The Babs Switch School Fire: The Oklahoma Schoolhouse Fire That Turned Christmas Into a Funeral

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:20):
Welcome to Weird Darkness and Merry Christmas. I'm your creator
and host, Darren Marler. Here you will find ghost stories,
unsolved mysteries, and other stories of the strange and bizarre.
I'm always looking for new stories. You can share your
terrifying experiences at Weird Darkness dot com. I might use

(00:42):
them in a future episode. In this episode, the holidays
are supposed to be a time of happiness and celebration,
but instead one of the most haunting mysteries to ever
occur in West Virginia and perhaps even in America, began
the pre dawn hours of Christmas Day nineteen forty five.

(01:05):
That day would mark a vanishing, perhaps even a mass murder,
which has never been solved. As crowds filled the Iroquois
Theater in Chicago on that cold December day in nineteen
o three to see popular comic Eddie Foy in the
hit comedy Mister Bluebeard, they had no idea how close

(01:29):
they were to meeting their deaths. The holiday season of
nineteen twenty four was a brutal one in Bab's Switch, Oklahoma.
Then came Christmas Eve, when a fire broke out in
a one room schoolhouse dozens died on that cold night

(01:49):
and left a dark haunting that lingered behind for years.
And the holiday season of eighteen seventy six should have
been a joyous time for those in northern Ohio. Christmas
Day had just passed, and America's centennial year was coming
to an end with a New Year's celebration that was

(02:11):
only days away. However, on December twenty seven, the region
was blanketed by an intense winter storm that could have
been taken for an ominous sign that dark days were ahead,
but no one had any idea just how dark those
days would become. Now sit back, turn down the lights,

(02:35):
pour Samgnog, and come with me into this special Christmas
edition of Weird Darkness. The holiday season of nineteen twenty
four was a brutal one in Oklahoma. As Winter Souls

(03:00):
was marking the change of seasons, bitter cold swept across
the plains. Frigid temperatures raged south of western Canada like
a runaway freight train. Snow covered most of Oklahoma. The
roads were slippery, and the chill caused a run on
heating stoves, and warnings were sounded for railroad men, police officers,

(03:23):
and others. Who worked outdoors at night, and then came
Christmas Eve when a fire broke out in a one
room schoolhouse in Bab's Switch, located just a few miles
south of Hobart, Oklahoma. The tragedy is nearly forgotten today,
but at the time it turned Christmas into a mournful

(03:46):
holiday for the people of the region. Three dozen people
died on that cold night and left a dark haunting
that lingered behind for years. The evening of December twenty
five began with joy and laughter. The little school building
was packed with over two hundred students and families enjoying

(04:08):
the annual Christmas program. A Christmas tree decorated with lighted
candles stood at the front of the room. Beneath it
was a pile of presents that were going to be
handed out to children at the end of the evening.
The fire began when a teenage student dressed as Santa
Claus was removing presents from under the tree. He bumped

(04:29):
against a branch and one of the candles was knocked loose.
The flames ignited the sleeves of his suit, and things
quickly spun out of control. Fire ignited paper decorations, tinsel
and dry needles and spread quickly across the stage. In
a panic, people rushed to the building's single door, which

(04:51):
opened inward, as far too many doors to public buildings
did in those days. As more people piled against the
door prevented anyone from opening it, others rushed to the
windows for escape. Unfortunately, though the windows had recently been
fitted with bars to keep vandals out of the school,

(05:12):
a few men managed to break the glass and pass
smaller children to safety between the bars. A teacher, missus
Florence Hill, saved several of her students lives in this manner,
but she herself perished in the fire. When it was
all over, the fire had claimed thirty six lives, among

(05:33):
them several entire families. The dead and injured were transported
by car to Hobart, the nearest town of any size,
and a temporary morgue was set up in a downtown building.
As the numbers of the dead and injured thirty seven
people were taken to the Hobart hospital were counted. There

(05:53):
seemed to be one child that was not accounted for.
The child, a little three year old girl named Mary Eden's,
was reported as missing, but her body was never found her. Aunt,
Alice Noah, who escaped from the school but died a
few days later, claimed that she carried Mary out of

(06:14):
the building but handed her to someone she did not know.
Mary had simply disappeared without a trace in the wake
of the fire. The Bab's Switch fire led to stricter
building codes in Oklahoma, especially for schools. It was also
one of the catalysts for modern fire precautions against inward

(06:36):
opening doors, open flames, locked screens over windows, and a
lack of running water near public buildings. Those who died
that night probably saved the lives of future generations of
Oklahoma school children. As it happened, there was a strange
twist to the Bab's Switch story. In nineteen fifty seven,

(07:00):
a California woman named Grace Reynolds came forward and claimed
that she was actually Mary Eden's, the little girl presumed
killed in the nineteen twenty four fire. Mary had been
a toddler at the time, and her body was never found.
Reynald's story was that she was handed out the window

(07:20):
by her real mother into the arms of a childless
couple who assumed that none of her relatives survived the fire,
and informally adopted her and raised her as their own.
Reynolds became a minor celebrity, reuniting on the air with
the Edens family on Art Linkletter's House Party television show,

(07:40):
and later wrote a book about her experiences entitled Mary
Child of Tragedy, The Story of the Lost Child of
the nineteen twenty four Bab's Switch Fire. Sadly, though the
whole thing was a hoax, no one knows why Grace
Reynolds believed for Clay aimed to believe that she was

(08:01):
Mary Eden's. It's possible that she believed that she was adopted,
or that perhaps she learned of the fire and saw
a way to get attention by claiming to be the
missing little girl. Her motives remain a mystery in any case.
A local newspaper editor uncovered the hoax and informed Mary

(08:22):
Eden's father about what he had discovered. Mary's father asked
that the editor not publish his findings, as he believed
that his wife could not endure losing her child for
a second time. The editor respected his wishes and his
findings were not revealed until nineteen ninety nine. Even this

