The Mysterious Reappearance of Mary Edens

Written By Kaelyn Moore

On Christmas Eve, 1924, a devastating fire broke out at a schoolhouse in Babbs Switch. 36 people died in total, and every person who was at the schoolhouse that night was accounted for. Except for one person- 3-year-old Mary Edens. Her aunt remembered passing her out of a window to someone, but no one knew what happened to her afterward.

Until 30 years later, when a woman shows up at the Edens home claiming to be Mary. She's welcomed in with open arms, but is she really who she says she is? Something starts to feel off to people in the community...

Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, I’m your host Kaelyn Moore

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Last week you heard the tragic story of the Sodder family, whose Christmas eve house fire was the catalyst for decades of twists and turns for Jennie and George Sodder, two parents desperate to figure out what happened to their children that night.

I was planning on closing out this year of heart Starts Pounding with their story. This amazing year that saw the launch of this podcast that wouldn’t exist without you all. I thought I’d put this podcast out into a void but do it mostly for my own dark curiosities. But it found a little bit of a home in you all, and for that I am so grateful. 

Anyways, that was supposed to be the last episode of the year, but nothing ever goes as planned, isn’t that in part the theme of this whole podcast? While I was researching the Sodders, I came across another, more obscure case. Another heart pounding holiday tale and I decided I had to slip it in before the year is over. You might hear some shocking similarities to last weeks deep dive- a devastating christmas eve fire. A missing person. A parents quest for answers. But what happens when the answer arrives, on your doorstep. And leaves you with more doubt than you had before?

Today, I’m going to take you along the twists and turns of the Babbs Switch fire and the story of Mary Edens- whose disappearance that night and then reapparance decades later never sat right with anyone, including her parents.

On Christmas Eve, 1924 (exactly 23 years to the night prior to the Sodder family fire) A small school house in Babbs Switch, a tiny, rural hamlet in Oklahoma, was having a christmas program. There were plenty of reasons why the program should have been cancelled that night. For one- it was snowing sideways and the air outside was sub zero. 

But, despite that, around 200 children and adults filed into the one story school house, freshly painted with new turpentine. Another new addition to the school was the  Heavy wire netting that had also recently been placed over the windows. The school was near a train station, and to prevent break ins and vandalism from vagrants, the netting had been bolted to the outside of the school over all of the windows. 

The school was only 36’ by 26’ and people were standing almost shoulder to shoulder inside, spilling from the seats in to aisles and stading against the back walls.  A little girl named Mary Edens sat in her Aunt Alice’s lap, eagerly awaiting Santa Clause. The program went off without a hitch and then it was time for a 16 year old boy named Dow Bolding who was dressed as santa, to pass out the christmas gifts. 

He reached back into the tree for a gift, pulling a small branch down with him. As he pulled his arm out, the branch snapped back into place, hitting a lit candle in it’s path. The candle toppled over onto the cotton and tinsel decorations, and a fire exploded across the stage and up the christmas tree.

Apparently, the children weren’t aware of what was happening at first. “Look out sants, you’ll catch on fire” a child laughed at the sight. But the parents immediately saw the threat and jumped into action.

Some immediately ran for the one door to the school house. But that door only opened inward, and as the pressure of the building crowd intensified, the door could only be opened partly. Just enough for one person to escape at a time. If you’ve ever seen a fire house demonstration of how fast fires can grow from a dry christmas tree, you know that within minutes, sometimes less time, a room can be full of thick black smoke. Another group tended to the tree fire, but in the process of trying to smother it with their coats, they knocked it over. The fire accelerated at an even more devastating rate, and within two minutes the entire school house was full of black smoke. 

Dow, the boy playing Santa, was enveloped by the tree fire almost instantly. His mother’s official statement to the newspaper was “I tried to beat the fire out with a paper sack,” she said. “The sheeting in front of the tree then caught fire. My boy, Dow, who was playing Santa, was enveloped in flames in a flash. I grabbed my youngest boy, Eugene, and got out on the porch. I fainted. They trampled me until I came to.”

Then there was the group trying to exit through the windows, largely to no avail. The wiring was so strong that few could break through it. One of those to break out through the netting was Alice Noah.  Once she made it out, she was transfered to the Hobart hospital with the other burn victims, where she started panicking. Where was Mary, the toddler that sat on her lap? She had passed Mary out of a window before escaping herself, but she couldn’t remember who was on the receiving end of that pass. If no one had come forward yet claiming they had picked up a child that wasn’t their own, Alice feared the worst.

The fire proved to be devastating. 36 people died in total, half of them children. Entire families were killed, as was the case with the Coffey family, who lost four members and a fiance, set to marry into the family the following day. They were found with their arms linked together. Tom Godforth had stood up when the fire broke out, yelling for everyone to remain calm, everything would be ok. His body was found in almost the exact same spot he had been calling out. 

Though the 20’s predated DNA technology by decades, many of the bodies, though unrecognizable, were able to be identified. Items of clothing and jewlery were picked out of the rubble and used as definitive evidence for those who had perrished. Alice was given some reassuring news. Nothing of Mary’s was found in the fire, including the distinct jewlery she had been wearing that day. In fact, after the search, Mary was the only person unaccounted for after the fire. Alice died within days from smoke inhalation, and any pieces of the memory of her handing Mary to someone died with her, leaving her parents, Ethel and Louis to wonder, what happened to Mary?

