 Welcome to Weird Darkness and Merry Christmas. I'm your creator and host, Darren Marlar. 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 WeirdDarkness.com. I might use 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 during the pre-dawn hours of Christmas Day 1945. That day would mark a vanishing, perhaps even a mass murder which has never been solved. Scouts filled the Iroquois Theater in Chicago on that cold December day in 1903 to see popular comic Eddie Foy in the hit comedy Mr. Bluebeard. They had no idea how close they were to meeting their deaths. The holiday season of 1924 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 and left a dark haunting that lingered behind for years. And the holiday season of 1876 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 only 20 days away. However, on December 27, 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, pour some eggnog, and come with me into this special Christmas edition of Weird Darkness. The holiday season of 1924 was a brutal one in Oklahoma. As winter solstice 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 and others who worked outdoors at night. And then came Christmas Eve, when a fire broke out in a one-room schoolhouse in Babs 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 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 24 began with joy and laughter. The little school building was packed with over two hundred students and families enjoying 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 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 opened inward, as far too many doors to public buildings did in those days. As more people piled against the door, it 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. A few men managed to break the glass and pass smaller children to safety between the bars. A teacher, Mrs. 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 36 lives, among 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, 37 people were taken to the Hobart Hospital were counted. There seemed to be one child that was not accounted for. The child, a little three-year-old girl named Mary Edens, 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 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 Babs 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 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 schoolchildren. As it happened, there was a strange twist to the Babs switch story in 1957. A California woman named Grace Reynolds came forward and claimed that she was actually Mary Edens, the little girl presumed killed in the 1924 fire. Mary had been a toddler at the time and her body was never found. Reynolds' story was that she was handed out the window 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, and later wrote a book about her experiences entitled Mary, Child of Tragedy, the Story of the Lost Child of the 1924 Babs Switch Fire. Sadly, though, the whole thing was a hoax. No one knows why Grace Reynolds believed or claimed to believe that she was Mary Edens. 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 Edens' 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 1999. Even this sad footnote to the fire was not the end of the story. In 1925, a new school was built at the site, but closed in 1943, 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 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 shortgrass playhouse. It is 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 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 taken after the fire remain a mystery. But we can only hope that they have found a little peace since their terrible deaths. On December 30th, 1903, one of the most devastating fires in American history occurred at Chicago's New Iroquois Theater during a standing room only matinee performance, starring the popular comedian Eddie Foy. The fire claimed the lives of more than 600 people, including scores of children who were packed into the place for the 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 theater was designed to be safe. It had 25 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 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 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 1903, they had no idea how close 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 Mr. Bluebeard. The main floor and balcony were packed, and dozens more were given standing room-only tickets, and they lined the rear walls of the theater. Around the beginning of the second act, stagehands 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 rushed for the exits. It is 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 stagehand attempted to lower the asbestos curtain that would protect the audience. 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 began rushing for the theater's Randolph Street entrance. With children in tow, the audience members immediately clogged the gallery and 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 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 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 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 noncombustible asbestos curtain, and when it collapsed, it plunged into the seats of the theater. The fire burned for almost 15 minutes before an alarm was raised at a box down the street. From outside, there appeared to be nothing wrong. It was so quiet that the first firefighters 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 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 10 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 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 firefighters found 200 bodies stacked there, as many as 10 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 found that the iron staircase was missing. In its place was a platform that plunged about 100 feet to the cobblestone alley below. Across the alley, behind the theater, painters were working on a building occupied by Northwestern University's Dental School. When they realized what was happening at the theater, 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, 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 today, after nearly 150 victims were found there. When it was all over, 572 people died in the fire, and more died later, bringing the eventual death toll up to 602, including 212 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 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 