(08:43):
sad footnote to the fire was not the end of
the story. In nineteen twenty five, a new school was
built at the site, but closed in nineteen forty three
when the Babs Switch District was absorbed by the nearby
Hobart School District. A stone monument was placed at the scene,
bearing a short description of the fire and a list

(09:06):
of the dead. The dead that some say do not
rest in peace, but it's not the site of the
school where ghosts of the past are reportedly restless. The
bodies that were taken from the site were brought to
Hobart and placed in a temporary morgue which is now
the fire station and the short Grass Playhouse. It is

(09:29):
rumored that the ghost of a little boy has been
seen throughout the building, running around the fire truck bays
and scampering down hallways. There is also the ghost of
a little girl who has been seen on the stage
of the playhouse. Who these spectral children may be is unknown.
Half of the dead from the fire were children, and

(09:52):
none of them were recognizable. They had to be identified
by jewelry, dentures, and anything that might be unique to
a person. Two little brothers were identified by a toy
gun found lying next to one boy, and the belt
buckle of the other. The identities of the boy and
girl who remain at the place where the bodies were

(10:13):
taken after the fire remain a mystery, but we can
only hope that they have found a little piece since
their terrible deaths. On December thirtieth, nineteen oh three, one

(10:53):
of the most devastating fires in American history occurred at
Chicago's new Iroquois Theater during a standing room only matine
performance starring the popular comedian Eddie Foy. The fire claimed
the lives of more than six hundred people, including scores
of children who were packed into the place for the

(11:13):
afternoon show. The Iroquois Theater was much acclaimed even before
it opened. In addition to being absolutely fireproof, it was
a beautiful place, with an ornate lobby, grand staircases, and
a front facade that resembled a Greek temple with massive columns.
The theatre was designed to be safe. It had twenty

(11:37):
five exits that it was claimed could empty the building
in less than five minutes. The stage had also been
fitted with an asbestos curtain that could be quickly lowered
to protect the audience. All of this would have been
impressive if it had actually been installed, and if the
staff actually had any idea how to use the safety

(11:59):
devices that existed, and those were not even the worst problems.
Seats in the theater were wooden and stuffed with hemp
on attractive safety doors were hidden from sight, and gates
were locked across the entrance to the balcony during the
show so that those in the cheap seats wouldn't sneak
into the main theater. The building had no fire alarms,

(12:22):
and a myriad of other safety equipment had been forgotten
or simply ignored, leading to the ever popular Chicago payoffs
to officials who allowed the new theater to open on schedule. Anyway,
As crowds filled the theater on that cold December day
in nineteen o three, they had no idea how close

(12:43):
they were to meeting their deaths. The horrific events began
soon after the holiday crowd had packed into the theater
on that Wednesday afternoon to see a matinee performance of
the hit comedy Mister Bluebeard. The main floor and balcony
were packed. Dozens more were given standing room only tickets,

(13:03):
and they lined the rear walls of the theater around
the beginning of the second act, stage hands noticed a
spark descend from an overhead light and then watched some
scraps of burning paper fall down onto the stage. In moments,
flames began licking at the red velvet curtain, and while
a collective gasp went up from the audience, no one

(13:26):
rushed for the exits. It's believed the audience merely thought
the fire was part of the show. A few moments later,
a flaming set crashed down onto the stage, leaving little
doubt that something had gone wrong. A stage hand attempted
to lower the asbestos curtain that would protect the audience.

(13:47):
It snagged halfway down, sending a wall of flame out
into the audience. Actors on stage panicked and ran for
the doors. Chaos filled the auditorium as the audience became
began rushing for the theatre's Randolph Street entrance with children
in tow. The audience members immediately clogged the gallery and

(14:07):
upper balconies. The aisles had become impassable, and as the
lights went out, the crowd milled about in blind terror.
The auditorium began to fill with heat and smoke, and
screams echoed off the walls. And ceilings through it all,
the mass continued to move forward, but when the crowd
reached the doors, they could not open them. The doors

(14:30):
had been designed to swing inward rather than outward. The
crush of people prevented those in the front from opening
the doors. Many of those who died not only burned,
but suffocated from the smoke and the crush of bodies. Later,
as the police removed the charred remains from the theater,
they discovered that a number of victims had been trampled

(14:53):
in the panic. One dead woman's face even bore the
mark of a shoe heel. Backstage, theater employees and cast
members opened a rear set of double doors, which sucked
the wind inside and caused flames to fan out under
the asbestos curtain and into the auditorium. A second gust

(15:14):
of wind created a fireball that shot out into the
galleries and balconies that were filled with people. All of
the stage drops were now on fire, and as they burned,
they engulfed the supposedly non combustible asbestos curtain, and when
it collapsed, it plunged into the seats of the theater.
The fire burned for almost fifteen minutes, before an alarm

(15:37):
was raised at a box down the street. From outside,
there appeared to be nothing wrong. It was so quiet
that the first fire fighters to arrive thought it was
a false alarm. This changed when they tried to open
the auditorium doors and found they could not there were
too many bodies stacked up against them. They were only

(15:58):
able to gain access by actually pulling the bodies out
of the way with pike poles, peeling them off one another,
and then climbing over the stacks of corpses. It took
only ten minutes to put out the blaze, as the
intense heat inside had already eaten up anything that would
still burn. The firefighters made their way into the blackened

(16:20):
auditorium and were met with only silence and the smell
of death. They called out for survivors, but no one
answered their cry. The gallery and upper balconies sustained the
greatest loss of life, as the patrons had been trapped
by locked doors. At the top of the stairways, the

(16:41):
firefighters found two hundred bodies stacked there, as many as
ten deep. Those who escaped had literally ripped the metal
bars from the front of the balcony and had jumped
onto the crowds below. Even then, most of these met
their deaths at a lower level. A few who made
it to the fire escape door behind the top balcony