Over the following years, Ethel and Louis would hear rumors from the community that someone had seen mary, only to have blood tests rule out the suspect. Again, this was before DNA analysis, so their best guess in this situation was going to be someone who shared the Eden’s blood type. 

Every year, an articles would run in the local paper commemorating the fire, and a few would mention the search for Mary Edens. Some of these got picked up nationally, and in 1956, one of these stories caught the eye of Grace Reynolds. 

A man by the name of Elmont Place was a Lions Club official living in california, who picked up a paper one sunday and saw the story of the Babbs Switch fire and the missing Mary Edens. He thought of his friend Grace who had confided in him at one point in her life that she never felt like she belonged to her family. She always had an aching feeling that she had a life before being with them. Doing some quick math in his head, he realized that Grace would have been about the same age that Mary would be.

He took the paper to Grace and her eyes lit up. That would make so much sense! She never felt at home in her family because she was taken from her real family as a child! Grace had no memories of the fire or her former family, but if Mary was only 3 at the time, that wouldn’t be all that unusual.

So together they wrote a letter to a woman named Betty who was born to the Reynolds after Mary disappeared. He explained his theory to Betty, and she wrote him back saying that she didn’t want him to contact her parents because they were still dealing with the grief of someone coming forward as Mary and then a blood test proving they weren’t her. 

But Mary’s sister sent photos of Mary, and Grace underwent a blood test that came back positive. She had the same blood type as all of the Edens.

Then there was the scar. Betty told Grace that Mary had a very specific small scar on the arch of her foot. Grace had an identical scar. That was all Betty needed. A reunion was set to take place on February 9th, 1957.

The story of the reunion exploded nationally, and was seen by Art Linklatter, a popular TV host at the time. A public reunion was schedule for the program Art Linkletter's House Party. 

This ushered in an era of fame and recognition for Grace, and she was loving it. For clarity, I’m going to continue to call her Grace Reynolds in this story, though the world, and the Eden’s, saw her as Mary Edens at this time.

Something about the story wasn’t sitting right with people. But on February 19th, just 10 days after the families reunion. A telegram was sent by Mel Bennet, a reporter in Stockton California, to Al Adams, a chief editor for a paper called the Democrat-Chief. It read

"CONFIDENTIAL. HAVE INFORMATION GRACE REYNOLDS REPRESENTING SELF AS DAUGHTER OF MR AND MRS L F EDENS YOUR CITY MAY BE IMPOSTER. BELIEVE HER TO BE DAUGHTER OF MRS GOLDIE THOMAS AND FORMER HUSBAND TOM GAITHER. PLS GIVE ADDITIONAL DETAILS MEANS OF IDENTIFICATION FINANCIAL CIRCUMSTANCES OF EDENS. WE WILL EXCHANGE OUR INFORMATION FOR ANYTHING MORE YOU CAN PROVIDE ON THIS CASE.
Al Adams started poking around this story after he had gotten a call from Dorthy Link, a woman who claimed she was Grace’s sister. She had told Adams that she had a letter from another one of Grace’s sisters expressing frustration over her falsely claiming to be Mary Edens. “That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard. I’d like to punch her in the nose” the letter read. Dorthy also mentioned that she had been married and divorced from a man named Alfred Reynolds, and six years after the divorce, Grace had married him. The investigator from the Democrat-Chief paper suggested that tension between the sisters may have caused Dorthy to call him.

Adams had also received a letter from a Goldie Thomas that read "I hereby certify that Grace Leona Reynolds (nee Gaither) is my lawful daughter. She was born July 11, 1923 on a farm near Cotton Plant (Woodruff County), Arkansas."

So, the Democrat-Chief had this bombshell story they’re going to report on about Grace’s stolen identity, but the head of the paper, a guy named Ransom Hancock, is friends with Louis Edens, and showed him the story first before running it. Louis read the article and asked that it not be run. He didn’t think his poor wife could handle the loss of her daughter Mary again. The story was killed.

In 1980, Grace Reynolds wrote a book called “Mary, Child of Tragedy” where she expanded on the time after she was taken from the fire. It included the tale of how she was picked up by a vagabond after the fire, and had a “slave like” experience after that. She claimed she was once bartered for a bag of beans and was given to whoever needed a slave at the time. Grace lived a nomadic life until she was 15, when she was adopted by a woman in California that wanted to help her piece together her backstory. When the story of Mary Edens reached her, she was a dress shop owner, doing quite well for herself. 

It’s reported that she never profited off of this story. 

Lous Edens passed away before the book was released, but it’s believed that he always knew Grace’s identity. He just didn’t want his wife to face anymore devastation in her life than she already had.

So happy holidays.from Heart starts pounding. You’ve brought me so much joy this year, with every listen, message, like, and subscribe. I’ll be taking a few weeks off for the holiday, but we’ll be back early next year with the rest of the season. Until next time.

Kaelyn Moore
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The Sodder Children Disappearance