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 anyone at all. In addition to not having any fire alarms in the building, the owners had decided that sprinklers were too unsightly and too costly, and had never had them installed. To make matters worse, the management also established a policy to keep nonpaying customers from slipping into the theater during a performance. They quietly bolted nine pair of iron panels over the rear doors, 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 officials 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 charged with a criminal act. Families of the dead filed nearly 275 civil lawsuits against the theater, 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 1904 as Haydn Beeman's Music Hall, and then in 1905 as the Colonial Theater. In 1924, the building was raised to make room for a new theater, the Oriental, but the façade of the Iroquois was used in its construction. The Oriental operated at what is now 24 West Randolph Street until the middle part of 1981 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. It reopened as the Ford Center for the Performing Arts in 1998. But this has not stopped the tails 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 appears to be. The narrow passageway which runs behind the Oriental theater is rarely used today except for the occasional delivery truck or a lone pedestrian who is in a hurry to get somewhere else. It is largely deserted. But why? The stories say that those few who do pass through the 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 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 be completely forgotten. The holiday season of 1876 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 only days away. However, on December 27, the region was blanketed by an intense winter storm that showed no signs of letting up. This 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. In the wake of that winter storm, the small town of Astubula, located in the northeast corner of Ohio, was a white wasteland of snow and ice. A blizzard had hammered the little town with more than 20 inches of snow and wind that whipped along at more than 50 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 No. 5 Pacific Express that was running more than two hours late from Erie, Pennsylvania. Weather delays had kept it in the Erie station until after 6 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 in the station, the scene was much more relaxed and festive aboard the No. 5 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 at a steady 10 mph. The passengers ate and chatted, played cards or slept peacefully in their berths. Others prepared to leave the train at Astubula 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 were cosily 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 128 passengers and 19 crew members on the No. 5 as it steamed onto the railway bridge that spanned Astubula 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 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 11 cars, collapsing with the bridge as it plunged more than 80 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 coked the locomotive to safety. As he pulled the brakes on the other side, McGuire heard the chilling sounds of crashing and twisting steel coming from the swirling darkness of the storm. The Astubula depot laid just 1000 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 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 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 horrifying. Miss Marion Shepard, a survivor of the disaster, was in her sleeper berth 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 glass in the entire train had suddenly broken at once. The train car plunged downward and Miss Shepard 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 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, Marion struggled to get out of her berth and fight her way to safety. She 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, with the bottom layer below the surface of Estabula 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 a few minutes, the remains of the cars and single locomotive had turned into a blazing inferno. The heater's 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 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, drowning many of those still trapped there, perhaps mercifully when faced with burning to death. One woman, later recalled by engineer Daniel Maguire, was trapped in the wreckage as the fire burned toward her and she begged with someone to cut off her legs and pull her out before the flames reached her. Tragically, no one made it to her in time and Maguire could only watch helplessly as she burned to death. Maguire's friend, Columbia engineer Peter Levenbrough, had been crushed in the engine when it fell. He died on the way to the hospital in Cleveland. William Alsell, the telegraph operator, had fallen and stumbled down the snow-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 Maguire, after bringing these socrates to a halt, sprinted to the depot with the terrible news before returning to the scene. A minute later, breakman Al Stone, who had escaped from the last car, limped into the station. He was badly hurt and bleeding but managed to send a telegraph to Erie in case another train was following behind the number five. Within minutes, every bell in Ashtubula was sounding the alarm for firemen and volunteers. The situation surrounding the fire, which killed more people than the initial wreck, has been a subject of mystery and debate since 1876. Although the Ashtubula 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 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, but it added to the finger-pointing and blame that followed. The less dramatic reasons were the confusing conditions at the scene. No one had ever seen anything like it before, and when Ashtubula fire chief GA Knapp arrived on the scene 45 minutes after the crash, possibly intoxicated, he found a scene of total pandemonium. There was no organized effort 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 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 Knapp 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 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 Knapp, Strong or any Ashtubula officials that night. The firemen simply pitched into the efforts of the rescue workers 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 