(17:04):
found that the iron staircase was missing. In its place
was a platform that plunged about one hundred feet to
the cobblestone alley below. Across the alley behind the theater,
painters were working on a building occupied by Northwestern Universities
Dental School. When they realized what was happening at the theater,

(17:25):
they quickly erected a makeshift bridge using ladders and wooden planks,
which they extended across the alley to the fire escape platform.
Reports vary as to how many they saved, but several
people managed to climb across the bridge. Several plunged to
their deaths as they tried to escape across the ladder,

(17:46):
but many times that number jumped from the ledge or
were pushed by the milling crowd that pressed through the
doors behind them. The passageway behind the theater is still
referred to as death Alley to day, after nearly one
hundred fifty victims were found there. When it was all
over five hundred seventy two people died in the fire,

(18:09):
and Moore died later, bringing the eventual death toll up
to six hundred two, including two hundred twelve children. For
nearly five hours, police officers, firemen, and even newspaper reporters
carried out the dead. Anxious relatives sifted through the remains
searching for loved ones. Other bodies were taken away by

(18:33):
police wagons and ambulances and transported to a temporary morgue
at Marshall Fields on State Street. Medical examiners and investigators
worked all through the night. The city went into mourning.
Newspapers carried lists and photographs of the dead, and the
mayor banned all New Year's celebrations. An investigation into the

(18:56):
fire brought to light a number of troubling facts. The
investigation discovered that the supposedly fireproof asbestos curtain was really
made from cotton and other combustible materials. It would have
never saved any one at all. In addition to not
having any fire alarms in the building, the owners had

(19:17):
decided that sprinklers were two unsightly and too costly, and
had never had been installed. To make matters worse, the
management also established a policy to keep non paying customers
from slipping into the theater during a performance. They quietly
bolted nine pair of iron panels over the rear doors

(19:37):
and installed padlocked accordion style gates at the top of
the interior, second and third floor stairway landings. And just
as tragic was the idea they came up with to
keep the audience from being distracted during a show, they
ordered all of the exit lights to be turned off.
The investigation led to a cover up by a fiials

(20:00):
from the city and Fire department, who denied all knowledge
of fire code violations. They blamed the inspectors, who had
overlooked the problems in exchange for free theater passes. A
grand jury indicted a number of individuals, including the theater owners,
fire officials, and even the mayor. No one was ever

(20:21):
charged with a criminal act. Families of the dead filed
nearly two hundred seventy five civil lawsuits against the theatre,
but no money was ever collected. The Iroquois fire still
ranks today as one of the deadliest in history. Nevertheless,
the building was repaired and reopened briefly in nineteen oh

(20:44):
four as hide in Beeman's Music Hall, and then in
nineteen oh five as the Colonial Theater. In nineteen twenty four,
the building was raised to make room for a new theater,
the Oriental, but the facade of the Iroquois was used
in its construction. The Oriental operated at what is now

(21:04):
twenty four West Randolph Street until the middle part of
nineteen eighty one, when it fell into disrepair and was
closed down. It opened again as the home to a
wholesale electronics dealer for a time, and then went dark again.
The restored theater is now part of the Civic Tower
building and is next door to the restored Delaware Building.

(21:28):
It reopened as the Ford Center for the Performing Arts
in nineteen ninety eight, but this has not stopped the
tales of the old Iroquois Theater from being told, especially
in light of more recent and more ghostly events. According
to recent accounts from people who live and work in
this area, Death Alley is not as empty as it

(21:51):
appears to be. The narrow passageway which runs behind the
Oriental Theatre is rarely used today, except for the occasional
delivery truck or alone pedestrian who's in a hurry to
get somewhere else. It is largely deserted. But why? The
stories say that those few who do pass through the

(22:12):
alley often find themselves very uncomfortable and unsettled there. They
say that faint cries are sometimes heard in the shadows,
and that some have reported being touched by unseen hands
and by eerie cold spots that seem to come from
nowhere and vanish just as quickly. Could the alleyway and

(22:35):
the surrounding area actually be haunted? And do the spirits
of those who met their tragic ends inside of the
burning theater still linger there? Perhaps? Or perhaps the strange
sensations experienced here are ghosts of the past of another kind,
a chilling remembrance of a terrifying event that will never

(22:58):
be completely forgot. The holiday season of eighteen seventy six
should have been a joyous time for those in northern Ohio.

(23:22):
Christmas Day had just passed in America's centennial year was
coming to an end with a New Year's celebration there
was only days away. However, on December twenty seven, the
region was blanketed by an intense winter storm that showed
no signs of letting up. This could have been taken

(23:42):
for an ominous sign that dark days were ahead, but
no one had any idea just how dark those days
would become. In the wake of that winter storm, the
small town of Ashtubula, located in the northeast corner of Ohio,
was a white waste land of snow and ice. A

(24:03):
blizzard had hammered the little town with more than twenty
inches of snow and wind that whipped along at more
than fifty miles an hour. Despite the weather, the town
train depot was bustling anxious passengers, many leaving town for
the holidays or waiting for trains to arrive. Crowded into
the station, many of them awaited the arrival of the

(24:26):
Number five Pacific Express that was running more than two
hours late from Erie, Pennsylvania. Weather delays had kept it
in the Erie station until after six p m. Many
of those waiting in the depot had friends and family
on the train or needed to make the connection to
continue their own journey. While things may have been anxious

(24:47):
in the station, the scene was much more relaxed and
festive aboard the Number five train. The warm and snug
passengers were seemingly oblivious to the frigid conditions outside, as
two locomotives pulled two express cars, two baggage cars, one
smoking car, two passenger cars, and three sleeping cars along

(25:07):
at a steady ten miles per hour. The passengers ate
and chatted, played cards, or slept peacefully in their berths.
Others prepared to leave the train at Ashtabula or warmed
themselves near the coal fired heaters that provided heat for
all of the cars. Except for the smoking car, which
had an old fashioned wood stove, all of the cars

(25:30):
were cozily lit by oil lamps, providing the illusion of
being completely separated from the storm outside. The exact number
of passengers aboard the train remains a mystery to this day,
but it is believed that there were at least one
hundred twenty eight passengers and nineteen crew members on the
Number five. As it steamed onto the railway bridge that

(25:52):
spanned a Stabula Creek. Daniel McGuire, the engineer of the
first locomotive, the Socrates, was the first to realize that
there was a problem. As the engine crossed onto the bridge,
he pulled the throttle out and increased the speed of
the train. They needed the extra power to drive the
train through the two feet of snow on the tracks.

