, they were told that although federal agents would like to help out with the investigation, they needed permission from the local authorities to do so. And the federal police and fire departments had, for some reason refused to give that permission, despite just how suspicious that was.

George and Jenny couldn't really do anything about it, so they had no choice but to try to find someone local as such. Two years after the fire in 1947, they hired a private investigator named C.C. Tinsley to look into everything. And shortly after C.C. began his investigation, he uncovered two more highly suspicious details in the case. The first detail was, for whatever reason, the life insurance salesman who had literally threatened to burn down George and Jenny's home had somehow been a member of the jury that had ruled the fire as an accident.

The second detail was that although the fire chief, Archie Morris, had originally told George and Jenny that no remains of the children had been found, there was a rumor that he actually had found something, a human heart in the ashes of the fire, although the first he told was extremely shocking. The second detail was just too strange to ignore and George and Jenny needed answers.

So they, along with C.C., decided to go confront the fire chief about these rumors. When they arrived, Fire Chief Morris admitted that it was true that he had found a heart at the scene, but said that he had placed the heart inside a metal box and buried it in the ashes. When George and Jenny asked him if he could show them where the heart had been buried, the fire chief agreed and led them back to the spot where they then dug the metal box.

Up inside the metal box was indeed an object that looked like a heart. But when George, Jenny and C.C. took the object to the local funeral director, they were told that it wasn't a heart after all, but just some beef liver. When confronted about this, the fire chief sheepishly admitted that he had actually intentionally placed the beef liver at the scene, since it seemed just how distressed George and Jenny had been over not finding any trace of their children.

He had apparently hoped that they would find the beef liver and think that it was a heart and receive closure from it, but that just didn't help George and Jenny at all in finding out what started this fire and where their children were. And since the lead on the life insurance salesman also soon went cold, they were back at square one in August 1949, four entire years after the fire.

George Anthony decided to hire a pathologist named Oscar Hunter to do a deeper, more thorough search of the dirt at the site of the fire. Now, the reason that they did this was because an extremely detailed search had never actually been conducted. Although the fire chief had told George Anthony right after the fire to leave the ruins of their home undisturbed so that the firefighters could come back and conduct a more detailed search later.

JORDAN Jenny was so traumatized from the incident and from losing their children that a couple of days after the fire, they simply could not bear the sight of their destroyed home anymore. So they had the entire area bulldozed over with dirt to convert it into a memorial garden for their lost children. As a result, since George and Jenny obviously had their reasons to not trust the first search that the firefighters had done, they now decided to look into it on their own.

This turned out to be a really good idea, since that's the pathologist was excavating the dirt from the site of the fire the George Anthony saw. He found several small bone fragments that were determined to be human vertebrae. But when these bone fragments were sent over to a specialist, it was determined that they were all actually from just a single person and that the age of this person should have been around 16 or 17 years old since the oldest of George and Jenny's missing children had only been 14, it was extremely unlikely that the bones belonged to any of them.

And when it was discovered that none of the bones showed any sign of exposure to flames, either, it was concluded that they had likely just come from the dirt that George had used to bulldoze the site of his home. But although the bones themselves hadn't been too helpful to the investigation, the news of their discovery soon began to attract national attention to the case of the missing solider children.

This was so much so that the West Virginia legislature actually decided to hold two hearings on the case the next year in 1950, and the FBI even decided that it actually did have jurisdiction over the case as a possible interstate kidnaping and began helping out with the investigation. But although for possibly the very first time, things finally seemed extremely promising for George and Jenny, unfortunately it wouldn't last.

After two long years of chasing leads and coming up completely empty handed, the FBI decided to drop the case for good, believing that it couldn't be solved. Similarly, the West Virginia governor and the state's police superintendent also told George Anthony that the case was, quote unquote, hopeless before closing it at the state level as well. Seven entire years after the fire toward the Jenny, we're still nowhere closer to catching the people who had set the fire and to finding the kidnaped children.

It must have been an unbelievably demoralizing and depressing feeling. But still, despite everything, the couple refused to give up hope. They began putting up printed fliers with pictures of their children all around town in the neighboring areas, offering a $5,000 reward, around $58,000 today for any information that could lead to the case being solved. When that didn't well enough attention, they decided to put up a giant billboard near their house with the same information on it, and they even later decided to double the reward offer.

Soon, dozens of leads and reported sightings of the missing slaughtered children began coming in. A woman from Missouri claimed that Martha Slaughter was being held in a religious community there. A man from Texas claimed to have overheard two people at a bar talking about a fire. They had said a couple of years back on Christmas Eve in West Virginia.

Another woman from Texas claimed that she knew Louis Sauder and that he had accidentally revealed his identity to her one night after having too much to drink. But despite George personally visiting all of these people to investigate these leads, none of them proved to be significant. The closest that they got to actually potentially uncovering something was with the woman who claimed to know Louis Sauder.

When George went to talk to the man who was supposed to be Louis, the guy. Tonight, everything but for the rest of his life, George always suspected that the guy had been lying to save George and his family from any potential harm. It wasn't until 1968, 23 years after the fire and 16 years after they had put up their billboard that the first genuinely credible tip finally came in.

When George was checking the mail that day, he found a letter addressed to Janey with no return address. However, inside the letter was a photo of a man in his mid-twenties who strongly resembled an older version of their missing son, Louis Sauder. The man had the same dark, brown eyes, dark, curly hair, strong straight nose and upward, tilting left eyebrow.

And if that was not already convincing enough on the back of the photo was a handwritten note that read, quote, Louis Sauder, I love brother Frankie little boys. 890132 or 35 convinced that this had to be their missing son and that there's proof their children were still alive. JORDAN Jenny immediately hired a private detective to go to Central City, Kentucky.

The place where the letter had been postmarked to investigate, however, to the incredible shock, this detective was never heard from again. Shortly afterwards, in 1969, George Sauder passed away at the age of 74. Although Jenny and the rest of her children tried their best to continue searching for answers in the years after his death. In the end, they were unable to uncover anything new.

In 1989, Jenny Sauder passed away as well. After her death, the war in an old billboard near their old home was finally taken out for the entire years after it had been first put up. Having promised Jenny that they wouldn't let the story die, the remaining sort of children kept on investigating leads and sharing details on the case on the newly established Internet.

Since her dad's words had never actually revealed to them why he had left Italy, he saw two children begin to suspect that he may have been involved in some shady business there, which caused them to become a target of the Italian mafia. But regardless, with no concrete evidence to support anything, at the end of the day, just like their parents, they had no idea what really happened on that fateful night.

The last remaining member of the sordid family passed away in 2021, and this mystery will unfortunately likely never be solved. Take care, guys, and I'll see you all next week.