150 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 128 passengers, but others claimed upwards of 200 men were on board when the wreck occurred. The best estimate is that 89 were killed and 63 were injured, five of whom died later. There were 19 corpses or parts of corpses that were never identified. A temporary morgue was set up in the lakeshore in Michigan's Southern Freight Depot and 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 established churches were conducted on January 19, 1877, the unidentified dead were buried in nearby Chestnut Grove Cemetery. A monument was created for them in the 1890s, 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 smoldering. At 9 a.m. on the day after the accident, an inquest was convened under the authority of Justice of the Peace Edward W. Richards. It lasted for 68 days and dozens of witnesses were heard. The jury in the case reached a series of eight verdicts, all highly critical of the lakeshore in Michigan's Southern Railroad and the rescuers at the scene. The verdicts are 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 willfully designed, constructed and directed a fatally flawed bridge and then had failed to adequately inspect it for the next 11 years leading up to the disaster. Additionally, they also found that the railroad, in violation of Ohio's law, had failed to warm the passengers' 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 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 Lakeshore and Michigan Southern Railroad eventually paid off about $500,000 in damage claims with little dispute. However, the company 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 Amesa B. Stone Jr., a Cleveland millionaire 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 had been a wooden one. In 1863, Amesa Stone made plans to replace it with the design of his own. The key section was the middle span, a 154-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 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 never be replicated. The new structure was installed in the fall of 1865 and was a series of 14 panels that were protected against the force produced by the weight of the trains by enormous diagonal eye beams. 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 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 11 years without mishap. It was inspected four times each year by railroad officials who reported no problems, except for the suspicious snapping noise that train 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 been crudely filed down to make them fit. If Inspector Charles Collins, who looked at the bridge just 10 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 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, and was especially arrogant when questioned by Special Investigative Committee of the Ohio Legislature on January 18, 1877. 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 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 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 always 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 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 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 Amesa Stone as well. Although he never accepted any responsibility for the accident and avoided personal legal consequences for it, there is no question that he was hurt by the public perception of him as a murderer. His temperament, never a happy one to begin with, became even darker after business reverses and then ill health followed in the wake of the established disaster. His only son had drowned while he was a student at Yale and Stone had been plagued with stomach pains and insomnia sleeping as little as two hours a night. By 1883 he had endured all that he could stand and on the afternoon of May 11 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, she had the butler climb through the transom. Stone was discovered lying in the bathtub half-dressed, a silver-plated Smith & Wesson revolver by his side. There was little to be seen today where the terrible events of December 1876 took place. The river now flows beneath an ordinary viaduct and it is impossible now to imagine the horror, fear and death that took place there. In spite of this, some mysteries do remain. According to some, the No. 5 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, 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 the stark granite obelisk that marks the common grave where visitors to the graveyard have reported seeing 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 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 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 desperately craves. 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 during the pre-dawn hours of Christmas Day, 1945. That day would mark a vanishing, perhaps even a mass murder which has never been solved. 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 that could be found in detective fiction. What happened to the Sotter 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 Sotters would continue their search for the missing children for nearly 50 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 Sotter Sr. and his wife, Jenny, were the proud parents of 10 children and lived in a new home outside of town. George, a 50-year-old Italian immigrant, 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 were celebrating the season at home with their parents. The Sotter children opened their presents on Christmas Eve, including toys that had been purchased by 17-year-old Marion 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, John, age 23, and George Jr., age 16. The other children, Maurice, 14, Martha, 12, Lewis, 10, Jenny, 8, and Betty, 5, all said they were too excited to sleep, but finally turned in around 10 p.m. Jenny took two-year-old Sylvia to bed with her soon after, 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 Sotters over the course of the next hours, days, 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 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 to sleep. But only a half hour 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 30 minutes later, she woke again. 