(26:15):
And to push against the gale force winds that buffeted
the train on the open bridge. But as the Socrates
approached the western abutment of the bridge, McGuire had the
sudden sensation that the engine was running uphill. He looked
back and was stunned with horror as he saw the
rest of the train, the second engine, the Columbia, and

(26:37):
eleven cars collapsing with the bridge as it plunged more
than eighty feet downward to the creek below. McGuire pulled
the throttle out all the way and the Socrates surged ahead.
He broke the coupling with the second engine, the Columbia,
and somehow coaxed the locomotive to safety. As he pulled
the brakes on the other side, McGuire heard the chilling

(26:59):
sound sounds of crashing and twisting steel coming from the
swirling darkness of the storm. The Estabula depot lay just
one thousand feet beyond the bridge, and William Alsell, a
telegraph operator, was the first person at the station to
realize what had happened. He had hoped to hitch a
ride through town on the train when it left the station,

(27:22):
as he had heard the whistle of the number five
as it approached the bridge. He was actually walking toward
it when it started across the bridge. When he caught
a glimpse of its lights. He turned to head back
to the depot and gather his belongings when he heard
the horrific crash. He spun around just in time to
see the lights from the sleeping cars as they fell

(27:44):
and then vanished into the darkness. He immediately began running
to the bridge, only to discover that the structure was
no longer there. The experiences of the passengers and crew
aboard the train were even more horryle Miss Mary and Shepherd,
a survivor of the disaster, was in her sleeper berth

(28:05):
and later recalled that she knew something was wrong when
the bell rope snapped in two, with one piece smashing
an oil lamp, the other knocking over a burning candle.
A moment later, she heard a thudding noise that sounded
as though the train wheels had jumped the track and
were now riding on the wooden ties. This was followed
by a tremendous shattering sound, as if all of the

(28:28):
glass in the entire train had suddenly broken at once.
The train car plunged downward, and miss Shepherd distinctly remembered
the cry of someone in the car as he wailed,
we're going down. The scream was followed by the sickening
sensation of falling, and she desperately braced herself outside the
sleeping berth. The air was filled with seats, lamps, and

(28:51):
human bodies as the car pitched into space. Seconds later,
the sleeper hit the rest of the number five cars,
and all of them crashed into the freezing waters of
the creek. Surrounded by the broken bodies of those who
did not survive the fall, Marian struggled to get out
of her berth and fight her way to safety. She

(29:12):
was in shock and terrified by the screams of the
injured around her in the darkness. Those who were alive
also tried to get out, and cries were mixed with
the terror of drowning in the icy water. As it happened,
the fear of drowning was second only to the danger
of being burned alive. The cars had fallen in an
upright position and were now stacked and smashed upon one another,

(29:35):
with the bottom layer below the surface of Astabula Creek
within five minutes of the wreck, the last car, with
its heater still burning, caught on fire. People like Marion,
both dazed and bleeding, managed to stumble out of the
cars and saw the winter night illuminated by flames as
the cars caught fire one at a time. Within just

(29:58):
a few minutes, the remains of the cars and single
locomotive had turned into a blazing inferno. The heaters, lamps,
and the heavily varnished woodwork of the cars combined to
engulf the mass of twisted wood and metal into a
tower of flames. The survivors of the disaster would never
forget what they saw that night. Most of them worked

(30:21):
frantically alongside a rescue crew from town as they tried
to pull the wounded and the dead from the burning cars. Finally,
the heat grew so intense that they were driven back,
unaware that many of those who had already been rescued
were now sinking into the waters of the creek. As
they cried for help, the cold water washed into the wreck,

(30:43):
drowning many of those still trapped there, perhaps mercifully when
faced with burning to death. One woman, later recalled by
engineer Daniel MacGuire, was trapped in the wreckage as the
fire burned toward her, and she begged with someone to
cut off for legs and pull her out before the
flames reached her. Tragically, no one made it to her

(31:05):
in time, and McGuire could only watch helplessly as she
burned to death. McGuire's friend, Columbia engineer Peter Levinborough, had
been crushed in the engine when it fell. He died
on the way to the hospital in Cleveland. William Alsill,
the telegraph operator, had fallen and stumbled down the snow

(31:27):
covered hill to the wreck just moments after seeing the
train plunge to its doom, kicking out windows. He pulled
wounded and unconscious passengers to safety and fought bravely to
keep them from the fire and icy waters. Meanwhile, Daniel McGuire,
after bringing these socrates to a halt, sprinted to the
depot with the terrible news before returning to the scene.

(31:50):
A minute later, Brakeman A l Stone, who had escaped
from the last car, limped into the station. He was
badly hurt and bleeding, but managed to sent a telegraph
to Erie in case another train was following behind the
Number five. Within minutes, every bell in Astubula was sounding
the alarm for firemen and volunteers. The situation surrounding the fire,

(32:14):
which killed more people than the initial wreck, has been
a subject of mystery and debate since eighteen seventy six.
Although the Astubula Fire Department managed to get one engine
down to the fire, no hoses were ever connected, and
no water, save for a few buckets of melted snow,
was ever directed at the burning debris. It was rumored

(32:37):
afterwards that officials from the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern
Railroad forbade anyone to put out the fire. The reason,
according to rumors, was that the company's insurance liability would
be less if the passengers were not only dead, but
burned beyond recognition as well. There was no truth to this,

(32:58):
but it added to the finger pointing in that followed.
The less dramatic reasons were the confusing conditions at the scene.
No one had ever seen anything like it before, and
when Astubula Fire Chief Ga Knapp arrived on the scene
forty five minutes after the crash, possibly intoxicated, he found
a scene of total pandemonium. There was no organized effort

(33:22):
to do anything passengers and rescuers were simply trying to
save anyone they could, and were hampered by the fire,
the water, smoke, snow, and treacherous terrain. Efforts were further
impeded by the hundreds of spectators who had gathered, and
by the activities of thieves who boldly robbed the wounded

(33:42):
and helpless passengers. The terror at the scene was increased
by the terrible snapping noise created by the paint on
the train cars as it ignited. Fire Chief Nap gazed
in bewilderment at the wreck and asked train station agent
George Strong which side of the burning mass he and
his men should put water on. Strong, more concerned about

(34:05):
the advancing flames killing people than where the fire department
should direct their water, told him to worry about getting
the people out instead. This was likely the right decision,
but it never mattered, for no actual orders were given
by Nap, Strong or any Astubula officials that night. The
firemen simply pitched into the efforts of the rescue workers

(34:28):
and concentrated their efforts on pulling the wounded from their
fiery and watery fates. The fire eventually burned itself out
and by daybreak the train was a blackened pile of
burned metal, scorched debris, and roasted human flesh. It took
more than a week to clean it all up. Although

(34:49):
one hundred fifty men were eventually sent to the scene
by the railroad, they never found all of those who
were missing, nor did they identify all of the dead.
The main problem was that no one had any idea
just how many passengers had been on the train. The
conductor's records showed one hundred twenty eight passengers, but others

(35:11):
claimed upwards of two hundred men were on board when
the wreck occurred. The best estimate is that eighty nine
were killed and sixty three were injured, five of whom
died later. There were nineteen corpses or parts of corpses
that were never identified. A temporary morgue was set up
in the Lake Shore and Michigan's Southern Freight Depot, and

(35:34):
weeping loved ones searched through the boxes of remains for
weeks afterward. Many of them were identified only by jewelry
that somehow managed to escape the notice of thieves at
the disaster site. After funeral services at two Estabula churches
were conducted on January nineteenth, eighteen seventy seven. The unidentified

(35:55):
dead were buried in nearby Chestnut Grove Cemetery. A monument
was created for them in the eighteen nineties, largely funded
by Governor William McKinley and Lucretia Garfield, widow of the
late President. The investigations into the disaster began as the
fires were still smouldering At nine a m. On the

(36:17):
day after the accident. An inquest was convened under the
authority of Justice of the Peace, Edward W. Richards. It
lasted for sixty eight days and dozens of witnesses were heard.
The jury in the case reached a series of eight verdicts,
all highly critical of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern
Railroad and the rescuers at the scene. The verdicts are

(36:39):
still considered controversial today. They ruled that the railroad was
entirely responsible for the accident and the deaths and injuries
resulting from it. The jury stated that the company had
wilfully designed, constructed, and directed a fatally flawed bridge, and
then had failed to adequately inspect it for the next

(37:01):
eleven years leading up to the disaster. Additionally, they also
found that the railroad, in violation of Ohio's law, had
failed to warm the passenger's cars with a heating apparatus
so constructed that the fire in it will be immediately
extinguished whenever the cars are thrown from the track. Finally,
the jury blamed the fire department and the railroad officials

(37:23):
at the disaster scene for many of the fire deaths,
claiming that they should have put out the fire rather
than try to rescue trapped victims. None of those accused
by the jury took it lightly. The Lake Shore and
Michigan Southern Railroad eventually paid off about five hundred thousand
dollars in damage claims with little dispute. However, the company

(37:46):
refused to admit responsibility for the bridge failure, arguing that
the wreck was caused by either the Columbia leaving the track,
a broken rail, or incredibly, a tornado that swept down
and wiped out the bridge. The most vocal in rejecting
blame was A. MESA. B. Stone Junior, a Cleveland millionaire

(38:06):
and railroad mogul, who had designed and built the bridge
until the day he died. He insisted the bridge had
been sound and that it had been human error or
an act of God that caused the disaster. Stone was wrong,
but the truth was more complex than either side would
have allowed. The original railroad bridge over a Stabula Creek

(38:29):
had been a wooden one. In eighteen sixty three, A.
Mesa Stone made plans to replace it with a design
of his own. The key section was the middle span,
a one hundred fifty four foot piece that sat on
two stone abutments that were put up after an extensive
fill had narrowed the river valley. It was a variation

(38:49):
on the long used wood and iron truss, but Stone's
new design used an all iron structure, a type that
had never been tried and as it turned out, would
now be replicated. The new structure was installed in the
fall of eighteen sixty five and was a series of
fourteen panels that were protected against the force produced by

(39:10):
the weight of the trains by enormous diagonal eyebeams. All
of the steel in the bridge was produced at the
Cleveland Rolling Mills, which was owned by Stone's brother andros.
The crew installing the bridge ran into many problems, and
at one point it had to be entirely taken down
and then put back up again at great expense. When

(39:33):
Joseph Tomlinson, an engineer on the project, warned Stone about
the stress on the trusses, Stone fired him. When completed,
the bridge was tested by the weight of six locomotives
and pronounced safe. After the disaster, many would remark that
it was not so surprising that the bridge fell, but
that it managed to stay up for eleven years without