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 Jr., who shared a room in the attic. George also shouted toward the other bedrooms on the second floor and thought that he heard all of the children answering. John and George Jr. made it downstairs and out of the house with their parents, Mary Ann 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 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 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 75 feet from the house, which is not where it had been left the evening before. George then seized on another idea. He would drive 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 Sotter ran to a neighbor's house to telephone the Fayetteville Fire Department, but the neighbor could not get an operator to assist her. Direct calls could not be made in the area at the time. All of them had to be operator connected. At 1 a.m., 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 on the line informing him that the Sotter house was burning and children were inside. But even after this call, the fire department did not arrive until 8 a.m., 7 hours after they learned of the blaze. The lapse was explained by the department's lack of manpower during the war and by the chief's inability to drive Fayetteville's fire truck. Morris had to wait until he could track down a qualified driver, and Fayetteville didn't have a fire siren in 1945, 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 firefighters arrived, the Sotter 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 ended at 10 a.m. on Christmas Day, with Chief Morris telling the Sotters 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 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 Sotter children on December 30. But were they actually dead? Today, we know that the fire, which leveled the Sotter 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 1400 to 1800 degrees. In fact, various household appliances found in the burned-out basement were still recognizable. Stranger still, a telephone lineman summoned to the Sotter home site reported that the telephone line had not been burned through, but rather had been cut 14 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. 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. A late-night bus driver disputed the coroner's verdict of an accidental blaze at the Sotter house, reporting that he had seen unknown persons throwing balls of fire onto the Sotter's roof. In March 1946, Sylvia Sotter found a green hard rubber object near the ruins, which some believed was some sort of fire bomb. The Sotters later claimed 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 fire bombs 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 manager of a motel that was located halfway between Fayetteville and Charleston, West Virginia, claimed that he saw the five Sotter children there on Christmas Day. A resident of Charleston later said that he saw four of the children, Martha, Louis, Jenny and Betty, with four unknown adults about one week after 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 Golly Bridge to look into the sightings and pursue the case. Tinsley went to work, not only trying to run down information about the children, but also looking to see who might have hard feelings against the Sotters, and if any possible enemies might have had something to do with the fire or with kidnapping the children. He discovered that the Sotters had been threatened in October 1945 by a Fayetteville resident who tried to sell them life insurance. When they told him that they weren't interested in his sales pitch, he warned them that their house would go up in 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 1945. Interestingly, the same insurance salesman had been a member of the coroner's jury that decided that the fire at the Sotter house was accidental. In 1947, a church minister from Fayetteville told the Sotters a strange story. While Chief Miller had claimed that no remains were found at the fire scene in 1945, he privately claimed to have found a heart in the ashes, which he placed in an empty dynamite box and buried at the scene without reporting the discovery. Tinsley and George Jr. 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. 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 1947, George Sotter saw a newspaper photo of several New York school children and 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 1949, Tinsley and the Sotters started a new search of the fire scene, discovering four human vertebrae. 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 19 and 22, an age range that did not match any of the missing children. Published reports stated that Tinsley later traced the bones to a cemetery in Mount Hope, West Virginia, but no explanation was available concerning their theft from the unidentified grave or how they managed to end up at the Sotter fire scene. With the Smithsonian report in hand, the family persuaded the FBI to take an interest in the case. In 1950, a file was opened on the Sotter 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 1965, the Sotters received a photograph of a young man in the mail. On the back of the photo, a handwritten note read, While George and Jenny were convinced that the photo was an older looking likeness of their 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 1952, they erected a billboard near Anstead, West Virginia that displayed photographs of the missing children and offered a $5,000 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 Sotters spent the rest of their lives searching for the missing children. George Sotter died in 1969, still hoping for a break in the case. Jenny lived another 20 years and she never gave up either. The billboard and Anstead remained in place until her death when it was finally taken down. Today, the youngest surviving family member, Sylvia Sotter-Paxton, keeps the family'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. Let me know about it at WeirdDarkness.com. Featured in this episode, when the show didn't go on, the Iroquois Theatre Fire, from the book, and Hell Followed With It, by Troy Taylor and Renee Cruz. 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 from the book and Hell Followed With It by Troy Taylor and Renee Cruz. In a Christmas mystery, the vanishing of the Sotter 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 Marlar. Merry Christmas and thank you for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Hey Weirdos, be sure to click the like button and subscribe to this channel and click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week and while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com.