(39:56):
mishapp It was inspected four times each year by railroad officials,
who reported no problems, except for the suspicious snapping noise
that trained engineers sometimes heard as they traveled over the bridge.
Also among the details missed by inspectors was the fact
that the metal on the ends of the beams had

(40:17):
been crudely filed down to make them fit. If inspector
Charles Collins, who looked at the bridge just ten days
before the calamity and found no problems, had gotten down
among the eye beams and had seen what many others
saw when the ruined bridge was on the ground two
months later, he would have shut it down immediately. Several

(40:37):
of the eye beams were as much as three inches
out of alignment at their juncture with the bearing blocks.
Given that the essence of the design was the connection
of all of the parts. The displacement of the eye
beams meant that it was just a matter of time
before something horrible occurred. Amesa. Stone refused to admit guilt, though,

(40:58):
and was especially eric when questioned by Special Investigative Committee
of the Ohio Legislature on January eighteenth, eighteen seventy seven.
Not only had the bridge been safe, he insisted, but
it had been designed to be stronger than it needed
to be. As for the stoves that set the cars
on fire, he insisted that he had examined every other

(41:21):
type of stove that was available and had dismissed them
as unsuitable. The stoves that he had used, manufactured by Baker,
had simply been the best. No stove could be designed
to extinguish itself in case of an accident. In his
final opinion, he stated that the train had jumped the
tracks and in turn had demolished the bridge. Inspector Charles

(41:45):
Collins was the mirror opposite of Stone. The man who
had recently inspected the bridge reportedly wept like a baby
when he saw the wreckage and loss of life in
the Estabula Valley. Although he testified in public that he
all we thought the bridge was safe, there were whispers
that he told a different story to those who were
close to him. Some maintained that he had been forced

(42:09):
to give favorable reports about the bridge by the company,
and that he often said he prayed it will be
a freight and not a passenger train that fell when
the bridge finally went down. Collins took most of the
blame for the company after the disaster, and there was
no question that he blamed himself for the accident. Three

(42:29):
days after he testified to the Special Committee, he was
found dead in his bed at his home on Seneca
Street in Cleveland. He had blown his brains out with
a pistol hours after he completed his testimony. Fate eventually
caught up with a mesa stone as well. Although he
never accepted any responsibility for the accident and avoided personal

(42:52):
legal consequences for it, there's no question that he was
hurt by the public perception of him as a murderer. Bubermot,
never a happy one to begin with, became even darker
after business reverses and then ill health followed in the
wake of the Estabula disaster. His only son had drowned
while he was a student at Yale, and Stone had

(43:14):
been plagued with stomach pains and insomnia, sleeping as little
as two hours a night. By eighteen eighty three he
had endured all that he could stand, and on the
afternoon of May eleventh, he locked himself in his bathroom
and fired a bullet through his heart. When Stone's wife
discovered the bathroom door locked and no response when she knocked,

(43:36):
she had the butler climb through the transom. Stone was
discovered lying in the bathtub, half dressed, a silver plated
Smith and Wesson revolver by his side. There was little
to be seen today where the terrible events of December
eighteen seventy six took place. The river now flows beneath
an ordinary viaduct, and it is impossible now to imagine

(43:58):
the horror, fear, and death that took place there. In
spite of this, some mysteries do remain. According to some,
the number five train was said to have been carrying
as much as two million dollars in gold bullion on
that cold December night. If it was, all of it
was lost in the valley below, and remains there today,

(44:21):
still waiting for someone to find it. Whether there is
lost treasure in the valley or not, there are no
ghosts there. Those who lost their lives have strangely not
been found at the place where their lives ended so tragically,
but rather at this dark granite obelisk that marks the
common grave, where visitors to the graveyard have reported seeing

(44:43):
specters walk about. The wraiths, often seen in period warm
weather clothing, wander about carrying carpet bags and baskets. Screams
are sometimes heard in the darkness, and some claim a
burning smell often sweeps through the air. Nearby, just a
short distance away from the mass grave, is the ornate

(45:06):
Gothic mausoleum of Charles Collins, the luckless inspector who had
missed the fatal flaws in the Estabula Bridge. It is
ironic that he would be entombed so close to the
graves of those whose death he inadvertently caused, and not surprisingly,
his ghost is said to haunt this place too. According

(45:27):
to the stories, the spectral figure of a man has
been seen near the tomb. He often appears with his
face in his hands, weeping bitterly. I'm sorry, I'm so
very sorry. He cries, wringing his hands in torment, and
then he vanishes, never finding the forgiveness that he so

(45:48):
desperately craves. The holidays are supposed to be a time

(46:22):
of happiness and celebration, but instead, one of the most
haunting mysteries to ever occur in West Virginia and perhaps
even in America, began during the pre dawn hours of
Christmas Day nineteen forty five. That day would mark a vanishing,
perhaps even a mass murder, which has never been solved.

(46:46):
On that cold Christmas night, five children seemed to have
been lost in a mysterious fire that destroyed their home.
But were they Their bodies were never found in the ruins,
and the children were later sighted in various places, creating
a puzzling, complex mystery that is as strange as anything

(47:08):
that could be found in detective fiction. What happened to
the Solder children? Did they die in the fire or
were they kidnapped for unknown reasons? And if they were,
why has no trace of them ever been found. The
Sawters would continue their search for the missing children for

(47:30):
nearly fifty years, going to their graves with the mystery
still unsolved. It was the holiday season in the West
Virginia countryside near Fayetteville. A light snow was on the ground,
and all seemed right with the world. George Sowter Senior
and his wife Jenny were the proud parents of ten

(47:50):
children and lived in a new home outside of town. George,
a fifty year old Italian emigrant, had recently started a
new coal trucking firm from his home, and it was
already prospering. One of the Sotter's sons was in the army,
but because World War II had ended several months earlier,
he was out of danger. The rest of the children

(48:11):
were celebrating the season at home with their parents. The
Solter children opened their presence on Christmas Eve, including toys
that had been purchased by seventeen year old Marian from
the dime store where she worked in Fayetteville. George went
to bed early that night, and so did the two
older boys who worked for him in the coal hauling business,

(48:32):
John aged twenty three and George Junior, aged sixteen. The
other children, Maurice fourteen, Martha twelve, Lewis ten, Jennie eight,
and Betty five, all said they were too excited to sleep,
but finally turned in around ten p m. Jenny took
two year old Sylvia to bed with her soon after,

(48:54):
looking forward to a good night's sleep before the holiday
festivities of the next day. But Jenny was not going
to get a good night's sleep, not that night, not
for the rest of her life. In the account that follows,
I have attempted to chronicle everything that I know that
happened to the Sodders over the course of the next hours, days,

(49:18):
and even years, No matter how insignificant or strange that
it seems, there was something very unusual at work in
their lives, and what it may have been, no one
can or is willing to say. Jenny was roused from
her sleep the first time shortly after midnight by a

(49:38):
ringing telephone in George's home office downstairs. It was very
unusual for anyone to call the office line at such
a late hour, so Jenny got up and answered it.
The caller was a woman who apologized for dialing a
wrong number. Jenny accepted her apology and returned to bed.
Soon she drifted back off, but only a half hour

(50:02):
passed before she was awakened again. This time, she heard
a sound like a heavy object landing on the roof
of the house. There was a loud thud, and then
it bumped and jostled its way from the highest pitch
of the roof to the gutter. She waited for the
sound to be repeated, but when it wasn't, she went
back to sleep. About thirty minutes later, she woke again.

(50:27):
She wasn't sure what was wrong, and then she smelled smoke.
Leaving her bedroom to investigate, Jenny found that flames were
already spreading through George's office. She rushed back to the
master bedroom, where her husband was sleeping, and they shouted
upstairs to rouse John and George Junior, who shared a
room in the attic. George also shouted toward the other

(50:50):
bedrooms on the second floor and thought that he heard
all of the children answering. John and George Junior bade
it downstairs and out of the house with their parents,
may Anne and little Sylvia, but the other five children
never came out. Now frantic, George rushed back into the
burning house and found that the only staircase was completely

(51:12):
engulfed in flames. The blaze was swiftly spreading through the
rest of the house. He yelled loudly up the stairs
but there was no reply. If the children were up there,
he realized they would have been screaming and crying by now,
so he assumed that they had somehow made it out.
He raced outside, but they were not there. Instantly he

(51:36):
made the decision to use a ladder and to get
the children out of the upper windows. He ran around
the house to retrieve the ladder that he kept there,
but it was gone. The ladder was later found to
have been thrown down an embankment seventy five feet from
the house, which is not where it had been left
the evening before. George then seized on another idea. He

(51:59):
would draw one of his coal trucks up to the
house and stand on top of it to reach the windows,
but both trucks, each of which had run perfectly a
few hours before, refused to start. Mary and Sowter ran
to a neighbor's house to telephone the Fayetteville Fire Department,
but the neighbor could not get an operator to assist her.

(52:20):
Direct calls could not be made in the area at
the time, all of them had to be operator connected.
At one am, another neighbor drove past the scene, saw
the blaze and hurried down the road to use a
telephone at a nearby tavern, but again no operator responded. Finally,
he drove into town and got Chief F. J. Morris

(52:42):
on the line, informing him that the solder house was
burning and children were inside. But even after this call,
the fire department did not arrive until eight a m.
Seven hours after they learned of the blaze. The lapse
was explained by the department's lack of man power during
the war and by the chief's inability to drive Fayetteville's

(53:05):
fire truck. Morris had to wait until he could track
down a qualified driver, and Fayetteville didn't have a fire
siren in nineteen forty five, so they had to rely
on a phone tree. An operator would call one firefighter,
then another, and another, but with no operators seemingly on duty,
the calls took hours to complete. By the time the

(53:28):
firefighters arrived, the sold home had been reduced to a
crumble of ruins over a smoking, ash filled basement. George
and Jenny were heartbroken, assuming that their five missing children
had died in the fire, but evidence soon emerged to
point in other directions. A brief search of the ruins

(53:51):
ended at ten a m. On Christmas Day, with Chief
Morris telling the Solers that no trace of the children
could be found. He suggested that the fire was hot
enough to completely cremate their remains, and he instructed the
family to leave the site as it was pending a
more thorough search. George waited for four days, then obtained

(54:14):
a bulldozer and covered the basement with five feet of dirt,
explaining that he planned to plant flowers and preserve the
site as a memorial to the children. A coroner's inquest
stated that the fire was accidental and blamed it on
faulty wiring. Death certificates were issued for the Solder children
on December thirty, but were they actually dead? Today we

(54:40):
know that the fire, which leveled the Solder home in
about half an hour, never reached the temperature required for
the total cremation of human remains. That would have taken
two to three hours and would have required a temperature
of fourteen hundred to eighteen hundred degrees. In fact, various
household appliances found in the burned out basement were still recognizable.

(55:03):
Strangers still a telephone lineman summoned to the Solder home
site reported that the telephone line had not been burned through,
but rather had been cut fourteen feet off the ground
and two feet from the nearest utility pole. Neighbors directed
the police to a man whom they saw at the
scene of the fire stealing an automotive block and tackle.

(55:26):
He pled guilty to the theft, but denied any role
in the fire, although he did admit to cutting the
telephone wire, allegedly mistaking it for the power line. His
identity and motives for cutting any of the lines at
the scene remain a mystery, and what the man was
really doing there was just the start of the unanswered questions.

(55:48):
A late night bus driver disputed the coroner's verdict of
an accidental blaze at the Solder house, reporting that he
had seen unknown persons throwing balls of fire onto the
Solter's roof. In March nineteen forty six, Sylvia Sowter found
a green, hard rubber object near the ruins, which some
believed was some sort of firebomb. The Sowters later claimed

(56:13):
that the house had burned from the roof downward rather
than from the ground floor up, but no evidence remained
to prove their story. However, the idea of firebombs being
thrown onto the roof might explain the strange noise that
Jenny heard when she was awakened a short time before
the fire started. And then the sightings began. First, the

(56:37):
manager of a motel that was located halfway between Fayetteville
and Charleston, West Virginia, claimed that he saw the five
Solder children there on Christmas Day. A resident of Charleston
later said that he saw four of the children, Martha, Lewis, Jenny,
and Betty, with four unknown adults about one week after

(56:57):
the fire. The adults spoke Italian and were never identified.
Suspecting that the children had been kidnapped, George and Jenny
hired C. C. Tinsley, a private investigator from nearby gully Bridge,
to look into the sidings and pursue the case. Tinsley
went to work not only trying to run down information

(57:18):
about the children, but also looking to see who might
have hard feelings against the Sowters and if any possible
enemies might have had something to do with the fire
or with kidnapping the children. He discovered that the Swters
had been threatened in October nineteen forty five by a
Fayetteville resident who tried to sell them life insurance. When

(57:40):
they told him that they weren't interested in his sales pitch,
he warned them that their house would go up and
smoke and their children would be destroyed over dirty remarks
that George had made about Benito Mussolini, Italy's fascist dictator,
who had been lynched in April nineteen forty five. Interactly
the same insurance salesman had been a member of the

(58:03):
coroner's jury that decided that the fire at the Solder
House was accidental in nineteen forty seven. A church minister
from Fayetteville told the solders a strange story. While Chief
Miller had claimed that no remains were found at the
fire scene in nineteen forty five, he privately claimed to

(58:24):
have found a heart in the ashes, which he placed
in an empty dynamite box and buried the scene without
reporting the discovery. Tinsley and George Junior persuaded Chief Miller
to show them where he had buried the box. They
dug it up, took it to a funeral home, and
asked the director to open the box and examine the contents.

(58:47):
Inside was what looked like a decayed beef liver. It
was untouched by the fire, meaning that it had been
placed there after the blaze, but for what purpose no
one knows. Later, in nineteen forty seven, George Sowterer saw
a newspaper photo of several New York school children and

(59:08):
insisted that one of the girls was his daughter Betty.
He drove to Manhattan in search of the child, but
her parents refused to let him see her. Unable to
come up with a plan to get another look at her,
he drove home disappointed. In nineteen forty nine, Tinsley and
the Sowers started a new search of the fire scene,

(59:30):
discovering four human vertebra. State authorities refused to examine the bones,
so Tinsley sent them to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Experts there determined that the vertebra belonged to a male
between the ages of nineteen and twenty two, an age
range that did not match any of the missing children.

(59:52):
Published reports stated that Tinsley later traced the bones to
a cemetery in Mount Hope, West Virginia, but no expert
planation was available concerning their theft from the unidentified grave
or how they managed to end up at the Solder
fire scene. With the Smithsonian report in hand, the family
persuaded the FBI to take an interest in the case.

(01:00:15):
In nineteen fifty a file was opened on the Solder
children as a possible interstate kidnapping, but FBI agents only
pursued the case for two years with no results. Around
that same time, the West Virginia State Police also looked
into the case, but with the same amount of success
or lack of it. In nineteen sixty five, the solders

(01:00:39):
received a photograph of a young man in the male
On the back of the photo, a handwritten note read
Lewis Sotter I love brother fankee Illill boys A nine zero, one, three,
two or thirty five. While George and Jenny were convinced
that the photo was an older looking likeness of their

(01:01:00):
missing son, they could not interpret the cryptic message on
the back or trace the sender of the photograph. Even so,
the family clung to hope. In nineteen fifty two, they
erected a billboard near anstead, West Virginia that displayed photographs
of the missing children and offered a five thousand dollars

(01:01:21):
reward for information leading to their whereabouts. It brought no
useful tips, but created a lot of speculation. Rumors abounded,
including stories of Italian fascists, mafia gunmen, and orphanages that
snatched children and sold them to childless couples. The Sowters

(01:01:41):
spent the rest of their lives searching for the missing children.
George Sotter died in nineteen sixty nine, still hoping for
a break in the case. Ginny lived another twenty years,
and she never gave up either. The billboard and anstead
remained in place until or death, when it was finally
taken down. Today, the youngest surviving family member, Sylvia Sodter Paxton,

(01:02:08):
keeps the Famili's haunting story alive with help from her daughter,
pursuing leads on the Internet or wherever information might come from.
To this day, though the case remains open and unsolved.

(01:02:31):
Thanks for listening to Weird Darkness. Do you have a
story you'd like to share for a future episode? If
you have a paranormal story that happened to you or
a loved one that you'd like to share, or perhaps
you found a link to something darkly, creepy and true
on the web that you think would be good for
the show, you can let me know about it at
Weird Darkness dot Com featured in this episode when the

(01:02:56):
show didn't go on. The Iroquois Theater fire from the
book and Hell followed with it by Troy Taylor and
Renee Cruse. A deadly Christmas Ghosts of the Babs Switch
School fire is used by permission from Troy Taylor. Horror
for the Holidays, Ghosts of the Estabula Bridge disaster is

(01:03:17):
from the book and Hell followed with it by Troy
Taylor and Renee Cruse. In a Christmas mystery, The Vanishing
of the Solder Children is used by permission from Troy Taylor.
Find links to this episode's stories or the authors in
this show's description. I'm your creator and host, Darren Marler.

(01:03:37):
Merry Christmas, and thank you for joining me in the
Weird Darkness

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